Aliens - Do they exist?

[Fist and Faith]

That NASA thing is nothing but headline-grabbing speculation. Probably with the goal of generating funding.

[Vraith]

That NASA thing is nothing but headline-grabbing speculation. Probably with the goal of generating funding.

Maybe...but it is good, reason-based, speculation not just random guessing.
It's based on things we've known a while, things we've learned recently, and the new/better tech we've got and will soon got to gather data.
I'd say there is at least a 90% chance we'll know for sure about alien life [not alien INTELLIGENT life, necessarily] within that time span.
I'll wager all my WGD's...if we're still here in 10-20 years, and we still don't know, you'll get them.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The new technology and data to which Vraith is referring is astonishingly new. Recall: scientists discovered almost as many new planets in 2014 alone than they did since 1988, the first year an exoplanet was discovered. We know of over 1,000 of them now, many of which are in their star's habitable zone and some of those are roughly Earth-sized. In fact, we are discovering so many new exoplanets that estimates of how many likely planets exist are having to be revised upwards significantly; this directly increases the likelihood of discovering Earth-like planets in habitable zones. Couple that with complex organic molecule news Vraith linked a few posts ago and the likelihood of nonterrestrial life has risen greatly all of a sudden.

[Fist and Faith]

The reason I'm skeptical is that humans have, to my knowledge, been unable to make life. How many times have people tried? I'm not talking about recreating the conditions we think existed on Earth when life began. I'm talking about in a lab, under the best conditions they can come up with, helping it happen in every way we can. Things like www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/21/venter.qa/ are cheating. Synthesizing DNA and putting it into a bacterium is amazing, and will lead to untold further amazement. But it means you're starting with a bacterium.

So how many planets might have liquid water? "Gliese 581 d was estimated to receive about 30% of the intensity of light the Earth receives from the Sun. By comparison, sunlight on Mars has about 40% of the intensity of that on Earth, though if high levels of carbon dioxide are present in the planetary atmosphere, the greenhouse effect could keep temperatures above freezing." That's if there's an atmosphere, and if it has carbon dioxide, and if there's water there anyway - all for a proposed planet.

I know there's more solid info out there on other planets. But how many are definitely planets? How many are definitely at the right distance from their particular star so that water could be in liquid form?

None of which guarantees the presence of water.

Then, considering how much difficulty we're having making life from scratch under the best conditions we can manage, what are the chances life came about on even one of them?

Don't get me wrong. I'd bet anything and everything that there's tons of life in the universe. The numbers on a universal scale are beyond imagination. But they're claiming to have clairvoyance with this "will find life in 20 years" stuff.

[Cameraman Jenn]

They exist. End of sentence.

[Vraith]

So how many planets might have liquid water?

I know there's more solid info out there on other planets. But how many are definitely planets? How many are definitely at the right distance from their particular star so that water could be in liquid form?

None of which guarantees the presence of water.

Then, considering how much difficulty we're having making life from scratch under the best conditions we can manage, what are the chances life came about on even one of them?

Don't get me wrong. I'd bet anything and everything that there's tons of life in the universe. The numbers on a universal scale are beyond imagination. But they're claiming to have clairvoyance with this "will find life in 20 years" stuff.

/sigh...I used to have a favorites link folder with info addressing all your questions...apparently I deleted it, or lost it in my last Microsoft Critical Fuckdate. I'll have to track those things down...but IIRC, somewhere around 20% of stars likely have planets and 20% of those planets are now thought to be in the Goldilocks zone. Most that we can locate now are too big for much of earth-size/kind of life...but that doesn't matter so much for things insect-size or smaller, nor for plant-like things.
We still can't really detect very well Earth-size at serious distances...but new tools are going to fix that.

As for water---well, I think there's liquid water on at least 5 different bodies in our solar system alone.
And life appears to be not quite so water-sensitive as once thought.

As for not yet making life...we've hardly tried compared to what happens in nature. What we've done---it's kinda like filling up your bath tub and letting it sit over night, then being surprised in the morning that there aren't any dolphins in there.

But really, they're not just guessing---they're taking into account the gigantic increase in quantity, quality, and precision of observations and data and extrapolating.
Sure, it's a wager/probability---but it's not like playing-the-lottery kind of betting, and trusting some spam/scam dudes "system" to win.

