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Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
See also: Released FAA recording reveals pilot report of a UFO over Long Island
I-Team Exclusive: Nevada senator fought to save secret UFO program
Related: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Newly-Released Video Shows 2015 U.S. Navy Sighting of UFO
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @02:39PM (5 children)
Yes it does.
Yes -- and let's be very clear there -- that's all that means. Which means absolutely nothing in terms of arguments about how commonplace life is, because a minor change in chemical conditions could introduce many orders of magnitude differences in the likelihood of a reaction. Shifting the start date of life from a billion years after formation to a few hundred million years is nowhere near as significant as potential chemical bottlenecks.
Well, also "very quickly" is relative. I admittedly don't keep up with the detailed science on this, but from what I remember reading in the past few years and what I can find in searches, it looks like the best solid evidence is still around 500 million years after the earth formed. Whether that's "very quickly" or not, I don't know, because "quickly" is a relative term, and we have nothing to compare it to.
There's the slippage again. What is sufficiently "Earth-like"? You don't know. You can't know. What you're relying on is basically a version of the mediocrity principle [wikipedia.org], which is an expansion of the Copernican principle [wikipedia.org]. The latter states that Earth is not cosmologically "special," in terms of its place in the universe, the local laws of physics, etc.
And yes, the Copernican principle can and has been reasonably extended to show there are other stars like our own and that they have other planets, some of which likely have some similar characteristics (size, temperature, some basic chemical composition, etc.). Great.
But extending this principle to assume that life is everywhere is a bit different in my view. The chemistry of life is so different and much more complex than what we find in other basic physical processes. Could it be that such chemistry naturally emerges if you only get the basic conditions right? Again, as I said, that certainly could be the case. But it could also be that there's some bottleneck somewhere in the abiogenesis or evolutionary series of steps that require very specific conditions (and certainly could be more than one). I'm not saying it's likely there is one -- I'm saying until we either (1) discovery life on a few other planets (not merely basic organic chemicals, but actual life), or (2) successfully reproduce all stages of abiogenesis in a laboratory and understand the constraints in those processes, we have absolutely no way of quantifying whether life is likely to arise on 1 out of 10 planetary bodies in the universe, or 1 out of 100, or 1 out of a million, or 1 out of a quadrillion.
Agreed. I'm not arguing your argument is implausible, by the way. I'm arguing that we simply have too little evidence to have any idea who the probabilities are. Therefore, speculating on the reason for the "Fermi paradox" is all just an exercise in speculation until we have more data points.
I don't mean to be argumentative here, but you're changing your claims significantly. In your last post, you were asserting that there are lots of UFOs, lots of reputable people claiming they are likely extraterrestrial in origin. I asked you for the best evidence to support such claims -- because I'm legitimately interested.
And instead, you give a vague argument saying you've already addressed it, and we can look at our own "technical development to get an idea of what is possible" but then couple it with "***If*** we were to develop faster-than-light technologies...." Setting aside that I think it takes an incredible amount of hubris to presuppose what a billion-year-old civilization may or may not choose to do, what its behavior might be, etc., also given we have absolutely no idea of what sort of constraints there might be on biology within the universe let alone possible psychologies of aliens.... setting aside all of that, I was legitimately asking for some decent corroborated scientific evidence by the pilots, astronomers, etc. you mentioned so I could evaluate said claims. Because, once again, without said evidence, your argument devolves into "But, other places/beings COULD be like us!!... and thus maybe they're coming here!!" Yes, that's true, but we have no evidence that they should be or how likely it is that they might be.
Maybe the coming decades will prove you right. I certainly hope the universe is teeming with life, because that might be a lot more interesting than if it weren't. But so far, we have very little evidence to suppose that's more "likely" than the rare Earth hypothesis [wikipedia.org] or many other random arguments.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday July 02 2018, @04:00PM (1 child)
A good starting point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_analog#Attributes_and_criteria [wikipedia.org]
0.8 to 2 Earth masses. The upper limit could be conservative but that remains to be seen. Not enough mass gives you a Mars situation with atmospheric loss. Too much mass could result in a water world or very high atmospheric pressure.
Terrestrial. Not a gas giant.
Average temperature allows liquid water to exist on the surface.
We can measure or infer some of these right now. There are a number of exoplanets for which we know the mass, radius, and temperature. Hubble was used [soylentnews.org] to find indirect evidence that water could exist on the surface of some of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. A 2.4-meter aperture telescope launched in 1990 and upgraded in 2009 will not be the best tool for the job for very long.
We are doing the best we can. Enough to come up with estimates such as: Number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy: Tens of billions [arstechnica.com].
