/sci/ - Science & Math

I'd be willing to be there's no intelligent life within .5 radius of the Earth

BUMP

I'm 99% sure there's no intelllgent life on earth.

Was that your question?

>>4119433

I second that. Unless some creature eats magma.

>>4119451
No, may there be life as intelligent as us elsewhere in our galaxy? Or would we have come into contact with them if they were that close?

>>4119459
You don't appreciate how big our galaxy is.

>>4119459

You don't appreciate how big our galaxy is... AT ALL!

>>4119481
>>4119462
Very well, so what's the answer to my question? How far away is the boundary between where there definitely is no intelligent life and where there might be?

>>4119779
bump.

>>4119779

I'd say our solar system definitely, and of course the empty space between the nearest stars.

After that any star system with goldilocks planets could have intelligent life. We just don't know.

>>4119798
So could any of the nearest stars have intelligent life around them?

>>4119459
Nothing is "close" in space.

>>4119801
Could, but if their technology advanced to radio signals, we would have been able to detect them some time ago. This is not even mentioning all of human's existence vs the age of the universe. When you factor in evolutionary timescales, age of the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, we could conclude intelligent life does not happen often.

>>4119803
I really know nothing about this, but don't we send some kind of 'signals' into space? Have these not ruled out there being any life as intelligent us ours within a certain proximity?

>>4119801

As far as I know the closest extrasolar planet is in orbit of Epsilon Eridani but life wouldn't survive there. You have to remember though that we're defining life as we define life here. I suppose that some hypothetical life form whose chemical composition is radically different from life on Earth could survive different conditions, but then we get into philosophy. We have defined life as we've encountered life on Earth. If start encountering things that appear alive but which are so radically different from life here, would broadening the definition of life to encompass these things as living really be sincere? As science advances even now the definition of life becomes more and more vague. We used to think that just humans were alive, and then plants and animals, and now bacteria.. We could broaden the term just a little bit and consider water to be alive.

There aren't any easy answers for these questions. "Life" isn't very easy to define even here on Earth so talking about life elsewhere is even more difficult.

I haven't been following the Kepler mission but I know it's been discovering buttloads of extrasolar planets, many of them Goldilocks planets, so check that out.

We've only explored 2% of the Earth's oceans. We can't say for certain whether or not there is other intelligent life within 0 radius of Earth.

>>4119806
>but if their technology advanced to radio signals, we would have been able to detect them some time ago
Ok, so how far have these signals travelled? To what kind of distance can we rule out there being any of this kind of life present?

>>4119815

Your method of questioning is starting to make me suspect that you want us to do your homework for you...

Anyways, if we say that radio waves travel at the speed of light (which they don't but for the sake of simplicity it's close enough) and sending out messages with SETI for 35 years we could get a response as far away as 17.5 light years, assuming the response was immediate.

If the aliens were sending out radio waves before we started listening then we could be receiving them from literally any distance... They could have been travelling for thousands of years before they got to earth or they could have been sent twenty years ago.

We're also assuming that they would be using radio waves to attempt communication, which reminds me of this comic.

>MFW we find a planet still in its medieval period and I can finally be a epic knight.

>>4119806
I guess right before we began to implement radio signals everyone thought there was a damn good chance of coming into contact with other lifeforms pretty soon right? Or did they realize even then that the vastness of the universe still made it unlikely?

God, imagine what a mindblowing revelation it would have been if there just happenned to be some similarly intelligent life fairly close.

>>4119832

A desert planet still in it's medieval period with lizard mounts...

Excuse me I need to go wank.

>>4119843

People have had a rough idea of the scale of things before SETI started, so hoping for first contact sooner rather than later was mostly naive optimism on the part of the researchers.

But hey, nothing wrong with that eh?

>>4119826
>Your method of questioning is starting to make me suspect that you want us to do your homework for you...
Haha no.

And so I guess we could come into contact at any time then?

We have to find intelligent life somewhere. It's our last hope, since we have yet to find any intelligent life on this planet.

>>4119826
>we could get a response as far away as 17.5 light years
bearing in mind that the universe has a radius of about 46 billion light years

>>4119857

Yeah but don't get your hopes up.

Contact might not exactly be a good thing either. A ship capable of travelling at such great distances needs to be able to withstand some pretty intense stuff. If their goal was military dominance there would be very little we could do.

In my mind we should keep looking but not advertising ourselves.

Imagine the stories told by the conquerers of Earth, laughing about how we invited their conquest.

>>4119868

Precisely.

I don't think anyone reasonably informed on the subject contests that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. It simply must be.

But if they're thousands (or millions or billions) of light years away they might as well not exist because we'll never make contact with them.

>>4119869
Yeah I didn't mean direct contact, just like knowing they were there or whatever. Fuuu just imagine what a discovery it would be, it would be the most important day in mankind's history defintely.

>>4119866

I'm getting sick of posts like this.

You're not edgy by implying that humans aren't intelligent. We're the most intelligent species yet discovered and by an extremely wide margin.

