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On November 05 2013 20:21 Lombard wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2013 20:07 ThePhan2m wrote:
This is all just fantasy and dreaming. We can all hope for life out there, even if there is there is no where near any technology that can get us there for the next imaginable future. There are enough stuff to do on this planet! Lets focus on fixing it rather than spend time, money and energy on something that is out of reach. My two cents That bolded part is what we're spending on it right now. With that attitude we'll all still be sitting in our gravity well when the next killer asteroid enters the earths atmosphere, which could happen at any time.
The chances of that happening is slim compared to a world war or any human made conflict
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On November 05 2013 20:35 papaz wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2013 20:21 Lombard wrote:On November 05 2013 20:07 ThePhan2m wrote:
This is all just fantasy and dreaming. We can all hope for life out there, even if there is there is no where near any technology that can get us there for the next imaginable future. There are enough stuff to do on this planet! Lets focus on fixing it rather than spend time, money and energy on something that is out of reach. My two cents That bolded part is what we're spending on it right now. With that attitude we'll all still be sitting in our gravity well when the next killer asteroid enters the earths atmosphere, which could happen at any time. Not to mention that sooner or later this planet is going to die. It's not like we are going to wake up one day and have the technology to travel trillions of light years to new places. One has to take tiny steps and that is why every bit of science is important and will take us closer to finding new planets and maybe one day for humans to travel there instead of getting extinct.
I read somewhere that we have about 600million years of habitable Earth left. I'm pretty sure that with the rate of advancement in technology we should be pretty good to go by the time that becomes an issue.
Not that finding ways to spend more money on things like research is a bad idea by any means.
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If we assume higher life forms are possible on other planets, we have to assume, that there must be civilizations that are millions or billions of years more advanced then us. Likely on star systems that developed much earlier then ours.
If there are these civilizations, we should have picked something up by yet, or more likely they picked something up from us or even visited us if interstellar travel was even possible.
In my opinion, there might be other life or even higher life forms, but it is very unlikely we would pick up a definite sign of them. They either died out millions of years ago on their bubble that we call a solar system or they are so far away we will never know them.
I doubt that humanity will ever be capable of interstellar travel if it is possible at all.
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On November 05 2013 20:42 ThePhan2m wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2013 20:21 Lombard wrote:On November 05 2013 20:07 ThePhan2m wrote:
This is all just fantasy and dreaming. We can all hope for life out there, even if there is there is no where near any technology that can get us there for the next imaginable future. There are enough stuff to do on this planet! Lets focus on fixing it rather than spend time, money and energy on something that is out of reach. My two cents That bolded part is what we're spending on it right now. With that attitude we'll all still be sitting in our gravity well when the next killer asteroid enters the earths atmosphere, which could happen at any time. The chances of that happening is slim compared to a world war or any human made conflict
It doesnt matter if the chance is slim or not. If I remember the limited course in statistical probability I took years ago somewhat correctly, the chance is the same tomorrow or the next day or in a hundred years. We do know one thing as fact though, it will happen sometime, and if we're not ready we're toast. So it doesnt matter if we've built paradise on earth. Lets face it, Bruce Willis wont be around forever .......
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Wouldnt it be more likely that aliens visit us before we manage to get the technology to visit them? Maybe we are a little crap planet compared to the rest and they just try to avoid us. Like a small village nobody wants to visit but the ppl in the village really want to check out the town. 
This is cool though. Once you start thinking about this stuff you can end up sitting for hours just staring and thinking about all the possibilities.
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And then we remember all those ridiculous explanations in 3X-games why so many species should start their discovery of the universe at the exact same time. Like Master of Orion, oh yeah, they were all created by some master species that programmed them to evolve at the same time. A couple of ten thousand years is nothing compared to the randomness when/if/how live develops on other worlds. Even if a planet develops intelligent live, and both them and us discover technology that defeats Einstein, the chance of it happening at the same microsecond of the lifespan of the universe is so ridiculously low.
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On November 05 2013 21:17 Holy_AT wrote:
If we assume higher life forms are possible on other planets, we have to assume, that there must be civilizations that are millions or billions of years more advanced then us. Likely on star systems that developed much earlier then ours.
If there are these civilizations, we should have picked something up by yet, or more likely they picked something up from us or even visited us if interstellar travel was even possible.
