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“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

skyatnightmagazine.com

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Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#171

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Guthur wrote: post #99
Guthur wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly? I'd prefer we'd just build some more houses so that owning one didn't require a life time of work to pay for.

[flagged]

I truly agree with this post.

There was this post on HN that life can't be given to mars for 99.99% and even if it could, it would be the most miserable life with only 1-2 decades. It isn't self sustainable as people imagine it to be.

So all we have is, is this Earth & our fellow human beings & instead of treating each other with basic necessities like housing, education , healthcare.

Also these things, in my opinion of researching the space and giving housing, they aren't mutual. They can both be done but even if they are mutual,I would personally pick housing any day, because what point is of space, what point is of going to outer space some day and living shit there if humans are currently living shit here as well.

Regarding Housing, I think it can easily be fixed and so much more like how we say tax the rich, if we could just tax lands.

Because people think of land as some "asset" and that they "own it" ,when in actuality, I might argue that land is the only thing that I personally think the govt. has any right over. So I personally believe that we are better off taxing land so that these pesty landlords who get rich off of the housing crisis can really just suffer so much that the lands would just be productive and not speculative , reducing the price of lands down and even rents down till the point housing is way more favourable.

Its a net win to everybody except those pesty landlords & maybe "investors" or people who bought housing pre-georgism because they might now believe that its unfair to them? Still I think that georgism is pretty flexible and this could be sorted out in such a way that it would have been less controversial and more net positive to the Society than the latest tariffs fiasco, though people didn't vote for housing, they voted for tariffs.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#172

Post by mr_toad »

rsynnott wrote: post #134
xrisk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says "In industry dimethyl sulfide is produced by treating hydrogen sulfide with excess methanol over an aluminium oxide catalyst”. Which part requires a living organism?

Well, someone needs to treat the hydrogen sulphide with excess methanol over an aluminium oxide catalyst. I suppose a robot could do it... For a non-life explanation, you're really looking for something that could plausibly happen in (abiotic) nature, not an industrial process.

The only thing that could make a nerd happier than detecting alien life would be detecting alien robots.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#173

Post by merek »

eecc wrote: post #12

JSWT... again the most formidable piece of equipment ever shot into outer space. That think is going to shake our understanding of the Universe to its foundations a couple times around

I think you mean JWST, not to be confused with JSON Web Tokens :)

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#174

Post by ivan_gammel »

cedilla wrote: post #73
ivan_gammel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. If dark forest theory is right, alien civilizations may stay undetectable by hiding biological signatures of their worlds.

The dark forest theory makes for a great book premise, but it probably doesn't apply in real life simply because the distances are so far. The universe is not a forest. It's a gigantic, empty ocean. The next, dangerous tribe is not lurking behind a bush 2 meters away, but is sitting on an island that's so far away it will take centuries to go there, if it is possible at all

Time does not matter. Space-faring civilizations can adapt their pace of life to the communication and exploration speeds or even live at multiple speeds. They are likely energy and resource-bound: within the same theory Dyson sphere is a risk, so they can only consume a fraction of locally available energy to remain unnoticed - meaning that it’s not the distance but energy consumption that will limit them.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#175

Post by cmsj »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #147
nurettin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from you personally, but civilization as we understand it is our own cliche. Organisms developed on different planets could absolutely have a different view on life and society in general. Even on earth we have highly intelligent and physically capable organisms that care naught for your conceptions of how groups should function together. There are even organisms that seem to have no intersection wit…

Regarding populating earth and invading space. I was just watching the original (first) matrix movie yesterday because I was just too bored. And there was this dialogue by Agent Smith:- ```I’d like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the…

It's a cool speech, but it's also wrong. Mammals don't "instinctively develop a natural equilibrium", reality forces that equilibrium on them. A species gets too good at breeding and/or resource consumption - that's either happy times for their predators who eat them back into balance, or they starve themselves back into balance.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#176

Post by ivan_gammel »

cedilla wrote: post #141
autonomousErwin wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point of the dark forest theory? It's not the fact that there is a dangerous tribe behind a bush it's more that you don't know if they're dangerous or not so you have to err on the side of caution - because you don't know if they're doing the same. It's the whole chain of suspicion theory that it's safer to shoot first and then ask questions later because the speed you can communicate is the same speed…

Yes, but the next bush is dozens of light years away. The analogy breaks down because the distances are different in quality. The only reason why this becomes such a problem in the Three-Body-Problem is the existence of magic in that universe. Thinking protons, instant communication, folded dimensions, easy interstellar travel, it's all interesting speculation inspired by physics, but incompatible with our actual uni…

Those things are just sci-fi glitter absence of which doesn’t invalidate the theory.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#177

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

concats wrote: post #160
milesrout wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of lifeforms have changed the composition of the atmosphere. At faster rates than we are changing it now.

The only similar example I can think of is when, roughly 2400 million years ago (during the Paleoproterozoic iirc), the ancestors of cyanobacteria poisoned their atmosphere by overproducing oxygen which resulted in an extinction event. But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.

> But that whole process still took somewhere in the order of millions of years to complete I believe.

The geological evidence is that that oxygen build-up first had to exhaust things that took the reactive oxygen out of the air and water. Iron oxide was laid down as huge deposits of "banded iron ore" The great rust. (1)

This is hard to get an exact number on, but as far as I know, it is estimated to have taken at least 500 million years.

And then oxygen increased again, a billion years later (2)

It was not fast. It was measured in 100 million year ticks.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event#Banded_i...

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoproterozoic_oxygenation_eve...

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#178

Post by lordnacho »

lupusreal wrote: post #153
energy123 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is now much less plausible. Intelligence, like eyesight, is believed to be a result of convergent evolution[0]. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least...

Being intelligent doesn't necessarily lead to runaway technological development. Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems. They're stuck in the water and don't have thumbs. And even orangutans, who have thumbs and live on land, don't seem tracked for technology even if humans weren't around; their ecological niche is small even if we assumed humans…

We don't even need to look at other species.

Humans have been just as smart as you and me, maybe even smarter according to cranial measurements, without inventing anything that significantly changed their way of life.

There could be loads of planets with prehistoric humans, having a fine time hunting with bows and picking fruit.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#179

Post by mr_toad »

mr_mitm wrote: post #75
londons_explore wrote: post #21

This is happening 124 light years away from earth. That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years. Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.

Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering. And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket…

Our energy production grows exponentially. For a type I civilisation, producing that kind of energy would be possible. For a type II it would be trivial. In any case the timescales involved are measured in centuries.

Re: “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

#180

Post by energy123 »

lupusreal wrote: post #153
energy123 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is now much less plausible. Intelligence, like eyesight, is believed to be a result of convergent evolution[0]. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least...

Being intelligent doesn't necessarily lead to runaway technological development. Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems. They're stuck in the water and don't have thumbs. And even orangutans, who have thumbs and live on land, don't seem tracked for technology even if humans weren't around; their ecological niche is small even if we assumed humans…

Nevertheless, if abiogenesis is common & intelligence is easy for evolution conditional on abiogenesis, the number of explanations for the Fermi Paradox just shrunk by a great deal, increasing the probability of the remaining explanations.
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