I do respect your thinking though spearchucker........wish there were more like you.
NASA Found the Death Star
- Thread starter Fijimn
- Start date
I guess what we can say is that if there was a technologically advanced species 65 million years ago, it was a land-based complex animal. That probably narrows the choice down to some form of reptile or amphibian. We can also say that it had not bothered to mold the earth's biosphere very much, the way our society has, what with all the dinos running around all over the world. We can also say that it either was clueless at detecting the incoming killer asteroid, or powerless to alter its path by attaching rocket motors before it got here / nudge it off course with nukes, etc. Or just disinterested in doing so / decided to just leave the home system altogether and watch its parent world get knocked back to the stone age, and let those who could not make the trip perish. I think the vast majority of Astrobiologists and anthropologists believe that homo sapiens are the first civilization, in any case.
But it's not so important really whether we were the first here. We know that it happened on this one planet, regardless of how many times. What we don't know is how rare we are. What we need to figure out is whether this same kind of biosphere of complex animal life happens commonly, or is exceeding rare in the universe, or even unique to here. We just don't know. Is the 2 billion years it took for simple cells to make the leap to multicellular organisms "typical"? Or is it an unusual random outlier that mostly never occurs at all. Or does it happen, but the normal average timeframe is 7 billion years, with earth just happening to be a 99th percentile planet that reached it way early.
I went back and looked at "Rare Earth" again and their revised/updated Drake Equation. It includes several things Drake failed to consider
--fraction of planets where the leap from living cells to complex metazoans takes place
--fraction of planets that have a uniquely large moon like ours (stabilized our atmosphere and climate)
--what percentage have a large Jupiter in the system to gravitationally siphon away killer comets and asteroids, and lower the frequency of extinction events
--what percentage have the radioactive elements, active plate tectonics, and thus a strong magnetic field to filter out radiation (only earth does in our solar system).
Anyhow, it's a really good book, with lots of other stuff. There are entire huge categories of galaxies like elliptical ones, and small ones, where the metal content is very low and thus they are likely lifeless according to astrobiologists. I picked up Carl Sagan's "Broca's Brain" today, where in the late 70s he was estimating 1 million civilizations in this galaxy (with an average distance apart of 200 light years). But he also later speculated that Type II and type IIl societies ought to develop at millennial intervals once a society reached Type I (he said we were at Type "0.7"). Of course we have no way to measure what our own galaxy's total energy output looks like from outside when we're inside of it. But certainly that external study we completed of 100,000 other galaxies yielded a gloomy result of zero Type IIIs anywhere. Our own galaxy's radio silence seems to indicate at least that if these other civilizations are forming, they sure aren't progressing much beyond our own level of energy production, where sending signals is too expensive, so we mostly just listen.
Very fun discussion. I don't disagree with you. I just like to speculate in terms of the practical, and species that have been able to make of intelligence in practical ways. By that measure I believe we've been the most successful. Any pre-extinction event intelligence, I will say I don't think they were as equipped as the US would be today at detecting in plenty of time, and dealing with, a big incoming asteroid.
It would have to be a decade or more out for out country, much less the whole world, would have a snowball chance in hell at stopping a big incoming asteroid. I'd like to think we would, but we would have to get extremely lucky.
Anybody who claims there's zero chance that there's other life out there just comes across as either not being in touch with science (IE. Religious people feeling God created us as a special existence) or completely arrogant. I can't even comprehend the size of our Universe. I'm not even certain I can truly understand the size of our Solar System, much less our Galaxy or Universe as a whole. There's a ton of space out there and most of it, we'll never even have a clue about before our planet gets destroyed by the sun.
I got the impression that we'd reached a point where we detect asteroids of that size at least 15 years before a possible impact. Several years back I read an article where we were tracking about 10 asteroids that had a possibility of coming near earth. Most big ones we detected and eventually determined would miss us. Now there was one somewhat smaller one we completely missed a few years back, until about a day before it whizzed right past earth at a pretty close distance. I think either NASA or a university or 2 that got the grant money have staff that go over pictures of each section of the night sky and look for unusually moving objects. Then when they track something that shouldn't be there, they start calculating the trajectory to see if earth is part of the possible paths.
I agree that with our current level of technology, it would be very hard to stop one. But I'm sure the best rocket scientists, engineers and weapons specialists from around the world would be enlisted in a project to figure out a way to nudge it slightly off course.
