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posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by bitshifter on Monday March 03 2014, @03:26PM

    by bitshifter (2241) on Monday March 03 2014, @03:26PM (#10070)

    I find your response very interesting.
    I agree that we may simply not recognize evidence of other civilizations.

    I did not mean to sound conclusive.
    I quoted this since the question seems appropriate - if there have been countless civilizations before, where have they disappeared?
    Or, as you say, they are there, just ignorant/unaware/not interested of us, or maybe just stuck at a technological level that does not allow space travel.

    Thanks for the interesting response.
    I wish I could mod you up.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AsteroidMining on Monday March 03 2014, @03:52PM

    by AsteroidMining (3556) on Monday March 03 2014, @03:52PM (#10087)

    Or, as you say, they are there, just ignorant/unaware/not interested of us, or maybe just stuck at a technological level that does not allow space travel.

    If there is any galactic civilization (bulge or disk) that is order 5 - 6 billion years old, it would be reasonable to assume that they have knowledge of every star in its galaxy, with its planets and their biological potential (as that information would take a small fraction of billion years to acquire). My suspicion is that waiting 10,000 years or so (which is next-to-nothing to a multibillion year old civilization) to contact new-comers would help weed out the "flash-in-the-pans," and save wasted effort. Given that our civilization is all of 5000 years old, that may give us still a little while to wait. Under this hypothesis, there is presumably some sort of alien monitor here in the solar system, which we might be able to find, as in Arthur Clarke's "The Sentinel" and (of course) "2001," although that may be hard or even beyond our abilities, as it may not want to be found.

    • (Score: 1) by bitshifter on Monday March 03 2014, @04:01PM

      by bitshifter (2241) on Monday March 03 2014, @04:01PM (#10092)

      Well, if you follow the line of "Sentinel" (and "2001", of course), then this "monitor" will be made hard to find on purpose, as you say, to ensure that the finder is worthy :)
      On the other hand, there is now a bubble of radio transmissions with a radius of 100 light years, surrounding the solar system, and growing.
      Somebody is bound to notice, sooner or later.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AsteroidMining on Monday March 03 2014, @04:20PM

        by AsteroidMining (3556) on Monday March 03 2014, @04:20PM (#10098)

        Yes.

        As for "hard to find," consider trying to find something like this - a probe made of condensed quark matter placed at the center of the Earth, looking for signs of neutrino production from nuclear power (we now generate lots) and communicating back to HQ by beamed neutrinos (condensed quark matter is basically opaque to neutrinos, and so would make neutrino communication possible). And, that is just something I can come up with. I would expect a multi-billion year old civilization to do substantially better.

        • (Score: 1) by Woods on Monday March 03 2014, @05:16PM

          by Woods (2726) <woods12@gmail.com> on Monday March 03 2014, @05:16PM (#10120) Journal

          Communication via neutrino emission, how very clever. Apparently, some American scientists have already started on this, and have successfully sent a short message "Neutrino" through 237 meters (2.2 football fields) of bedrock.

          Though, the method requires a particle accelerator, and a massive detector, I am sure eventually we will figure out how to get it whittled down to something much more manageable.

        • (Score: 1) by bitshifter on Monday March 03 2014, @05:26PM

          by bitshifter (2241) on Monday March 03 2014, @05:26PM (#10123)

          OK. So assuming that assuming neutrinos travel at the speed of light, the bubble of neutrinos has a radius of 69 light years, from the time of the the first atomic tests...

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 03 2014, @05:39PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 03 2014, @05:39PM (#10131)

      5000 years? Last I heard, we humans started using agriculture around 8000 years ago.

      Why wait a specific length of time anyway? Different civilizations will develop at different rates, surely. The Star Trek concept of waiting until a civilization develops warp drive seems to be a pretty good marker for "ready for first contact". (Of course, we don't know if warp drive is even possible, so maybe the ETs look for some other marker that we don't even know about because we haven't invented it yet.)

