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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: 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.