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posted by
janrinok
on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30AM
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
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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Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All
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It's not reality that's important, but how you perceive things.
(Score: 3, Informative) by evilviper on Monday March 03 2014, @09:44AM
It's hard to imagine how intelligent life, like us, could ever be "gone". Even with a nuclear holocaust, thousands of people would crawl out of the ground, a century or so, later, and start out again. Even now, we're seemingly on the verge of colonization of other plants. How long until technology will allow reaching the nearest solar system within a human lifetime?
If intelligent life has sprung up MILLIONS of times before now... WHERE ARE THEY? Why do our microwave antennas pick up cosmic bacground noise, but no intelligent signals? If they predate us by millions of years, then we should be seeing some signals from up to millions of light-years away. And why isn't there any intelligent life within 100+ light-years of us, who would be seeing our first powerful radio signals by now?
Not that your premise is correct, though... I expect a large majority of people believe in life outside of earth, and intelligent life, too. Personally, I see overwhelming evidence against the theory. There could be life all over the place, but it seems none of them figured out how to make flashlights or radios... none of them figured out inter-planetary travel and industralization in general, or else they'd be around, and we'd see signs of life on every other solar system...
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday March 03 2014, @12:51PM
There is a difference between 'intelligent' and 'broadcasts RF signals that can be interpreted'. For most of the history of the human race, we've not been transmitting anything. It's possible that a post-nuclear-holocaust society wouldn't either. Even now, there's a trend towards less radiation. The quest for higher data rates involves higher frequency RF, which doesn't propagate as far.
Contrary to popular SciFi depictions, there's actually very little that we've ever transmitted that would be distinguishable from noise beyond the termination shock. And that's not a matter of insufficiently advanced technology, it's a hard physical limit: if your signal produces less variation in the carrier than the background noise, you can't detect it.
And there's no guarantee that a species will continue to use RF at all. They may use some other communication mechanism, based on quantum entanglement or some theory that we've not yet discovered, which is not possible to intercept. Being impossible to intercept or block also means it wouldn't interfere, so you'd be able to have a large number of point-to-point links in a single space. We're approaching this with multipath RF, which can easily appear to be noise to anyone who is not one of the endpoints. More complex encoding schemes, even on wavelengths that we can detect, appear even harder to distinguish from noise.
You assumption isn't that no one outside of Earth figured out radio, it's that no one figured out anything more complex than pumping insane amounts of power through a spark-gap transmitter.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Monday March 03 2014, @02:10PM
The other thought is that due to the rampant energy use current, post-cataclysmic event energy may not be nearly as freely available as it is now.
How would society evolve now if 10,000 years ago the world's oil, rare earth elements, and easily reachable radioactive element supplies were used up creating a doomsday weapon?
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:06PM
If we have enough sunlight that the planet is not in the worst ice age ever, we have LOTS of power. Mirrors + water + turbines + wire == lots of electricity. Without sunlight, wind power would do well, and keep us from freezing.
Once you've figured out that whole theory of electromagnetics thing, (and SOMEBODY will remember), it's pretty damn easy to start over from there. Once you know what IS possible, and the basics of what's needed to get there, it doesn't take much effort to start again, and tackle the low-hanging fruit that will save profound amounts of labor right away.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Open4D on Monday March 03 2014, @02:10PM
Even accepting that, how successful would these people be, starting out again? My theory is that modern day humankind has been lucky; we had easy access to the raw materials (fertilizers, metals, etc.) and energy that we needed to build ourselves into this fairly advanced civilisation. Those easily accessible materials are gone now (or dispersed & contaminated) - but that's okay because our fairly advanced civilisation is able to do things like extract oil from deep-sea wells (normally) and carry out aeroplane & satellite geological surveys to find new places to mine for all our raw materials.
But what if all that was lost? I think it would be so much harder for any future human society to boot itself up to our current 21st Century level, that I wouldn't be surprised if it just doesn't happen in the time available (i.e. while the planet remains habitable). It's one reason why we have to be careful not to risk the collapse of our current civilization. (We should make it sustainable, for starters.)
So to bring it back on topic, I can easily imagine that alien cvilizations could have existed in the past and now be (effectively) gone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 03 2014, @03:08PM
Don't need worldwide nuke exchange, even a substantial financial impact could be exciting.
The major domestic coal producers are all basically going bankrupt in the next decade for a bunch of financial and geological reasons. So bail them out for a little while, or just stop burning coal in the USA, or ... ?
This is reminiscent of the "can't build a saturn V" meme. No, we can't, probably ever again. We might be able to build something bigger and more powerful and more modern, but rolling back the clock is hard.
(Score: 1) by SuperCharlie on Monday March 03 2014, @05:46PM
So to bring it back on topic, I can easily imagine that alien cvilizations could have existed in the past and now be (effectively) gone.