Absolutely true. The other side of that coin is the near religious belief that there has to be lots of other complex, intelligent life out there just b/c there's complex, intelligent life here. We just have no idea of its prevalence or lack thereof. We only know that so far, we haven't detected definite signs of it anywhere else.
As our planet becomes too hot to inhabit (in around 200 to 400 million years.......oceans will have evaporated by 1 billion years from now, at the latest), I think a number of interstellar arks will be constructed and many groups will depart for other stars. We will at least have been able to identify multiple "new earth candidates", but probably very few/possibly none, where we detect an oxygen atmosphere (i.e., signature of a thriving biosphere). You guys should look up the new novel "Aurora" on amazon, about an interstellar ark trip. The author really researched his science well. He says that we might find out that life on earth is so integrally caught up in the conditions of this planet--living in a strong magnetic field, etc, that we might find out that we just can't flourish very well once away from the environment that was the crucible of our existence. We might become sickly as a spacefaring people.
I don't see how life as we know will even exist in 5,000 years.......much less millions of years. That's all I'm saying for fear of turning this into one of "those" threads.
That's what I meant. It would have to be going very slow, not very large, and/or very far out for us to do this and even then I'm not sure we could. What we should be doing is finding such an Earth crossing asteroid to "practice" on........if we could push it into the sun et al. then I'd buy into it.
I guess I wasn’t around for that. I don’t recall what ‘those threads’ were
. Microbial life we’ve confirmed is extremely hardy. It’s been here 3 billion years and it'll probably be around right up until the oceans disappear. Insects are pretty tough too, and there are such huge hordes of them and they breed so fast that some will likely adapt to the changing conditions and still be around til the end as well. Larger plants and larger animals will find it more difficult. Mankind, I don’t think we’ll change much through natural processes. We’ve ended most deaths due to natural selection. But we’ll do technology add-ons. Our basic DNA won’t change much, though surely we’ll engineer out certain diseases and increase the amplitude of positive genes. People will live longer and healthier. I don’t believe “mind uploading” will ever be possible. Brainwave patterns IMO are too ephemeral, and can’t be mimicked by a non-biological substrate. Even as the environment becomes more hostile, I believe the people left stuck here will construct self-contained habitats with their own controlled environments. But I think we’re limited as a species in how much we can change and grow. And true AI might not even be possible -- I don’t think ‘supersmart machines’ will emerge to save us. So my guess is our species has a limited shelf-life. I think we’ll die out here, but some will depart. If our telescopes can identify a “blue world” nearby, like 200 light years, maybe multi-generational arks can reach it in 2,000 years or so. If it had no civilization we could build on it. If it did, maybe they’d be nice enough to not nuke us but instead let us reside nearby in the same solar system. I just don't buy into the warp drive or wormhole travel fantasies. I just think the energy requirements are too vast and would require manipulating the very structure of the universe -- spacetime itself -- at a magnitude that is only in the province of whatever is at a much higher level of existence than we are. God, etc.I guess I wasn’t around for that. I don’t recall what ‘those threads’ were
The climate et al. (basically man can do no wrong) threads were basically the reason the politics board was created, and I found myself getting sucked into them. If there's still a legendary board here I'm sure one of my thread is on it........in fact, in looking here's one of mine from the Iowa Off Topic board from 2005.
Deep Impact collision ejected the stuff of life
I just really don't give a !@#$ anymore because it goes nowhere and really serves no purpose.
We've found extremophiles every where we've looked on earth, they will be around long after the Earth. Since you seem interested about this subject I highly recommend this website. It really helped change my thinking about such stuff.
COSMIC ANCESTRY: Panspermia
Just a half century ago the same things were said about the sound barrier..........through M/String theory mathematics we've discovered there's at least 11 dimensions so who knows how we will be able to manipulate Space/Time. Multi-Generational arks are not the solution IMO (although the Rendezvous with Rama books are some of my favorite.....wish they would make a movie).
If you haven't seen this PBS program I highly recommend it (you can watch it online), it discusses many of these things.
Nova: Elegant Universe
Last edited:
That is a cool website. And thanks for the PBS link, I'll watch it as time permits.
I guess I'm more pessimistic regarding space manipulation than that old sound barrier stuff, or the old idea that nukes might ignite the atmosphere, b/c we seem to have some real barriers showing up in the necessary physics. Like that it seems we'd to have to discover or create large amounts of "negative matter" to create wormholes or space warps. I had just been looking at the link below where Kip Thorne, who's work has been on the cutting edge, says that the math seems to be indicating that traversable wormholes will be forbidden by the laws of physics. So they might be one of those things that for whatever reason, the universe is just not going to allow you to do, like moving a particle up to the speed of light in your particle accelerator. If general relativity is right, you can push it to .9999...... out to infinity, but never all the way to 1.0 c, as that would take infinite energy as its mass went up to infinity.