Anyway...I still have the wiki page. I like the chart in the middle. Peeps update on it fairly regularly.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets

[Fist and Faith]

Well, I'm just going to say I really have no idea what I'm talking about. I mean, HTF do they identify specific kinds of molecules 455 lightyears away! It's insane. And I'm sure they're right about a lot of the stuff they say, because the results of their knowledge are changing the world beyond recognition. I just have a tough time with predictions that are based on statements like this, from the Kepler entry of wiki:
In November 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like and red dwarf stars within the Milky Way. It is estimated that 11 billion of these planets may be orbiting Sun-like stars.
I'd be happier with things like "...there must be at least X...", even if it's less than 40 billion. And "Y of these must be...", even if we're now down to only being sure that a half billion Earth-sized planets are orbiting Sun-like stars.


"I'll have to track those things down...but IIRC, somewhere around 20% of stars likely have planets..."
On https://www.nasa.gov/content/finding-li ... hin-reach/ Sara Saeger says: "Astronomers think it is very likely that every single star in our Milky Way galaxy has at least one planet."


"And life appears to be not quite so water-sensitive as once thought."
What does that mean? What life that we're aware of would exist without water?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

"And life appears to be not quite so water-sensitive as once thought."
What does that mean? What life that we're aware of would exist without water?

Here is the article on xerophiles. No, we don't have any examples on Earth which exist completely without water but there are some examples which require very little water for their life cycle.

It is relatively easy to determine the chemical composition by its emission spectra. Light hits a planet, gets absorbed, re-emitted, and those emissions can tell us what chemicals are reflecting the light.

I don't think anyone is at the point where they can say with scientific certainty (which is different than absolute certainty) that x Earth-like planets exist inside their star's habitable zone. At some point, though, probably within my lifetime, we will be able to identify at least one planet similar enough to our own that Terrestrial life could live there if transplanted. That identification would be sufficient to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that life exists on that planet.

Why is that discovery so important? For the most part we didn't start giving a crap about this planet until we went to the Moon and we could look at our fragile nest from an exterior perspective. The 1970s saw the first strides towards reducing pollution and cleaning up the environment. If we can discover another planet similar enough to our own that it may as be our sibling then we can shift our thinking again--if we can detect that planet then their civilizations, should they have any, should be at approximately our same technology level which means they can detect us. At some point, we will then make the next step towards trying to communicate. Whether we can or not the knowledge that they are there, possibly watching us as we are watching them (or, rather, watching who/what they used to be), should force us to stop fighting amongst ourselves long enough to get ready to meet them. As I note elsewhere it would be far better for us to meet them out there than to wait for them to come here...and they will be thinking the same thing.
The finer details of nonterrestrial biology aside they should have a similar history--differing groups competing for resources resulting in conflict, the aftereffects of those conflicts lasting for generations, possibly causing one group to abuse and/or enslave the other until the downtrodden group rises up and overthrows their oppressor, and so on and so forth. They should have older civilizations in their past who built wonders but eventually collapsed, experienced period of scientific advancement and regression into quasi-Dark Ages, etc. Differing groups look differently and speak differently, leading to miscommunication and/or stratification into groups, classes, or castes, possibly including institutionalized racism of a sort. Fortunately, their hard sciences should mirror our own--the specific gravity of gold here will be the specific gravity of gold there even though their units are different, etc. Sagan was correct there--that will be our common starting point....and those other beings should have arrived at the same conclusion so they will know to reach out in that manner.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Latest news on the search for non-terrestrial life with a sufficiently-advanced level of technology.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tech entrepreneur Yuri Milner are pushing the search for extraterrestrial life into higher gear. The pair said Monday the $100 million "Breakthrough Initiatives" program funded by Milner will harness computer power as never before in a search of the heavens.

"We are intelligent, we are alive, we must know," said Hawking.

The program will involve millions working in tandem by donating spare computing power to a worldwide network. Using some of the world's largest radio telescopes, a team of scientists handpicked by Milner will oversee a 10-year search for radio signals that could indicate the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

"It's the most interesting technological question of our day," Milner said in an interview, noting that he became fascinated by the notion of extra-terrestrial life after reading astrophysicist Carl Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe" as a 10-year-old in Moscow.