In my opinion, there might be other life or even higher life forms, but it is very unlikely we would pick up a definite sign of them. They either died out millions of years ago on their bubble that we call a solar system or they are so far away we will never know them.
I doubt that humanity will ever be capable of interstellar travel if it is possible at all.
I'm in the camp as to why we haven't heard from any other civilizations. If they had billions of years to grow and advance before us they should be way ahead of us by now, surely capable of emitting radio waves or some sort of signal that we could pick up.
The speed of light is so far our hard-barrier to space exploration. According to current theories it is impossible to break this limit, which means many many years to travel even to the closest star with planets. Space is just too big for us humans.
I also think that people underestimate just how rare life on earth is. It may be rarer than the stars and planets in the universe are numerous. Our planet is just so precious and some people treat it like garbage. We need to wake up and treat earth and each other much better than we do because we might have only each other in this huge place we call the universe.
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1019 Posts
lol guys the reason why we don't hear from others is because the universe is fcking huge. There are hundreds of light years between planets, stars, etc. so the probability that someone happens to find us by chance is very low. Even if someone has the capability to actively search around the galaxy to find higher life forms (ie humans like us), the chance they will find us is small.
And if humans attain the technology to travel in space, why the hell should we go around looking for others? It's like native americans in the 1500s traveling across the atlantic to let europeans know that they are available to be invaded. Terrible idea. Space travel would be most beneficial for economic and survival purposes (mining asteroids, space tourism, colonizing other planets, etc.).
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On November 06 2013 04:05 white_horse wrote:
lol guys the reason why we don't hear from others is because the universe is fcking huge. There are hundreds of light years between planets, stars, etc. so the probability that someone happens to find us by chance is very low. Even if someone has the capability to actively search around the galaxy to find higher life forms (ie humans like us), the chance they will find us is small.
And if humans attain the technology to travel in space, why the hell should we go around looking for others? It's like native americans in the 1500s traveling across the atlantic to let europeans know that they are available to be invaded. Terrible idea. Space travel would be most beneficial for economic and survival purposes (mining asteroids, space tourism, colonizing other planets, etc.).
I think the distance problem for interstellar travel is overstated. There are hundreds of stars within 20 lys, probably hundreds of terraformable planets and exomoons within the same distance.
The problems are relatively short human lifespans and our tiny energy budget. Both of which are fixable in situ. If humanity could harness 0.1% of the Sun's total energy output (not just the part that reaches the Earth, but the total energy produced by the Sun every second) and human lifespan could be increased to 200-300 years interstellar travel would become a real possibility.
It depends on the trajectory of human civilization. I don't think the kind of technological and industrial development that has been the norm in the last 200 years will continue indefinitely. But if it did we would see humans (or whatever our descendants call themselves) in a different solar system in a few centuries.
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If I recall correctly SETI project is listening for radio signals emanating specifically from those habitable candidate planets but haven't found a clue that supports the existence of advanced intelligent life.
Ahhh that was a hard sentence 
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On November 06 2013 04:33 hypercube wrote:Show nested quote +On November 06 2013 04:05 white_horse wrote:
lol guys the reason why we don't hear from others is because the universe is fcking huge. There are hundreds of light years between planets, stars, etc. so the probability that someone happens to find us by chance is very low. Even if someone has the capability to actively search around the galaxy to find higher life forms (ie humans like us), the chance they will find us is small.
And if humans attain the technology to travel in space, why the hell should we go around looking for others? It's like native americans in the 1500s traveling across the atlantic to let europeans know that they are available to be invaded. Terrible idea. Space travel would be most beneficial for economic and survival purposes (mining asteroids, space tourism, colonizing other planets, etc.). I think the distance problem for interstellar travel is overstated. There are hundreds of stars within 20 lys, probably hundreds of terraformable planets and exomoons within the same distance. The problems are relatively short human lifespans and our tiny energy budget. Both of which are fixable in situ. If humanity could harness 0.1% of the Sun's total energy output (not just the part that reaches the Earth, but the total energy produced by the Sun every second) and human lifespan could be increased to 200-300 years interstellar travel would become a real possibility. It depends on the trajectory of human civilization. I don't think the kind of technological and industrial development that has been the norm in the last 200 years will continue indefinitely. But if it did we would see humans (or whatever our descendants call themselves) in a different solar system in a few centuries.