I suppose that if it is doable though, some species out there in the vastness of space has done it.
http://www.space.com/27845-interstellar-movie-wormhole-travel-feasibility.html
I think we've come up with a theoretical shortcut where it would no longer require the equivalent of 100 million years of solar energy to create a grapefruit sized wormhole as stated below. But still pretty high requirements and something more advanced than a Type II civilization. And as Dr. Wright was complaining in the Scietific American article, there just don't seem to be any Type IIIs out there in any of the 100,000 galaxies they looked at.
http://space.about.com/od/blackholes/a/Wormholes.htm
I guess I'm more pessimistic regarding space manipulation than that old sound barrier stuff, or the old idea that nukes might ignite the atmosphere, b/c we seem to have some real barriers showing up in the necessary physics. Like that it seems we'd to have to discover or create large amounts of "negative matter" to create wormholes or space warps. I had just been looking at the link below where Kip Thorne, who's work has been on the cutting edge, says that the math seems to be indicating that traversable wormholes will be forbidden by the laws of physics. So they might be one of those things that for whatever reason, the universe is just not going to allow you to do, like moving a particle up to the speed of light in your particle accelerator. If general relativity is right, you can push it to .9999...... out to infinity, but never all the way to 1.0 c, as that would take infinite energy as its mass went up to infinity.
I suppose that if it is doable though, some species out there in the vastness of space has done it.
http://www.space.com/27845-interstellar-movie-wormhole-travel-feasibility.html
I think we've come up with a theoretical shortcut where it would no longer require the equivalent of 100 million years of solar energy to create a grapefruit sized wormhole as stated below. But still pretty high requirements and something more advanced than a Type II civilization. And as Dr. Wright was complaining in the Scietific American article, there just don't seem to be any Type IIIs out there in any of the 100,000 galaxies they looked at.
http://space.about.com/od/blackholes/a/Wormholes.htm
The scientists scoured the WISE data for signs of too much mid-infrared radiation. Out of 100,000 galaxy images, only 50 appeared to have unusually high levels of the radiation, but there were no obvious signs of activity that could be attributed to advanced civilizations. Follow-up studies of those 50 galaxies should be able to determine if the radiation levels are the result of natural processes.
While an interesting read, do they really think that OUR planet's mid-infrared radiation would show up when looking at our galaxy from another one? I would imagine that any galaxies radiation would far over power some civilization's, I just don't buy that as a null hypothesis.
No, they looked for the signature of energy use on the scale of a very large civilization (or many multiple individual civilizations) that had spread though a vast swath of the galaxy. They can't conclude that there aren't any small or primitive ones, only that there aren't any very advanced ones able to manipulate large amounts of energy. Basically, any technologically based energy use will eventually show up as waste infrared energy, just based on the laws of thermodynamics. If 10% of the original energy output of a galaxy's stars has been converted to energy, that galaxy will register at only 90% of its expected light output, but with an equivalent of 10% infrared output.
According to the optimistic theories from the 70s by Sagan and others, that kind of advancement was inevitable in this galaxy. So by that same logic, we ought to see its signature in the majority of galaxies we look at. Instead we saw it happening nowhere.
There's so many reasons that we wouldn't see said signature, many that we've in all probability never even thought of..........and while it is information, and any information (every if it's wrong) is inherently good, I still don't see that is a definitive answer on this.
This is what the researcher said:
http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2015-news/Wright4-2015
"Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, space flight, communication, or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the mid-infrared wavelengths," Wright said. "This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on."
I don't know where to go from there, in terms of reasons why we wouldn't see. Occams razor says we probably don't see it b/c it isn't happening.
Add in the fact that even with our strongest telescopes, we're still only seeing a very small fragment of the Universe and the argument against other life simply seems off balance. We certainly haven't discovered any, but the ideas that they would use the same types of energies or that we'd be able to even observe them is strange to me. The only way I think there is absolutely no other life out there is if we were created by God as a very special project. I am a Christian, I believe in God, but I have a hard time believing that God developed this huge majestic Universe and only put people on this one very small planet.
