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First images from Euclid are in

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Re: First images from Euclid are in

#111

Post by DubiousPusher »

virtue3 wrote: post #20
ekianjo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Earth. There is no model to say that life always goes on that way. We just have no clue.

"Astronomer Frank Drake created a formula to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way. Adam Frank and Woodruff Sullivan modified the equation to calculate the odds that Earth was the first intelligent life in the universe. They concluded that the odds of Earth being the first are less than one in 10 billion trillion, which suggests that other intelligent species have likely evolved." 1 i…

The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as more thought experiment than reality.

It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.

In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.

Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#112

Post by bongodongobob »

gorgoiler wrote: post #101

A fun thing I like to do every so often is to try to break away from the natural notion that space has a horizon and that instead force myself to feel that it continues equally in all directions. We’re naturally inclined to be ok with giant distances on the horizon. It’s natural to put more emphasis on that part of the world. Hold up your thumb to the horizon and notice how many things fit alongside it compared to yo…

Yes. I like to look at the moon and think of it as being "down" and I'm the one at an angle. Rather than "there's nothing under me, just the ground" it's "there's nothing under me, just nothing forever."

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#113

Post by DubiousPusher »

bigiain wrote: post #53
JohnBooty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really doubt that life with human-level (or greater) intelligence has evolved at least a few times. What I'm more pessimistic about is how long such intelligence might live. How many civilizations reached a point of harnessing nuclear power and then wiped themselves out with nuclear war?

I think even that's perhaps a warped anthropocentric view of intelligence? Think about other earth-centric scenarios, and try and imagine if dolphins or octopuses or fungus or maybe even insect colonies or plant ecosystems had "won" and become the apex lifeforms on earth instead of humans. I wonder just how different concerns like "civilisations" and "war" and "nuclear power" would have played out in those cases? I w…

It's not even clear that the ants haven't won.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#114

Post by kranner »

Jun8 wrote: post #90

Watching this is ... hard to find the words to describe it. It's insane! It shows us how mind bogglingly vast the universe is and how we're literally nothing compared to it. Paradoxically, it also makes me feel incredibly potent and capable as a human being in that being this small we can know so much! Your size is to the distance of that distant spiral galaxy (420 Mly - 10e24m) as a neutrino is to you (effective cro…

That we can know anything at all is a miracle in itself. It could have been just fine evolutionarily for us Earth creatures to be no more than Large Action Models with no inner experience, but somehow we ended up as these perceiving, cogitating, apprehending beings.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#115

Post by DubiousPusher »

jiggawatts wrote: post #71
bigiain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 600 times zoom-in on 1% of the eventual survey of 1/3rd of the non milky way sky... Shows a couple of galaxies, which if the milky way is "typical" represent a couple of billion stars. Suddenly 1 in 10 billion trillion odds doesn't seem so (and I apologise in advance for this) astronomical...

Typical galaxies the size of the Milky Way have 100 to 2,000 billion stars and could have as many as ten trillion planets. That’s about 100^5, so one way to think of this is that if you categories these by any four properties (temperature, stability, hydration, day length) then you’d expect about 100 samples for any point in that 4D space. So even if you believe Earth is unique along four critical metrics, there are…

But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#116

Post by DubiousPusher »

billti wrote: post #100
caust1c wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a pretty compelling argument that could be made that matter assembling itself into conscious beings follows pretty naturally from life itself, given a long enough time horizon and assuming the properties of basic elements holds constant throughout the universe which seems pretty likely.

I’m no physicist/biologist, but I always find it odd when they look for water on other planets to see “if life could exist”. Sure, maybe that’s a requirement for the type of life we on earth know about, but I don’t see why other elements couldn’t have also formed in just the right way to be able to reproduce, and maybe eventually “think”.

It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which interact in interesting ways.

Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#117

Post by thomassmith65 »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #84
thomassmith65 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be countless other planets with intelligent life right now, but... if it took them millions of years to evolve... and they're millions of lightyears away... we might have to wait millions of years for signals to reach Earth from the eldest civilizations in the closest galaxies.

Why would we have to wait? Why would you assume that they're only sending signals now? Why would you not assume that they had a head start on sending signals before us?

My guess would be that there are millions of other intelligent species out there.

Maybe these species are distributed evenly throughout our 90-billion-lightyear-in-diameter universe.

Maybe half evolved to our current level of sophistication in less time than it took us.

So... what is the minimum duration of time, after the big bang, that some lineage of creatures might take to evolve from sludge into a life form capable of emitting data via radio waves? It cannot happen instantaneously... first conditions need to cool down enough to be amenable. Beyond that, it seems to require a little time for evolution to get to human-like level, it took us 13+ billion years.

So given the lack of meaningful signals we have detected so far, Occam's Razor says the nearest intelligent life that currently exists out there is too young and far away for its transmissions to have yet reached Earth.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#118

Post by dev1ycan »

bikamonki wrote: post #7

So many solar systems out there, life evolved in many planets for sure. No proof but no doubt.

I mean there is a very non 0 chance that Europa (moon) itself has life in it, it might not be more than very basic life, but there is a non zero chance that it does have it.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#119

Post by ujikoluk »

vasco wrote: post #78
lefrenchy wrote: post #63

It's just so crazy to me to see a galaxy 420 million light years away. That is so much time for what we're seeing to have changed. I presume life can form within that window given the right conditions, so to some degree it just feels a bit sad that the distance is so great that we can't actually see what may exist in this moment that far away

In another way it's really cool to be able to "see the past" even if all we see is always the past. At this level it is like a super power. If only some aliens had put a mirror somewhere far so we could see ourselves too. Or multiple mirrors at different distances. With enough mirrors and light bouncing around the size of the universe itself can be a "storage media" of the past with different photons all around carry…

For prior art in this field, see:

https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs

"pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and back again."

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

Storing data as acoustic waves gave a higher capacity in practice, as propagation is slower thus fitting a larger number of symbol per time unit.

Re: First images from Euclid are in

#120

Post by recursivecaveat »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #117
spartanatreyu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we have to wait? Why would you assume that they're only sending signals now? Why would you not assume that they had a head start on sending signals before us?

My guess would be that there are millions of other intelligent species out there. Maybe these species are distributed evenly throughout our 90-billion-lightyear-in-diameter universe. Maybe half evolved to our current level of sophistication in less time than it took us. So... what is the minimum duration of time, after the big bang, that some lineage of creatures might take to evolve from sludge into a life form capa…

Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but the milky way is only 105 thousand light years across. So even if you assume an earth like planet couldn't have formed any earlier than ours, other intelligent life in the galaxy only has to go through the geological processes and evolve a tiny tiny fraction of a percent faster to have tons of time to send all the signals they ever want. Nearest other galaxy is only a couple million LYA which ain't too bad either.
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