Im thinking more along the lines of a billion years or more being enough time for a sun to consume a planet, galaxies colliding, planets colliding, etc.. catastrophes on the scale of complete obliteration well before we climbed out of the ooze.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by etherscythe on Monday March 03 2014, @06:12PM
Gun, Germs, and Steel [pbs.org] talked about this very kind of thing - particularly related to why (human) civilization took off in a technology sense in some places, but remains barely above subsistence farming in others. Without the critical availability of certain materials and time-saving techniques that allowed societies to develop specialization and economy of scale, modern chemistry, aerospace engineering, and the internet will never develop. You're back in pretty much the same place if these same resources are used up or destroyed in a major cataclysm.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:25PM
Iron is "the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust". Silicon (glass) is #2. And unlike aluminum, they're both easily extracted and processed into useful forms with the most primitive of technology (fire). With those two, alone, you could bootstrap electrical power generation in a few weeks, and be putting it to good labor-saving uses (pumping water, heating/cooling, transportation, etc.) in no-time. Iron (or steel) wires wouldn't be as efficient as copper (#26), but they'd still do the job well enough.
Portable energy for transportation is trickier, but excess electricity can make hydrogen from water, or charge simple batteries. A couple lead plates, or nickel and iron, both in acid, and you've got rechargeable golf-cart batteries after the apocalypse.
It's the technical knowledge we have now, that early humans lacked. And it's very hard to entirely get rid of such useful knowledge.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday March 03 2014, @03:38PM
Oh, I can imagine lots of ways we could be done in as a species right now:
- Out-of-control global warming turns Earth into Venus faster than we can adapt.
- Large asteroid impact a la the dinosaurs 66 millions years ago.
- Neutron star or other giant celestial object swats away the entire planet like it's a flea.
- Yes, nuclear war. Remember, it's not just surviving the initial barrage of nukes (which are now powerful enough that your 60-year-old backyard bomb shelter won't help much), it's having enough supplies underground to manage several centuries with no ill effects, and then enough seeds and enough non-radiated soil and the right atmosphere to come up with food once you reach the surface.
- Gray goo, as rampaging nanobots destroy everything in their path.
- Skynet / Matrix, where rampaging sentient artificial intelligence tries to destroy all humans.
- Virus or bacteria. While often there's enough diversity that at least a few members of a species will make it, sometimes there isn't.
- Invasion by aliens. (you said "imagine")
- A religion with an apocalypse story turns out to be right, and some sort of deity / deities kill us all. (Again, you said "imagine") Note that the Norse Ragnarok story does not qualify, since 2 people survive that one to repopulate the world after it's all over.
You're severely lacking in imagination. I understand why you want to have faith in humanity, but you might be completely wrong.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:31PM
So we survive under-ground. Not too hard. We have glass to allow limited light through for growing plants... solar power would still work, and wind-power would have one hell of a ROI.
Nope. Dinosaurs didn't know how to create bomb shelters, or manage the most basic forms of agriculture and teraforming (eg. shading or using green-houses for plants).
In the next couple centuries, I'd expect humanity will have self-sustaining colonies on Mars that would survive the loss of Earth.
There are extremely isolated pockets of humanity on earth.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 03 2014, @03:47PM
From an old telecom engineers perspective, if I'm trying to relay an old fashioned analog microwave carrier 75 miles there is no way my budget, both link budget and economic budget, will permit you to "accidentally" have the SNR margin to detect 10 million lightyears away. Even idiot humans, mere decades after the first radio broadcast, were already pretty good at running near the Shannon limit and optimizing links to darn near the dB. So assuming you'd hear anything other than a long term intentional interstellar broadcast seems a little irrational. Maybe an accident, or maybe something inadvertent like a MASER pumped ion drive which happened to be pointed at us. Maybe. But we are not going to monitor incidental telecoms-grade conversations. The engineering just doesn't work out for anything except some weird intentional stuff.
Another interesting perspective is an intelligent species could have been sending us a continuous broadcast of rickrolls and goatse from the Andromeda galaxy for the last 2.3 million (or so) years and we're still not going to see them for another 100K (or so) years. Depending on exact geometry. Or "they" could have had a fad of broadcasting to us for 100K or so years, unfortunately 2.6 million years ago, and when their "momentary" fad ended, our ancestors were still working on that whole stone tool thing, so too bad.
Finally the light cone is only about 14 billion years in radius but at least assuming earthly evolution there's not much to see for the first couple billion. Although the whole universe is at least 78 billion across. So there's an immense fraction of the universe we'll never see, at least using light propagated thru vacuum. Admittedly there's a heck of a lot in our light cone that we could theoretically be expected to see. This does put a bit of a damper on any theoretical warp drive cultures or even substantial sublight cultures as you'd expect a couple billion years would be enough to colonize a large plot of land, and a large plot of land Might result in strange overspill of interstellar comms channels.
Or perhaps there's IS a perfectly good sublight galaxy wide civilization a mere billion lightyears away, and in a billion years we'll hear all about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#M isconceptions [wikipedia.org]
Now if you wanted to really F with an interstellar capable civilization, you'd dump weird things into the sun to create some truly bizarre stellar spectra. We would certainly notice that. That might not be terribly wise. Aside from being wise or not, unfortunately we haven't seen anything that weird.
I'm forever optimistic that some gamma ray burst or quasar or whatever mystery of the month is just some advanced civilization trying to F with us by putting on a confusing show.
(Score: 1) by tangomargarine on Monday March 03 2014, @07:18PM
Judging by politics and general human stupidity, they're probably better off staying away...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"