/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16017899
Intelligent technological civilizations that exist at the same time as us are extremely rare, possible less than 1 per galaxy on average.
The rest of the life out there is fairly common but simple and boring, most of it never evolves past stages resembling algae or fungi.
Earth has an extremely rare combination of conditions needed to not just allow life to get going, but to keep kicking and shoving and disrupting that life and driving it toward complexity. Extremely rare, but not the only one in the universe

>>15201225
IQ tests are guaranteed to fuck up your life up by way of self-fulfilling prophecy. Every time.

If you score high, you risk displaying unwarranted self-importance which ironically lowers your self-awareness. If you score low, well congratulations, you'll now believe you're retarded and doomed to a mediocre life. Also quite ironic, considering you could've just avoided both tests in the first place and would've ended up better off

>>14992128
Hard to see, because most of them are not intelligent or technological.
As far as we can tell, only 1 species on earth has ever developed a civilization, out of around 5 billion different animal species in earth's history.
Apply that same rarity to the universe and it becomes extremely unlikely that another technological civilization exists close enough and at the right time for us to detect it

>>14874700
Fact that it's true. Humans and Earth don't occupy any special vantage point within the universe (or at least we haven't found any scientific evidence for that). We're not at the center of anything, and there's no reason to think Earth is uniquely capable of hosting life and that it's impossible everywhere else.
It's true we haven't discovered any aliens yet. But a simple explanation for this would be that intelligent technological life is very rare (reasonable guess based on how Earth has had only 1 such species that we know of) and we just have very limited ability to detect the rest of it, the simpler life that's not emitting radio signals
>>14874745
fuck off retard

>>14868136
Or, alternatively, abiogenesis could have happened anywhere with conditions similar to early earth. Since there's a decent chance of it anywhere that has volcanic glass and water and that isn't insanely hot or cold.
Maybe it could have happened on earth too, but our life actually originated on Mars, and some of it got blasted off of Mars by an impact and was sprinkled here.

https://www.science.org/content/article/did-volcanic-glasses-help-spark-early-life
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2022.0027

>>14858386
You're the same anon making the "Jews are a Fermi Paradox solution" threads, aren't you?
Aren't youuuuuuuuuuu...

>>14852352
>>14852390
>>14852372
The issue isn't that religions explicitly rule out other life in the universe, it's that they tend to be very geocentric.
Where even if there is other life out there, earth's life was created first and is somehow the most important.
In reality, vast numbers of aliens and intelligent civilizations could have arisen throughout the universe long before our solar system even existed. That would be a pretty significant detail for a genuine holy text to leave out ("In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" etc etc).

>>14849835
Sagan was right about that, though.
Sure, life elsewhere in the universe is probably more likely to be carbon-based than not, but it's foolish to assume all other life must play by the same rules we're familiar with.
Silicon-based life might be more rare, but still very possible.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

>>14849843
It disparages the assumption that aliens must be carbon-based, because of how this limits imagination. Similar to how aliens are often assumed to need liquid water and use DNA, when there's no reason for those to be absolute, fundamental requirements

Could be wrong but pretty sure the Goldilocks zone thing only considers life that requires liquid water

There's no reason to think that all life in the universe is entirely dependent on water, there could be life that uses something else like ammonia as a solvent, and would therefore tolerate a different temperature range

Would be nice to have a sample size of greater than 1 for planets with life and different types of biochemistry; perhaps one day scientists will instead point to like 3 or 5 different rings around a star and say "here's the zone for water, here's the zone for ammonia, here's the zone for hydrogen fluoride, here's the zone for methane..."

>>10337448
>global cooling

It's a widely spread myth that the scientific consensus in the 70s was a cooling trend or that we were "heading for another ice age", and thus that they all flip flopped.

In reality, a -minority- of climate scientists in the 70s believed in the cooling trend, something like only 20%, while the other 80% agreed with today's scientists on the warming trend.

>short history of time

One of Webb's goals will be direct imaging of exoplanets

Does this mean we might find ayy lmaos if we look at enough of them?

>>9829562
Assuming life on earth arose through abiogenesis, it's possible that such a natural occurrence is extremely rare, a statistical improbability, and that life evolving intelligence is even rarer

It's estimated that there are 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, but it would not surprise me at all if the planets with intelligent life only number in the tens or hundreds, and are so far apart that lifeforms from different planets never come into contact with each other

Not that this speculation means much, since we only have a sample size of 1 inhabited planet at the moment