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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: 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.