I’m expecting to be long dead. And I don’t expect any of the ‘suspendees’ at Alcor to see the day either, barring some improbable quantum advancement in what appears possible at the micro-biochemical level with nanotechnology. But I still enjoy speculating on how the story of man will end up. Any thoughts on what precisely might get done, if not arks……..Or do you think things will be so strange and different from today that it’s pointless to even consider? According to some research from a few years ago, we could terraform Mars with existing technology in a few centuries. But to move out to Mars or the asteroid belt you’d have to find sufficient water or ice out there, or take it with you before it disappeared from earth I think people will just want to go ahead and start searching for another system altogether, and I just don’t think we’ll find a way around doing it in normal space, in fully self-contained and self-replenishing environments.
They started looking at this star.
Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star Has Begun
Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star Has Begun
They really had zero to say about the presence of life in the universe, or even civilizations. But they seem pretty certain that nobody is using energy on anything close to a galactic level in any place surveyed. There could be a civilization in each of those galaxies, just not one using large amounts of energy. So perhaps nobody has found a way to traverse space on a grand scale. I think we understand the fundamental nature of energy, and I don't think there are 'new kinds' of it out there that we've yet to encounter. Energy is energy and I don't think there's any that would be invisible to us.
Last edited:
Just to play devils advocate on your last point, I don't think God, creator of the universe, whatever you call it, would think of this universe in terms of it being big or too big for just one special project. God wouldn't think in those terms IMO. Would he think it was 'beautiful', I wonder?
And yet stuff like this keeps happening.
Discovery of a new class of particles at the LHC
Two New Sub-Atomic Particles Discovered at CERN
I guess I wasn’t around for that. I don’t recall what ‘those threads’ were
You should read up on NASAs warp field experiments. They already believe that normal amounts of energy such as that generated by a Voyager sized probe would be sufficient to trigger warp fields and they did some tests in April of this year that likely proved that we could generate warp bubbles although it will need to be replicated in a vacuum to ensure its not something else going on. Just google White-Juday warp field and you'll see there are lots of people who think that we'll have this technology within 100 years.
I think many new kinds of particles are still expected to be found. I think all matter so far is believed to be made of some form of quark at small level(?). Now particles are matter and not energy, but I think all matter is believed to be transformable into energy
E=mc^2
Energy is equal to matter..........essentially they are the same when it comes to the math.
This popped up from NASA's admin. He claims the fastest thing they can pursue right now is Ion propulsion. I'll try to look some more
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html
Yep, I remember the theoretical equivalence. The reason I wrote that the way I did is my uncertainty over what we can actually do. I'm not sure if or under what circumstances we've ever condensed energy into matter. Certainly we can to the opposite by colliding anti-particles....or with nukes.
Here's a stripped down version of what I was saying about the warp field research being performed by NASA by White and Juday.
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/04/nasa-may-have-accidentally-developed-a-warp-drive/
Intriguing. I'm not knowledgble enough to understand it, and I couldn't tell exactly what they expect from EM drives in terms of practical thrust. If there a connection between doing the bubble and doing the drive, they need to figure if there's any way to go from small scale warping in a laboratory, to some kind of practical application that's mobile, and somehow scalable enough to move spacecraft.
And there was a concern that the radiation would fry people inside any starship created but by placing the bubble generator in a ring around a football shaped ship it's supposed to create deadly radiation inside just outside on the "bubble" that is being pushed. Oddly enough, the 60s Star Trek "Warp Drive" is looking almost prescient while the more "believable" wormhole drives of shows like Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica look infeasible. Instead you create a wormhole bubble in front and distort space behind you while leaving a point of normal space time for the ship to sit in and then "push" the bubble along.
I consider it a sign of hope. But just to throw out another data point, this guy is much more circumspect.
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/nasa-warp-drive-yeah-still-poppycock/
The reason the Eagleworks lab presents results in unrefereed conference proceedings and Internet posts, according to Eric Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, is that no peer-reviewed journals will publish their papers. Even arXiv, the open-access pre-print server physicists default to, has reportedly turned away Eagleworks results.
Why the cold shoulder? Either flawed results or flawed theory. Eagleworks’ results so far are very close to the threshold of detection—which is to say, barely perceptible by their machinery. That makes it more likely that their findings are a result of instrument error, and their thrust measurements don’t scale up with microwave input as you might expect. Plus, the physics and math behind each of their claims is either flawed or just…nonexistent.
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/nasa-warp-drive-yeah-still-poppycock/
The reason the Eagleworks lab presents results in unrefereed conference proceedings and Internet posts, according to Eric Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, is that no peer-reviewed journals will publish their papers. Even arXiv, the open-access pre-print server physicists default to, has reportedly turned away Eagleworks results.
