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Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

phys.org

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Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#51

Post by Teever »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #31
Earw0rm wrote: post #8

Not an original thought, but I wonder if the answer - or part of it - to the Fermi paradox is that we don't know all the ways it's possible for a planet in the Goldilocks Zone to be otherwise hostile to life. Liquid water and.. chemistry leading to an ambient pH of 2 or 12. Liquid water and.. radiation environment such that proto-RNA strands get immediately smashed to bits by high-energy rays. Liquid water and.. bomb…

The Fermi paradox seems to take for granted that complex multicellular life will eventually develop technological civilization, but there is no reason for that to be true. Orcas could very well be more intelligent than humans, but they are physiologically incapable of building tools. Human hands and visual processing were an evolutionary fluke that took tens of millions of years of natural selection, long before apes…

Maybe Earth is rare in that most life evolved in a way that locks in morphology.

It's entirely possible that it's far more common place for intelligent life to evolve in a way that allows that intelligence to direct the growth of an arbitrary body shape to solve arbitrary tasks.

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#52

Post by anjel »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #31
Earw0rm wrote: post #8

Not an original thought, but I wonder if the answer - or part of it - to the Fermi paradox is that we don't know all the ways it's possible for a planet in the Goldilocks Zone to be otherwise hostile to life. Liquid water and.. chemistry leading to an ambient pH of 2 or 12. Liquid water and.. radiation environment such that proto-RNA strands get immediately smashed to bits by high-energy rays. Liquid water and.. bomb…

The Fermi paradox seems to take for granted that complex multicellular life will eventually develop technological civilization, but there is no reason for that to be true. Orcas could very well be more intelligent than humans, but they are physiologically incapable of building tools. Human hands and visual processing were an evolutionary fluke that took tens of millions of years of natural selection, long before apes…

Pterodactyls when on the ground are believed to have been quadripeds that walked on "hands" with finger-like appendages[0] hence the "Dactyl" part of its species-name. They perished agter the meteor. More up-to-date, I believe Bats have a similar skeletal feature in their design. Cetaceans have finger-like skeletal features in their flippers.[1]

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pterodactll+walking+&t=newext&atb=...

[1]https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whales+used+to+have+hands&t=newext...

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#53

Post by WhyNotHugo »

aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #31
Earw0rm wrote: post #8

Not an original thought, but I wonder if the answer - or part of it - to the Fermi paradox is that we don't know all the ways it's possible for a planet in the Goldilocks Zone to be otherwise hostile to life. Liquid water and.. chemistry leading to an ambient pH of 2 or 12. Liquid water and.. radiation environment such that proto-RNA strands get immediately smashed to bits by high-energy rays. Liquid water and.. bomb…

The Fermi paradox seems to take for granted that complex multicellular life will eventually develop technological civilization, but there is no reason for that to be true. Orcas could very well be more intelligent than humans, but they are physiologically incapable of building tools. Human hands and visual processing were an evolutionary fluke that took tens of millions of years of natural selection, long before apes…

Even if you had human-like civilisations, they might simply opt for a simpler but more sustainable way of life, like many ancient civilisations which have been eradicated by more uncivilised ones.

There’s no evidence that societies based on our technological direction last more than a couple of centuries. Maybe societies with nukes and rockets always kill each other, and Mayan-like societies thrive for far longer periods without ever reaching outer space.

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#56

Post by Earw0rm »

asdff wrote: post #38
pc86 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often thought about how likely it is there are intelligent and sentient civilizations that are content to their planet, or bounded to it by - as you mentioned - physiological constraints. I never connected that to "you probably need hands or something very closely approximating a hand" but it makes perfect sense.

Intelligence is such a bewildering fixation too when you think about it for ourselves. Due to science fiction writers and our insistence on anthropomorphisation we assume we will be forming treaties aboard an alien ship meanwhile we have yet to communicate let alone form a treaty with any other form of life just here on earth. The hubris is massive and it invades even the scientific community to a degree. Whoever put…

I wonder what the likelihood is of big leaps forward there, in terms of communicating with other intelligent Earth life.

As in, will our ability to wrangle vast amounts of data and characterise it gives us enough insight into what whales are saying to one another that we might be able to start asking them questions?

It doesn't seem absurdly far-fetched at this point. But they're probably even more pissed at us for the last couple of centuries' behaviour than the various Indigenous peoples we Westerners have screwed over.