Stop putting my species down, humanity is fucking awesome. You should kiss the ground every day that you were born as an intelligent and self-aware homo sapien and not an ant or lizard or some shit.

>>4119872
For all we know though life could be fairly common and condensed(relative to the size of the universe) so there might be contact soon?

>>4119884
The suspicion is that life isn't all that common.

>>4119868
The universe has a radius? Explain

>>4119877
"Humanity fuck yeah" is as retarded as putting it down more than it deserves.

Except for one thing.

>>4119884

It seems like you really, really really want us to say that we're probably going to make contact soon. Like, it's like you pleading with us to convince you that it's possible for us to make contact soon.

Much like those wacky creationists say, life is extremely unlikely. It happening here was a matter of coincidence, even on this planet with such perfect conditions. The reason it occured was a matter of probability: Hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of star systems mean at least hundreds of billions of planets like Earth. The supreme unlikeliness of life coming about was surpassed only by the scale of the universe.

It's very big, mostly empty, and nobody will hear us scream.

>>4119895
I read wiki and that's what it said.

>>4119826
If they were so intelligent they would have more ways than just using pheromone trails to detect living things.

right?

>>4119884
>>4119887
Maybe life is very common. But that's not saying that intelligent life is.

For humans to emerge, a very specific series of catastrophes had to happen, each shaping us toward more communicative, more social, life, affording higher benefits for intellect.

Aaaaand pic related. It's fiction, but it's still a sobering thought.

One thing to consider is that a paradise like Earth might not just be rare in space, but also time. Human civilization has been around for what? 6,000, maybe 10,000 years at the most? Radios were invented a century ago. Nobody knows how this great human experiment will end but it's pretty likely that we won't be around forever.

Consider now that the universe is, what? ~14 billion years old? The entirety of human civilization is a supremely small fraction of the history of the universe. Maybe there were dozens of advanced civilizations close to our solar system, but they each rose and fell in a few thousands years.

And maybe each of those dozens of civilizations became convinced that they were the only ones. Their pale blue dots like ours were paradises that wouldn't last.

Also, there's a Pale Blue Dot audiobook read by Carl Sagan. I don't like audiobooks but he makes it exploderiffic.

>>4119906
>>4119908
time-mind

>>4119900
But how do you know? How do you the universe isn't in fact teeming with life? You can't say 'because they would have picked up our signals already' because we've only sent them out to such a short distance really.

>>4119913

We don't... We're not saying that we know, we're just saying what is most likely given our current knowledge. In our neighborhood there aren't many (if any) planets that might support life as we understand it.

It's not just Earth's conditions either. Our solar system is very convenient for us. Jupiter serves as a huge gravity source that protects us from many of the various knick-knacks floating about in space, and our star is quite a healthy distance from the center of our galaxy.

Like we've said, having not encountered life elsewhere we can only define life on Earth-like terms. Under that definition it seems quite unlikely that intelligent life is common.

>>4119918
>In our neighborhood
What's this? Few nearest stars?

>>4119906

Vernor Vinge aww yeaah.

>>4119906
No, intelligence is expectable where life can develop for millions years. A lot of animals have some crude form of communication and society, and a few have the capacity to solve complex problems and use tools.
Starting from there, more intelligence is not an evolutionnary disadvantage in most situations, and several human-like intelligences will appear.

>>4119906
Where is that pic from?

>>4119932
It's a truncated excerpt from Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge, or rather, the novel Marooned in Realtime, which is part of the aforementioned.
http://www.mediafire.com/?ymkm3zzgtmy

>>4119938
Thanks.

>>4119929
Why? We know of exactly two sapient species that have risen on Earth, only one of which is a tool-user.

And like I said, for humans, the road to sapience went through several catastrophes.

If a certain rock had missed the earth, the world could still be full of dinosaurs.

If the savanna hadn't expanded, making trees scarce, we could still be more adapted to climbing and eating fruits and nuts.

If the Toba supervolcano hadn't erupted, a group of weird savannah-apes would probably still be stuck in africa.

Evolution doesn't prefer intelligence, it just favors better adaptation.

I personally think that there's life all over the universe, but that intelligence may have risen only on a few rare environments.

>>4119941
No problem, bro. It's one of my favorite books and love spreading it around.

>>4119987
Gorillas can into sign language.

Koko the gorilla even drew a cat or something iirc.

Theres been a documented case where gorillas have used sticks to check the depth of a swamp/body of water

>>4119462
>>4119481
You don't appreciate evidence. Go back to /x/.

>>4120023
Sorry linked the wrong post.

>>4119826
Your comic fails. Radio waves are a universal phenomenon; unless they're some crazily advanced race that uses wormholes or something beyond our imagination, they're probably using radio waves, just like they would use math, computers, etc.

It's cool that SETI just started up again. They're now targeting the handful of Earth-like planets found by Kepler. There's one that is almost identical to Earth, but it isn't confirmed yet, so they're starting with Kepler 22b.