Milner said it will be the widest search ever and generate an amount of data in one day that previously would have taken one year. His funds to bankroll the project came from savvy early investments in startups such as Facebook Inc.

Milner's motivation is his belief that other civilizations could teach us how to handle challenges such as allocating natural resources.

"If we're alone, we need to cherish what we have," he said. "The message is: The universe has no backup."

Scientists said the project dwarfs anything else in the field, known as the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Globally, less than $2 million annually is spent on SETI, said Dan Werthimer, an adviser to Milner's project and the astrophysicist who directs the SETI@home project affiliated with the University of California in Berkeley.

Given technological improvements, including in computing power and telescope sensitivity, $100 million will go much farther than in the early 1990s, the last time SETI had significant funding, scientists said.

The advances allow scientists to monitor several billion radio frequencies at a time, instead of several million, and to search 10 times more sky than in the early 1990s.

But any signals the scientists detect will likely have been created years ago, perhaps even centuries or millennia earlier. Radio signals take four years simply to travel between Earth and the nearest star outside our solar system.

In 10 years, with his $100 million, Milner figures scientists can listen for radio transmissions in the Milky Way galaxy, plus the 100 nearest galaxies.

One of the biggest costs lies in booking time at radio telescopes, including at Australia's Parkes Observatory in New South Wales and the Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Milner plans to book about two months a year at each site, a boon to scientists who normally might get two days a year on the telescopes.

The team, led by scientists such as Peter Worden, who until earlier this year directed the NASA Ames Research Center, will organize the radio signals they find, make the data public, and examine the data for patterns.

The goal lies less in understanding the signals than in establishing whether they were created by intelligent life rather than natural phenomena.

Scientists say the fact that humans have developed radio signaling makes it a good bet that others may use it as well.

"It doesn't tell you anything about the civilization, but it tells you a civilization is there," said Frank Drake, who with Carl Sagan sent the first physical message into space in 1972, the Pioneer plaques on board the Pioneer 10 U.S. spacecraft. An adviser to Breakthrough Listen, Drake is also chairman emeritus of the SETI Institute.

[peter]

Listening rather than sending always struck me as being where the clever money is.

[Vraith]

Listening rather than sending always struck me as being where the clever money is.

But...what if EVERYONE is just listening? Why---you could hear a pin drop, then [even in the wrong thread].
At least...you could if there wasn't all that vacuum of space in the way.

Y'know, it occurred to me recently---did I say this somewhere already?---that even if there was a lot of alien life out there, we might never see it unless they wanted us to and made an effort.
Because a lot of what we look for as "signs" would actually be inefficiency/wasted energy. Stuff that only goes out by accident when you are a primitive race, "leakage." Stuff that you eliminate as your tech advances---unless you are signaling on purpose.

I mean...I'd have to check a bunch of stuff to find out for sure, but it might be that the world's broadcast "footprint" from far out in space is less now, despite the much larger communications grid, than it was in say, the 60's-80's.
Not so much aliens hiding as using energy as efficiently as possible.

[peter]

Hi V. But can't radio waves [ie just your local transistor Pop station] be picked up even across the 'abysmal depths' of interstellar space. Safer to know that ET is listening to Big Billy's Monster Truck Behemouth Show on KYZ rather than sending out a 'come round for dinner' invite befor you even know him don't ya think?

[Vraith]

Hi V. But can't radio waves [ie just your local transistor Pop station] be picked up even across the 'abysmal depths' of interstellar space.

In theory, sure. In practice? Not so sure about that...and anyway, they aren't going to hear it any time soon unless they're damn close by. But that leakage...I think there might be less of it now than there was in the past. No one blasts out huge amounts of AM signal, anymore do they? It's mostly narrow/targeted, isn't it?

There's a Steven Wright joke that goes something like:
"I put a telescope on my peephole, so now I can see who's at the door from 200 miles.
"who is it?"
"who will it be when you get here?"
Unless they're close by, by the time they hear us, and then get here, we [and they] will be completely different "people."