Well you could just have a multi-generational ship where some people live and die on the ship while it is in transit. I think one big problem (I seem to recall reading about this being an issue for a hypothetical manned Mars mission) is fitting enough food/water. Obviously, a multi-generational ship would need to be self-sustaining somehow.
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On November 05 2013 13:58 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot and not too cold for life.
Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone. Source
I realize it's cool to find places that are similar to Earth, but I don't see what's stopping life from potentially sprouting up in any random planet (heck, life forms on stars why not?). Why is it that life couldn't exist in 1000 C temperatures in a methane atmosphere? We evolved to our environmental conditions, other organisms could evolve to their own. Of course, how life "originates" in itself is a mystery.
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United Kingdom1717 Posts
On November 06 2013 05:24 mantequilla wrote:If I recall correctly SETI project is listening for radio signals emanating specifically from those habitable candidate planets but haven't found a clue that supports the existence of advanced intelligent life. Ahhh that was a hard sentence
The only possible sign which I know of is the "wow" signal. But that's tenuous, and a one-off.
To the poster higher-up: diverting, for example, the world's military budget (or even just the redneck gun-crime budget) onto technological advancement for travel, exploration and even terraforming of planets such as Mars would be a massive plus for the world, rather than a hindrance.
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For people talking about old civilizations finding us look at it this way.
We have absolutely zero understanding of beyond human intelligence. For all we know we're not even considered sentient beings to an alien race. We could be considered what insects are to us. Unfortunately it's flawed thinking to believe that an alien race would let themselves be known to us. What makes us think we're so special? Look at us as a species we're awful. This is just humanity being self-centered as usual, when we could very well be insignificant to alien races.
I don't think people quite comprehend just how large the universe and our galaxy is either. Let's say hypothetically you were a super advanced race capable of interstellar travel. Say it only took you a few minutes to travel to a different star.
For the sake of this post we'll say it takes 5 minutes to travel to any star regardless of it's distance. There are approx. 300 billion stars in our galaxy. It would take 1.5 trillion minutes to visit every single star. The average person lives 39.5 million minutes. It would take roughly 38 000 life times to visit all the stars.
Now if you're some super advanced race, would you even bother checking every single star? It would be the equivalent of you looking through every single blade of grass in your city just to find something interesting, that would most likely have little to no pay off.
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On November 06 2013 06:44 Krohm wrote:
For people talking about old civilizations finding us look at it this way.
We have absolutely zero understanding of beyond human intelligence. For all we know we're not even considered sentient beings to an alien race. We could be considered what insects are to us. Unfortunately it's flawed thinking to believe that an alien race would let themselves be known to us. What makes us think we're so special? Look at us as a species we're awful. This is just humanity being self-centered as usual, when we could very well be insignificant to alien races.
I don't think people quite comprehend just how large the universe and our galaxy is either. Let's say hypothetically you were a super advanced race capable of interstellar travel. Say it only took you a few minutes to travel to a different star.
For the sake of this post we'll say it takes 5 minutes to travel to any star regardless of it's distance. There are approx. 300 billion stars in our galaxy. It would take 1.5 trillion minutes to visit every single star. The average person lives 39.5 million minutes. It would take roughly 38 000 life times to visit all the stars.
Now if you're some super advanced race, would you even bother checking every single star? It would be the equivalent of you looking through every single blade of grass in your city just to find something interesting, that would most likely have little to no pay off.
Haha, this is exactly right. If you think about the ant-to-human ratio on the planet (according to antweb.org) it is likely that the number of ants who actually encounter humans is much lower than the number of humans that are purported to have encountered aliens. So I think it would be safe to say that if ants are capable of thoughts of this depth, they would most likely believe that human beings are a myth. The problem I see with SETI is that they are looking for radiowaves as communications when another form of life may very likely not be communicating using radiowaves.
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On November 05 2013 21:17 Holy_AT wrote:
I doubt that humanity will ever be capable of interstellar travel if it is possible at all.
We are already capable of interstellar travel, it's just not feasible. You need a generation ship, probably nuclear pulse propulsion Project Orion style. It would take decades to plan and build and would cost many countries insane amounts of cash, with a very real possibility that it would fail. But it not impossible, it would take a nuclear pulse propulsion ship about 50 years to fly to alpha centauri, and the actual nuclear pulse technology is relatively old by now though it was never tested for real.