Why the cold shoulder? Either flawed results or flawed theory. Eagleworks’ results so far are very close to the threshold of detection—which is to say, barely perceptible by their machinery. That makes it more likely that their findings are a result of instrument error, and their thrust measurements don’t scale up with microwave input as you might expect. Plus, the physics and math behind each of their claims is either flawed or just…nonexistent.
Last edited:
One interesting thing to note about studying 100,000 galaxies: At the bottom link is a list of galaxies within 11.7 million light years of us. Not counting dwarfs/ satellite galaxies, there are just over 100 of them.
In order to survey 100,000, the bulk are probably 10s and 100s of millions of light years away. So in many cases we are observing them during the time of the dinosaurs, or even way back to the time of the Cambrian Explosion of animal life on earth. So if life in other places typically is as slow to develop as on earth (we don’t know that the ‘average’ isn’t slower than what happened here). Then we could simply be looking “too soon” to detect civilizations. A galaxy that we are seeing 100 million years in the past might look dormant to us, but in fact might be currently filled to the brim with energy and advanced civilization. We just might not be able to detect that for quite some time. I didn’t see any of the scientists talk about how far the survey was looking into the past – it’s a little surprising they failed to point that out. Still, as Peter Ward so eloquently layed out in his book, it’s quite possible that complex animal life is exceedingly rare, even on a universal scale. And the other thing is that it just might be impossible to ever access the levels of energy needed for civilizations to show up at a distance by the methodology used in the study. It might prove difficult to manipulate much more energy than we currently can. In which case nobody will ever show up in this kind of study, and nobody will be zipping around galaxies. Maybe the whole "Kardashev scale" is based on a fallacy of over optimism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies
In order to survey 100,000, the bulk are probably 10s and 100s of millions of light years away. So in many cases we are observing them during the time of the dinosaurs, or even way back to the time of the Cambrian Explosion of animal life on earth. So if life in other places typically is as slow to develop as on earth (we don’t know that the ‘average’ isn’t slower than what happened here). Then we could simply be looking “too soon” to detect civilizations. A galaxy that we are seeing 100 million years in the past might look dormant to us, but in fact might be currently filled to the brim with energy and advanced civilization. We just might not be able to detect that for quite some time. I didn’t see any of the scientists talk about how far the survey was looking into the past – it’s a little surprising they failed to point that out. Still, as Peter Ward so eloquently layed out in his book, it’s quite possible that complex animal life is exceedingly rare, even on a universal scale. And the other thing is that it just might be impossible to ever access the levels of energy needed for civilizations to show up at a distance by the methodology used in the study. It might prove difficult to manipulate much more energy than we currently can. In which case nobody will ever show up in this kind of study, and nobody will be zipping around galaxies. Maybe the whole "Kardashev scale" is based on a fallacy of over optimism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies
Last edited:
I think you left MILLION out of your post, because 11.7 light years is just on the other side of the closest start system, Alpha Centauri (4.7 lys).
I thought about this on the way home last night, there's just so many numerous reasons why we've not seen any things.
Jreed, correct me if I'm wrong here, 'cos I'm sure no scientist, but it was always my understanding the light years is a measure of distance, and that what we see in the sky is actually real time.
Am I incorrect? The post above makes perfectly good sense to me, but it doesn't square with what I was always taught.
Am I incorrect? The post above makes perfectly good sense to me, but it doesn't square with what I was always taught.
You're correct and incorrect. Light year is the distance that light can travel in a year. If something is 11.7 million light years away from us, then the light we're seeing with our naked eyes is 11.7 million years old at the time that we see it. So when you look into the sky, you are looking way back into history.
Yep, I hate it when I do a dumb typo like that.....went back and fixed it
So much about intergalactic scale distance/time is confusing. As noted above, we are literally looking back in time further and further, the farther we look. Because the universe came into existence 13.8 billion years ago, light has had time to travel that far, so we can see a few objects many billions of light years away, but we see them in primordial time. But b/c the universe has expanded faster than light speed, there's lots of it we can't see. As per the 1st link below, supposedly it's 93 billion light years across. But it also might be spacially infinite, with an infinite number of galaxies (see the second link for an interesting aspect of that).
https://www.quora.com/How-can-it-be...-across-and-yet-only-13-8-billion-years-old-1
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/ou...re-is-an-infinite-number-of-me-s-intermediate
Similar threads
