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Extreme supersonic winds measured on a planet outside our solar system

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

#31

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

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 started using these adaptations to build simple tools. It is plausible that "bipeds with hands" will eventually lead to civilization: getting there is the hard part.

Put another way: birds are very intelligent bipeds, but I am not convinced that the dinosaurs would have developed advanced technology if the meteor didn't hit. There has to be an evolutionary path to develop something like hands, which means either sprouting extra arms or compromising a claw / leg / wing. Perhaps that path shows up, perhaps it doesn't - maybe there are fossils of raptor-like dinos with unusually dextrous claws. But without hands, even superintelligent animals cannot reliably make fire, build ropes, sew leather, carve stone, etc etc.

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

#32

Post by kjs3 »

tenpies wrote: post #14
est wrote: post #9

> WASP-127b, a giant gas planet located more than 500 light-years from Earth. How do you define "sound speed" on a gas giant?

As a layperson I thought that was odd choice too and would be an Earth-centric measurement, but the paper on which this article is based references this paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac51d2 Where they spell out a formula for the speed of sound in this type of planet given some assumptions. It's beyond my understanding, but I thought it was pretty cool. Section 4.4 if you want to have a l…

Very cool! Isn't it amazing what happens when you don't assume bad faith or incompetence on the part of the researchers? You have to like a paper that has a section discussing the precipitation of vaporized iron out of a planets atmosphere...mindblowing. Of course, that means doing a little homework to actually understand what they already know and avoiding the lazy "me and my preconceived notions and lack of domain knowledge are here to tell you why your wrong".

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

#33

Post by RandomBacon »

davedx wrote: post #17
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…

But there are also 7500 known exoplanets within a few tens of thousands of light years of Earth. There are almost certainly multiples more than that we cannot see. The "Goldilocks Zone" is also highly anthropomorphised: there are extremophiles that live in all sorts of crazy environments on Earth. I'm coming around to the Dark Forest theory, personally, as terrifying as it is.

> 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 FTL communication/travel is difficult or impossible, then it could take a long time for us to find evidence, and maybe by then we'll be extinct due to natural causes or devices of our own.

Or maybe there's some theistic evolution component and we are the only species in the universe with divine providence.

It seems to me that it would be impossible to prove or disprove any of those possibilities unless we actually discover extraterrestrial advanced intelligent life.

(And even then, who is to say that God didn't create Edens on other worlds? So meeting aliens still might not disprove any divinity.)

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

#34

Post by Etherlord87 »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #19
davedx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are also 7500 known exoplanets within a few tens of thousands of light years of Earth. There are almost certainly multiples more than that we cannot see. The "Goldilocks Zone" is also highly anthropomorphised: there are extremophiles that live in all sorts of crazy environments on Earth. I'm coming around to the Dark Forest theory, personally, as terrifying as it is.

> I'm coming around to the Dark Forest theory, personally, as terrifying as it is. If you're silent with the intent of remaining hidden, then that behavior must have been learned. Either you evolved from a prey type of species, or a non-apex predator. It would be strange of humanity is the only apex-ish predator intelligent-ish life form in the universe that blasts signals into space without consideration of who migh…

> If you're silent with the intent of remaining hidden, then that behavior must have been learned. Either you evolved from a prey type of species, or a non-apex predator.

Or you learned it in a non-evolutionary way, through logical reasoning.

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

#35

Post by philipov »

RandomBacon wrote: post #33
davedx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are also 7500 known exoplanets within a few tens of thousands of light years of Earth. There are almost certainly multiples more than that we cannot see. The "Goldilocks Zone" is also highly anthropomorphised: there are extremophiles that live in all sorts of crazy environments on Earth. I'm coming around to the Dark Forest theory, personally, as terrifying as it is.

> 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 first place, and why would have this happened so much faster elsewhere? The trend towards higher entropy/complexity is like a universal clock.

The universe might look big, but our view of it is not homogeneous. We wouldn't even see ourselves if we tried to find us, unless we were a close neighbor.

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

#36

Post by sinuhe69 »

Are not super storms raging for hundreds of years on Jupiter? What we can observe from earth are mostly giant exoplanets, not unlike Jupiter. Thus, I expect "normal" exoplanets are more like Mars and Venus. And who know, some could be very much earth-like!

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

#37

Post by pc86 »

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…

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.

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

#38

Post by asdff »

pc86 wrote: post #37
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 that human pictograph on voyager evidently did not consult an evolutionary biologist nor a statistician, probably watched an episode of Star Trek.

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

#39

Post by semi-extrinsic »

RandomBacon wrote: post #33
davedx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are also 7500 known exoplanets within a few tens of thousands of light years of Earth. There are almost certainly multiples more than that we cannot see. The "Goldilocks Zone" is also highly anthropomorphised: there are extremophiles that live in all sorts of crazy environments on Earth. I'm coming around to the Dark Forest theory, personally, as terrifying as it is.

> 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…

> the idea that FTL communication/travel is difficult or impossible

Not just FTL. My hypothesis is that any type of substantial interstellar travel is going to be so enormously expensive, complicated and time consuming, an advanced civilisation will only do it once in a billion years. In the form of mass exodus when there are no more habitable planets in their system or their star is going nova. As this never gives exponential growth, it is enough to resolve the Fermi paradox.

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

#40

Post by sightbroke »

pc86 wrote: post #37
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Hands, or tentacles, or a really long snout. There appear to be a variety of appendages that can be rather good at manipulating the environment for the users purpose.

Forgot also swarms of many cooperativing organisms. Ants appear quite adapt at manipulating things to a degree.

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