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I want to go there...
I love living during the time the internet just started but still... Why can't we also have 50% light speed space travel...
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On November 06 2013 07:47 ninazerg wrote:
The problem I see with SETI is that they are looking for radiowaves as communications when another form of life may very likely not be communicating using radiowaves.
There are people who look at optical pulses too. But I think all current SETI efforts look for communications from more advanced civilizations that deliberately target us. The hope is that they would know what we're looking for or at least what is 'easiest' to achieve and not use their most advanced methods 
In any case you can only look for what you know. Maybe 'everything else' is more likely but until someone builds a telescope that detects everything else we are stuck with radio waves.
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On November 06 2013 05:58 Jonoman92 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 05 2013 13:58 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:WASHINGTON -- WASHINGTON (AP) — Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot and not too cold for life.
Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone. Source I realize it's cool to find places that are similar to Earth, but I don't see what's stopping life from potentially sprouting up in any random planet (heck, life forms on stars why not?). Why is it that life couldn't exist in 1000 C temperatures in a methane atmosphere? We evolved to our environmental conditions, other organisms could evolve to their own. Of course, how life "originates" in itself is a mystery.
Well, Earth-based life has a couple substances that are really important to it due to the way those substances work i.e. carbon and its astounding array of combinations. At these planets scientists are discovering, some substances which are endemic to Earthly life can be found in abundance, meaning we can find Earth-like life, which has a potential to operate at least vaguely like us. These planets are also significant in that they *may* be able to be colonized. Finally, the goldilocks zone was a very special thing until relatively recently. We thought we were special snowflakes for a while. Turns out we aren't.
You are right though. Life could be conceivably found anywhere. Best to start where we already know it can thrive, though. We haven't seen anything to suggest that boiling gas giants, for example, encourage teeming ecosystems.
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Its actually quite informative to go to the SETI website and read about their reasoning and how they go about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Here's a link.
I tried to summarize
+ Show Spoiler +Basically they say that the best way to communicate across the stars at the fastest speed is to use some type of electromagnetic wave as they travel at the speed of light. Now over long distances gas and dust can absorb many types of radiation, but they leave radio waves essentially unimpeded. So that is why they theorize that if a civilization wanted to communicate across space with its colonies, one of the best choices would be to use radio waves. The idea is that we want to try to pick up on these frequencies.
Furthermore there is a particular range of frequencies that are ideal; you have our galaxy emitting a large amount of noise at lower frequencies, and at higher frequencies, assuming the planet is life supporting and has water, the atmosphere absorbs and releases a large range of these higher frequencies as noise.
So the best bet is actually to transmit radio waves somewhere in the middle. Incidentally they talk about how water molecules actually transmit certain frequencies themselves which (to our great fortune) lies within this quiet zone. So we can search for planets that have water as well (they call this small band "the water hole").
To distinguish between natural frequencies and artificial ones they look for very thin frequency bands; as natural phenomena tend to cover a very broad range of frequencies, but technological forms of communication (at least as far as we know) typically take up only a fraction of the frequency scale.
But I think it will be a very hard search. Not even in terms of the size of the universe (we really only look at the center of our galaxy where most of the stars are), there is quite a lot of space to cover as we can only focus our telescope arrays in very small areas at a time, and we are assuming these intelligences are going through this phase of communication while we are alive (i.e. these waves didn't already pass through long before we were capable of listening in). This is actually the biggest point to me; on a cosmological time scale our existence is an incredibly small fraction of time.
Moreover they could have simply passed through this phase and found a better means of communication than with radio waves. Its hard to say what the probability is, we simply don't know what technologies are possible. But Alpha Centauri, the closest star system that could potentially support life, is only 4.4 light years away. So in less than 5 years an EM wave could reach Earth. So its definitely possible, and we do have access to a very large area. But we have to actively search this area, and hope that one planet is going through the phase of radio wave communication. Within a century or two of our planet.
Another question is, with the incredibly rate of advancement that our technology has seen, what really IS the window for communication using radio waves? If its just a century then that's very small indeed. We have passed from the industrial age to the computer age in a century. What will the world be like a century from now? Two centuries from now? What new forms of communication will exist? Too many uncertainties (all this considered together) to really say that if life existed we would have heard from them by now.
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