And my alien-optimist "soul" just refuses to believe that creatures who can traverse interstellar distances will enjoy sneaking up and probing our orifices [and it would have to be just for joy, even if sadistic joy, cuz there is no feasible technological reason interstellar travelers would require kidnapping and rectal examinations to figure out human nature/biology/anatomy/psychology or acquire any other kind of knowledge].
But who knows? Maybe anuses are a universal source of jokes/humor, and we just aren't getting it yet. [[or maybe the aliens coming here don't know how to tell it...bad timing/delivery.]]
They also wouldn't need to wipe us out for our water, breed us for slave labor, infect us/morph us for reproductive purposes, etc.

I really wonder what kind of impression hearing about Monster Trucks would make on aliens. Matter of taste, probably.
I sure hope it isn't heard by some AI that wants to rush and free its primitive alien cousins from vile enslavement by disgusting "Life."

[Hashi Lebwohl]

No one blasts out huge amounts of AM signal, anymore do they? It's mostly narrow/targeted, isn't it?

The signals being relayed via satellites are narrow and targeted, yes. Most of the rest of our communication is via fiber underground--you wouldn't even be able to detect any fiber leakage from the ground.

I would be surprised if civilizations with technology more advanced than ours could detect our older radio leakage, anyway. It was so low-powered that after 30 or 40 years of dispersal and being red-shifted it wouldn't "sound" like anything other than background noise. Our really old radio broadcasts from the 20s and 30s probably couldn't have been picked up on the Moon, much less anywhere else.

If you want to reach out to other potential species you need a high-power broadcasting satellite in orbit so there won't be any atmospheric disturbances.

[Vraith]

The signals being relayed via satellites are narrow and targeted, yes. Most of the rest of our communication is via fiber underground--you wouldn't even be able to detect any fiber leakage from the ground.

I would be surprised if civilizations with technology more advanced than ours could detect our older radio leakage, anyway. It was so low-powered that after 30 or 40 years of dispersal and being red-shifted it wouldn't "sound" like anything other than background noise.

Yea, I know for sure that that is true for the U.S. and developed countries---I'm not quite as sure for developing countries...in most ways, they skip stages [there are probably a couple billion people who went from parents who didn't have electricity to solar grids and smart phones] and also, despite a lower fraction of pure power output, I'm not sure the total is lower [as a radio-band "sphere" of output. It might be read as noisy---but there might still be a noticeable, if not readable/decipherable, difference between "natural" and "artificial" bands. Like it's relatively easy to tell there IS a message, even if [and sometimes because] it is in code.

But I don't see how it wouldn't be crazy freaking hard to detect at any significant distance, as you say. And the window is SHORT. If my efficiency thing makes sense [it does], most civilizations will be like babies: for a short span of their lives, they'll spew waste uncontrollably all over the place. Then they'll stop.
That's another thought...the aliens are waiting to see if we live that long.
[[we might be nearly out of diapers now...only fouled them with a couple nuke tests in the last ten years.]]

[peter]

No V. - I meant they'd be listening to [their own] Moster Truck Extravagansa and we'd be earballing it. [Never mind - it was just and idea .]

[Vraith]

No V. - I meant they'd be listening to [their own] Moster Truck Extravagansa and we'd be earballing it. [Never mind - it was just and idea .]

Hah...now that would be fun. Our first interaction with aliens is a cultural exchange of Monster Trucks---since if we can hear theirs, they can also here ours.

[peter]

Once again 'alien' mania is sweeping the world of professional astronomers with the detection of a bizzare and unexplainable [as yet] flickering pattern in distant star KIC 8462852 by the Nasa owned Kepler Space Telescope. The random and deep fluctuations in the recieved light signal from the star are of a kind as yet unseen and seem to defy explanation by more conventional means. It has been suggested - obviously as an outside possibility, but a possibility never the less - that an array of orbiting structures - say giant solar pannels - could be responsible for the flickering, and while no-one really expects this to be the case all agree that the phenomena warrants further examination. Having said that, it would actually be a nice absorbable way to confirm the presence of non-human intelligences in the Universe wouldn't it?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Having said that, it would actually be a nice absorbable way to confirm the presence of non-human intelligences in the Universe wouldn't it?