      It's too bad that our civilization is most likely one of those "flash in the pan" types you mention, and seems to be regressing rather than progressing. Just look at Windows 8 for proof.

      • (Score: 1) by AsteroidMining on Monday March 03 2014, @06:30PM

        by AsteroidMining (3556) on Monday March 03 2014, @06:30PM (#10147)

        Why wait a specific length of time anyway?

        Well, the entities interested in new civilization anthropology (or whatever bin it falls under) might be, say, in the galactic bulge, or 15,000 light years away. Or they might be "merely" a few 1000 light years away. We have no way of knowing.

        It seems to me that one crucial question here is whether the speed of light is a true limit. If so, a galactic civilization will move slowly. No matter how fine the wheels grind, no matter where they are, they will grind exceedingly slow.

        Conversely, if c is not a barrier, they presumably know all about us, and are waiting their time for their own reasons. (They, of course, would have experience in these matters, about things like when would be a good time to intervene, etc.) Either way, 5000 or 8000, that number of years is just not likely to seem like a significant delay to a billion+ year old galactic civilization.

        In consequence, I do not see how a delay in contact since the founding of our civilization (however that is defined) is any sort of proof of the non-existance of a multi-billion year galactic civilization.

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 03 2014, @06:50PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 03 2014, @06:50PM (#10155)

          It seems to me that one crucial question here is whether the speed of light is a true limit. If so, a galactic civilization will move slowly. No matter how fine the wheels grind, no matter where they are, they will grind exceedingly slow.

          I'm not so sure about this. It seems to me that if it is a true limit, there simply can't be a such thing as an galactic (or worse, intergalactic) civilization. You could have a civilization that spawns many colonies, but a "civilization" implies that all parts of that society are able to communicate, and thus function more-or-less as one. For instance, suppose that we humans built a big generation ship and sent a bunch of people out to Alpha Centauri to start a colony. We can exchange little bits of information from them, which is years old by the time it gets to either side, but we're really now two separate civilizations, not one. Instead of Alpha Centauri, make it a one-way wormhole to the Delta Quadrant; we could still communicate with them (maybe), but the latency will be so ridiculously long that we effectively have no contact. We're no longer a single civilization.

          I think the only way you can call yourself a "civilization" is if you have communications with reasonable speed; the slower they are, the more the whole "civilization" idea breaks down.

          In consequence, I do not see how a delay in contact since the founding of our civilization (however that is defined) is any sort of proof of the non-existance of a multi-billion year galactic civilization.

          Well of course. I was just quibbling about the age of our civilization. They probably have a Prime Directive. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the problems inherent in contacting primitive goat-herders and showing them advanced technology.

          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by AsteroidMining on Monday March 03 2014, @07:05PM

            by AsteroidMining (3556) on Monday March 03 2014, @07:05PM (#10158)

            I assume that a very long lived civilization will also contain very long lived entities. Suppose they have a lifespan of 10^9 years, then spending 100,000 years to get somewhere and come back is comparable to one of us spending 3 days on a trip to LA. The British had a global empire (tougher to do than a civilization) at a time when travel times were months (yes, they lost the US part of it, but kept the rest, at least until communications sped up) and, of course, many civilizations (such as the Chinese) certainly existed at a time when the vast majority of their inhabitants never left their home village.

            • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 03 2014, @07:38PM

              by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 03 2014, @07:38PM (#10176)

              Yes, I suppose the ultra-long lifespan thing would make it more feasible. I guess it's pretty hard to think about in human terms, because the idea of waiting even 100 years for a response to a query seems pretty ridiculous even if we had 200+-year lifespans, just because of the speed of our thinking. But remember, it's not just lifespans, it's the speed at which your daily events take place: when the British had to deal with the American colonies declaring independence, travel time was probably only a couple of weeks. It's not like King George had to wait years or decades to learn enough information to decide whether to send troops or not; he had his answer in a month or two. It's still a long time, but not so long you've moved on to other matters and lost interest in the issue.