My ultimate conclusion was that "maybe some UFO sightings are alien in origin" and that if we develop faster-than-light technology, we could be almost certain that we have been visited. Faster-than-light travel would give civilizations the ability to absolutely litter themselves across the galaxy, perhaps allowing them to exist for millions or billions of years by making them resistant to extinction. Part of the civilization can die while the rest live on. Instead of presupposing what a civilization will do, presuppose that, given the capability, some small groups will likely break off the main group, following their own objectives.
The Fermi paradox fails if we are being visited by aliens this very moment. So when you have eyewitnesses attesting to that, it becomes a possible solution to the paradox. Yes, it is too bad there is no hard proof.
We have estimates of billions of potentially habitable exoplanets within the galaxy based on observations by Kepler and other missions. The Rare Earth hypothesis is dying piece by piece.
I have laid out why I think it is plausible that, given X billion potentially habitable planets (defined as having all of the fixings of Earth, particularly liquid water), something like 0.9 * X billion could develop microbial life. Maybe I'm dead wrong, but we have good reasons to be optimistic about that while remaining agnostic about the intelligent life related parameters in the Drake equation.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @11:39PM
Those aren't criteria for planets that will support abiogenesis or where life can evolve efficiently. Those are criteria where life (at least as we know it) can survive. Those may be the same criteria, or they might be very different criteria. We have no current way of judging, since we have not observed life evolved except in the evidence from a single case.
Except I never much doubted that there would be other potentially habitable planets in the universe or in our galaxy. We just hadn't observed them, but once astronomers figured out the basics of stellar formation and system formation, it seems a reasonable supposition that you'll get some planets in the "habitable zone" with various characteristics like Earth. Yes, some of the actual authors of the original "rare Earth hypothesis" focused on a few elements that might be more commonplace than they thought -- but hardly all.
And really they didn't even deal much with my issue -- which is really mostly about abiogenesis, since it's the part of the process I think we know least about in terms of all the details... and there are a lot. Yes, there's an outline and a lot of theories. But last time I checked, we're leagues away from being able to synthesize life from basic organic compounds in a lab (at least using processes that could reasonably be "random" and happen in a natural environment). Correct me if I'm wrong.
I mean, have you ever looked in depth at how cell replication works and how many pieces have to come together to make that possible? I'm no expert, and I'm not arguing for "intelligent design" or some such thing -- I just think it's reasonable to withhold judgment about what is "likely" until we understand the process more... and not just go around assuming any planet that has vaguely enough liquid and a vague mix of the right elements is likely to sprout up microbes.
Well, you've laid out that you're willing to just make the assumption that life will magically sprout up on 90% of such worlds. You have presented absolutely no evidence to support that 90% number, which could very well be 90% or 99% or 1% or 0.0001% or 0.00000000000000000000001%.
I don't think that last one seems the most likely (though I have no evidence to support that judgment either, and I'll be straightforward about that), but from a logical and mathematical and scientific standpoint, the rational conclusion until we have further evidence of the sort I outlined in my last post is that judging among those estimates must be indeterminate, which means speculating on the reasons for the Fermi paradox is an exercise in futility.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 02 2018, @09:06PM (2 children)
What "minor change" happens over an entire planet? Let us recall that most such things are very local and on something the size of a geologically active planet over hundreds of millions of years, there's a vast number of local environments. So while a global "minor change" can shift some environments out of whatever zone is particularly susceptible to life, it would also shift other environments into those zones.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 02 2018, @11:46PM (1 child)
Yes, obviously. The question is how "special" the particular "soup" (for lack of a better word) must be. Do you assume that life just develops everywhere on a planet because it's so easy? Or is it something that needs such particular conditions that only one "soup" in one zone of Earth over one span of a few thousand years had just the right conditions... and then it gradually spread elsewhere? The latter is certainly possible. Or maybe there were various intermediate stages that served as bottlenecks and had to happen in a particular order. And if so, you don't need to worry about a change taking over an entire planet -- you have to worry about one pool meeting the criteria one time EVER and what the likelihood is.
I'm not saying that's the way it happened. But given how different the chemistry of biology is from most other basic natural processes and how complex it is, I really don't know how hard it would be for it to spontaneously emerge. Maybe it just takes a few million years at the right vague conditions -- but we really have no evidence of that, as far as I know. (Correct me if any lab experiment has shown otherwise... otherwise it's all speculation.)
I can make something incredibly improbable happen right now -- I can shuffle a deck of cards. It's unlikely that particular order has ever occurred in the history of the universe (even if there were millions of other civilizations out there continuously shuffling cards). Extremely improbable events happen all the time. Is the emergence of life one of those? I have no idea, but it's certainly a reasonable answer to the Fermi paradox (at least as reasonable as any other) to assume that maybe it actually depends on a chain of seemingly simple but collectively improbable events like ordering a deck of cards.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 05 2018, @04:42AM
Of course not.
Pretty much. The problem here is that small changes may move the "particular conditions" around, but they don't eliminate them.