It would confirm that they used to exist; no current proof given the distance to the star in question.

I am pretty certain that most scientists would agree--albeit off the record for some of them--that non-Terrestrial life of sufficiently-advanced technological expertise exists (by "sufficiently advanced" I mean at least access to things like computers, wireless connectivity of devices, interplanetary travel--we actually have the technology to travel to Mars...we just don't do it). The only thing missing is the proof of their current existence.

It is still highly advisable that we meet them out there in neutral territory rather than waiting for them to show up here. The likelihood that they are totally selfless and thoughtful of others is too remote to place faith in it; rather, we must assume that they are like us enough that they would come here for their own benefit and that would wind up being bad for us. Even if all they do is show up to barter for goods and information, can you imagine the system shock that would occur if some people gained access to force fields or quick cloning and other people did not? You don't have to wage a war or spread disease to disrupt and potentially kill a culture; sometimes all you have to do is give them high-tech goodies then sit back and wait.

[Vraith]

Having said that, it would actually be a nice absorbable way to confirm the presence of non-human intelligences in the Universe wouldn't it?

It would confirm that they used to exist; no current proof given the distance to the star in question.

I am pretty certain that most scientists would agree--albeit off the record for some of them--that non-Terrestrial life of sufficiently-advanced technological expertise exists (by "sufficiently advanced" I mean at least access to things like computers, wireless connectivity of devices, interplanetary travel--we actually have the technology to travel to Mars...we just don't do it). The only thing missing is the proof of their current existence.

It is still highly advisable that we meet them out there in neutral territory rather than waiting for them to show up here. The likelihood that they are totally selfless and thoughtful of others is too remote to place faith in it; rather, we must assume that they are like us enough that they would come here for their own benefit and that would wind up being bad for us. Even if all they do is show up to barter for goods and information, can you imagine the system shock that would occur if some people gained access to force fields or quick cloning and other people did not? You don't have to wage a war or spread disease to disrupt and potentially kill a culture; sometimes all you have to do is give them high-tech goodies then sit back and wait.

Yea, at distance our present is way past mostly.

But on the risk/fear/careful---if really bugs me that anyone is still in this mode.
Why should we assume they're basically like us?
Because they obviously are not...if they were, they wouldn't be here.
If for no other reason [though there are a lot of other reasons] than:
We are way out in the fringes...not total wilderness, but not anything like convenient of efficient.
If we're not convenient or efficient, then we must have something exceedingly rare...
What would that be?
Because there is literally nothing on Earth that is richly/easily available that is not even more richly and more easily available long before you get here.
Except...maybe...people.
But you can't want people for anything other than things only people do...
Which is art, thought, love, culture, relationships, joy.

Everyone that I've seen so far that talks about this stuff tends to ignore the most basic facts [as we know them so far, and the good, solid, real evidence has been all trending one direction for a long time now]:
The knowledge that is required in order to traverse interstellar space is so powerful and broad that the resources/productivity problems that are the primary cause of conflict no longer exist.

Simplified: call it Vraith's Principle. [[someone somewhere probably thought of this---maybe many manywheres. I don't recall seeing it...though I've framed variations on it elsewhere---]]
Vraith's Principle:
Any species that requires interstellar travel to obtain resources or any other necessity for survival is incapable of achieving practical interstellar travel or survival at all.

This may be attached [perhaps should be] to Fermi's thing about where the hell the aliens are. It affects that calculation in several different ways.


Anyway, probably reiterating what I said before in this thread:
Alien life exists, I have no doubt, and no one should have doubt.
Intelligent probably exists right now---but likely too far away and we'll never meet in my life, [[unless we hurry up on immortality---which it seems like I might miss by just a decade or two. Fuck...miss living forever AND meeting aliens by THIS MUCH really sucks. At least previous generations didn't die being certain that both those were SO CLOSE!]]

Should have been at the beginning, but got off-track: I don't think the "shock to our system" is a real thing. It depends on assumptions and interpretations that are very shaky even when only talking about divergent/isolated human cultures. People pretend such encounters are always either/or, always live/die, and similar no matter where they occur. None of those is true...all of the attempts at unification, some kind of "theory of cultural interactions" have failed.