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#57

Post by Earw0rm »

philipov wrote: post #35
RandomBacon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm coming around to the Dark Forest theory, personally, as terrifying as it is. Perhaps it's just that advanced technology is extremely rare given another comment's supposition that there could be other intelligent life, just unable to make advanced technology, or along those lines: if they have the appendages to do so, maybe their environment doesn't have the resources. If you couple the above with the idea that…

A really simple answer to the Fermi paradox is that we're the first, or in the first wave, of intelligent species, and it's just too early for the light from the others to have reached us yet. We're not just looking into the distance, we're also looking into the past. Life is less likely the farther we look. It took a long time for the universe to create the conditions for a solar system like ours to exist in the fir…

Possible, but in terms of the galaxy vs evolutionary time, we're not looking very far into the past.

The Milky Way is of the order of 100K light years, which for evolution is the blink of an eye.

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#58

Post by asdff »

thrance wrote: post #48
asdff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is if you assume the aliens will board a ship with conventional forces and enact a human style invasion. Now what if the alien was not even sentient. A giant configuration of some structure of chemistry just floating through interstellar space, catalyzing reactions when inputs are met, lying in wait otherwise. It might not “die” in the sense that any other mass of atoms doesn’t “die.” When faced with some input…

One might argue encountering something like this would be more akin to a natural catastrophe (like a killer meteor) rather than an alien invasion. Stephen Baxter wrote a novel in which galaxies would be regularly wiped out by a natural phenomena, and that explains why there are no aliens in his universe. It's "Manifold: Space" if you're interested.

Life as we know it is just chemical reactions occuring within some membrane or walled environment. I don’t see why that definition couldn’t be extended to self sustaining chemical reactions that aren’t bound by a membrane or wall structure. The purpose of that membrane or wall is to just establish favorable conditions for the chemistry within the cell. If conditions could be established without such a membrane there wouldn’t be a reason for it. If reactions were energetically favorable across a wide spectrum of conditions there wouldn’t be a need for it either.

There are some that consider fire to be a form of life. I don’t think that is such a wrong idea if we are to consider how wide the scope of possibilities are in the universe.

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#59

Post by asdff »

Earw0rm wrote: post #56
asdff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence is such a bewildering fixation too when you think about it for ourselves. Due to science fiction writers and our insistence on anthropomorphisation we assume we will be forming treaties aboard an alien ship meanwhile we have yet to communicate let alone form a treaty with any other form of life just here on earth. The hubris is massive and it invades even the scientific community to a degree. Whoever put…

I wonder what the likelihood is of big leaps forward there, in terms of communicating with other intelligent Earth life. As in, will our ability to wrangle vast amounts of data and characterise it gives us enough insight into what whales are saying to one another that we might be able to start asking them questions? It doesn't seem absurdly far-fetched at this point. But they're probably even more pissed at us for th…

The hard part is that it goes two ways. Most animals are adapted for interactions within their own species. A seagull is adapted to react a certain way when another seagull screams the same way we smile when someone laughs or get a sense of panic if we hear someone shriek. A seagull has no concept of our behavior really beyond if we move at it in a threatening manner like other potential predators. The most you can do is probably some simple conditional learning akin to dog training considering seagulls in recreational areas have associated beachgoers with potential food source already.

Why might a whale speak back to us? Maybe it we chum the water when whales make certain noises they will begin making those noises and expect chum. I wouldn’t call that communication as people expect it to be with ET however. A primitive form of trade perhaps.

Re: Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

#60

Post by Earw0rm »

asdff wrote: post #59
Earw0rm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the likelihood is of big leaps forward there, in terms of communicating with other intelligent Earth life. As in, will our ability to wrangle vast amounts of data and characterise it gives us enough insight into what whales are saying to one another that we might be able to start asking them questions? It doesn't seem absurdly far-fetched at this point. But they're probably even more pissed at us for th…

The hard part is that it goes two ways. Most animals are adapted for interactions within their own species. A seagull is adapted to react a certain way when another seagull screams the same way we smile when someone laughs or get a sense of panic if we hear someone shriek. A seagull has no concept of our behavior really beyond if we move at it in a threatening manner like other potential predators. The most you can d…

Whales are unusual in that they use complex sound for beyond visual range communication, and they may (emphasis may) be intelligent enough to treat our proxy sounds as an attempt to recreate their own and respond in kind.

I doubt we'd get much out of a seagull or even a cat. They don't seem to communicate much. Whales however seem to be able to "speak" over long distances and emit long phrases in which individuals are identified by something like a name. There's a lot more to work with there than even most mammals.

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