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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

#351

Post by hollerith »

BirAdam wrote: post #349
hollerith wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose the asteroid is much bigger than the one that ended the dinosaurs.

If the Earth is completely destroyed, the humans on space ships wouldn’t survive either. There is no self-sustaining off world colony currently, and there most likely will not be in the lifetime of anyone alive today. At such time that there is, bacteria, rodents, and other life will likely come with humans as humans build the biospheres that we need elsewhere.

With a few years to prepare, the humans would have a chance IMHO.

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

#352

Post by andrewflnr »

Loughla wrote: post #350
andrewflnr wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of animals have been curious for hundreds of millions of years, but technology more advanced than breaking bits off rocks and sticks has only been around a couple thousand years. If you say it's a "natural progression", you also have to say there are serious barriers that most species will never pass.

Okay?

So the notion that "life would tend toward technology", charitably speaking, does not make any useful predictions. Based on all evidence available, including the dearth of extraterrestrial technosignatures, you can't rely on it happening in any particular situation or timeframe. At best it's speculation, more likely it's just false.

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

#353

Post by detritus »

tomelders wrote: post #25

My understanding is that the great filter theory means this is bad news for us humans here on earth. And considering the state of the world right now, it's especially ominous. Fate loves irony.

Not necessarily. I think it's reasonable to imagine that 'some sort of low-level life' might be fairly common across the galaxy ('one in a ten million'), whereas complex life - never mind 'intelligent' or technologically-sophisticated life might be very much rarer.

The older I get and the more I appreciate Just How Lucky we are to exist at all on our planet here, the more I favour the above thinking.

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

#354

Post by fc417fc802 »

perihelions wrote: post #251
perihelions wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced about the methods. It looks a lot like p-hacking to me: they have a highly specific hypothesis drawn from a large universe—that dozen or so molecules (§3.1) in their infrared spectrum model they're fitting experimental data against. I don't buy the way they created that hypothesis. The put a handful of highly specific biosignature gases into it, things that were proposed by exobiology theory papers.…

I'm going to double-down on my stubborn, unpopular opinion. This is my best attempt at explaining my criticism: - Alien metabolites are a low-prior probability hypothesis. Dimethyl sulfide is a long-postulated biosignature with no natural source, so, it's low-prior - The paper's model fits Webb data—a handful of photons—against no more than 20 candidate molecules, combined across all of their atmospheric models. Many…

False positives are acceptable if the goal is to generate leads to follow up on. If the detection was due to chance then it won't hold up to further measurement. There's few enough hits that we don't need to worry about being more rigorous (and potentially introducing false negatives) at an earlier stage.

Given the context, a publication seems appropriate. A high profile similar example is when neutrinos supposedly broke the light speed barrier. If the mass media misrepresents things that's hardly the fault of the scientists.

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

#355

Post by fc417fc802 »

energy123 wrote: post #338
lordnacho wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it only takes a small tweak for everything to stall. Suppose say, that people only trust a small group. Extended family and lifelong friends, for instance. People get very violent as soon as they disagree on something, immediately wanting to settle disputes by force. Nobody can strike a deal to do anything with anyone outside their group, and you certainly can't make agreements with a guy in Seattle to delive…

Mutation is random but selection is non-random. Multilevel selection could select against those scenarios you're talking about. Collaboration could be yet another thing that comes from convergent evolution.

Random walks only progress if they don't get trapped in a local minima. GP example is but one entirely contrived scenario. The point is that technological development depends on many factors and it's entirely plausible that some of them aren't strongly selected for.

This seems to be supported if you consider how long it took for humans to emerge and the fact that other fairly intelligent species exist alongside us but didn't follow the same path. If you suppose that technological development has a clear selection path then why isn't there any evidence of space fairing dinosaurs?

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

#356

Post by fc417fc802 »

lupusreal wrote: post #256
diggan wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems. How could we possibly know this? The only case of "Dolphins" we know of, is on Earth, with the interference of humanity, and we're looking at Dolphins at a really small timescale. Given N thousands of years without interference from other species, who can really confidently tell exactly how Dolphins would…

We've had at least two developments of ""dolphins"" that I know of. We also have other intelligent sea life, like squids and octopuses, who've been around for a hell of a long time and are on track to never develop advanced tool creation and use. Living in the water is a massive tech nerf.

Notably the latter example has ideal appendages for tool manipulation - likely far superior to primates with thumbs. Yet somehow they're indefinitely stuck without tool use.

I wonder if things would progress if they had the same level of communication that dolphins do.

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

#357

Post by Loughla »

andrewflnr wrote: post #352
Loughla wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay?

So the notion that "life would tend toward technology", charitably speaking, does not make any useful predictions. Based on all evidence available, including the dearth of extraterrestrial technosignatures, you can't rely on it happening in any particular situation or timeframe. At best it's speculation, more likely it's just false.

Correct, we disagree in what we think.

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

#358

Post by jayGlow »

simiones wrote: post #133
ta8645 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if there was a Kardashev type III civilization in the Milky Way, they would have had full control of our entire galaxy in a mere 200 million years or so. And we can be pretty sure that such a civilization doesn't actually exist. Which suggests that either advanced life is rare, or dies off long before it ever reaches such technological breadth.

Or this is merely sci-fi and it's physically impossible to build anything even close to such structures as Dyson spheres. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that just because we can conceive of something like that, it's actually possible to build it using real materials in real quantities with real amounts of available energy in a star system, and even less so to maintain these magical devices even if built.

you don't need to build a physical shell, a dyson swarm would get the job done.

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

#359

Post by jayGlow »

okamiueru wrote: post #35
ta8645 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise t…

Not sure how bad it could be given the hypothetical "millions of years more technologically advanced". They'd need to have a pretty good reason to care about us. Otherwise, we'd be so insignificant that it seems much more likely that whatever natural resources they'd want, would also be likely nearer and easier to obtain. War-mongering, and otherwise zero-sum mentality shouldn't make all sense if they have the techno…

in the book they couldn't stay in their system since it was unstable and our star was the closest to them and they knew we were less advanced than them.

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

#360

Post by kulahan »

weard_beard wrote: post #288
netsharc wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, "alien life" is a reasonable title, IMO. I think the sensationalism is happening in your head, that you're imagining the Borg or little green men.

I'm imagining some new kind of volcanism and one less way to detect life. Or, as my wife put it, "Ah, rock babies again."

Yes, this is what scientists are assuming as well. The first real step is to work with chemists to try and find a way this could be created in such large amounts so consistently, as well as additional observations to remove noise from the data.
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