Poll & discussion: UFOs / UAPs / Other Intelligent Life in Universe

[Pluto]

I think the obvious answer is simple - 'FTL travel isn't possible, and without that it just doesn't provide enough ROI to bother with at any kind of scale'

Nonetheless, there may well be species out there for whom a five hundred year voyage is nothing more than a bit boring.

The attraction of FTL travel is based on little more than our tiny lifespan. The longer-lived you are, the less the need for FTL travel.

 

[StevenEleven]

Sixty years after the Drake Equation, we haven't really managed to solidify many more of those variables, certainly not the most tricky ones like…
fi, fc & L

For the convenience of the uninitiated but curious:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

The Drake equation is:

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);

= mean rate of star formation

= fraction of stars that have planets

= mean number of planets that could support life per star with planets

= fraction of life-supporting planets that develop life

= fraction of planets with life where life develops intelligence

= fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop communication

= mean length of time that civilizations can communicate

 

[JohnBooty]

However, you should never neglect to consider the consequences of the final term of the Drake Equation, the one that factors the length of time throughout which a civilization remains contactable. Many mighty galactic empires may have risen and fallen since the universe began

Maybe. Or, maybe we're one of the first "advanced" species! It's unclear if life could have evolved elsewhere much earlier before we did.

For the convenience of the uninitiated but curious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

One big thing the Drake equation leaves out or just chooses not to address -- the earliest possible starting date for life in the universe. We don't have a solid estimate for when "rocky, organic soup" planets like Earth even become possible, other than "probably pretty recently."

• The universe is ~14 billion years old
• Earth is ~4.5 billion years old
• Earliest life took ~1 billion years to appear on Earth
• Humans appeared, well, just a blink of an eye ago. ~0.0 billion years ago.

Remember, life was not possible in the early universe. It's almost certainly a recent (in cosmological terms) development.

After the big bang, the universe was only hydrogen and helium. It took quite a few billions of years star formation and death before heavier elements even existed to the extent that anything resembling rocky Earth like planets full of complex mixtures of organic elements might have existed. The even rarer elements were formed during even rarer events such as neutron stars colliding.

And then billions of years after that point for life to potentially evolve on those planets.

So, it's very possible we're one of the first.

 

[Pluto]

So, it's very possible we're one of the first

Or not
It's just too big a question, for now.

I would speculate that the most important single factor in all this, for essentially philosophical reasons, is longevity of a species.

I would postulate that anyone living in this universe is driven by what can be achieved within a lifetime. We (homo sapiens) appear to be a lot less good with ideas that may take several lifetimes to come to fruition and, I speculate, that this is likely to be a universal truth amongst intelligent creatures.

When you live for a few thousand (or more) of our years, the universe becomes that much smaller than it seems to us.

 

[JohnBooty]

Maybe they all live in symbiosis and therefor had no need to invent weapons of mass destruction. And insted using their time and resources to find ways to not destroy and drain the planet they live on. Just a thought

I hope so, but could such a species really be produced by evolution?

Evolution is competition. The most brutal kind. Eat or die. If you live long enough you pass your traits to your offspring. It does not reward long-term thinking much beyond one's own lifespan, nor empathy for anybody but one's own family/group.

Humans have taken baby steps towards acting a little more "enlightened" but we're still on a fast track towards wrecking this planet or perhaps blowing ourselves up first.

I certainly hope we figure it out, but it's going to take a massive leap of overcoming our own evolution. What percentage of species pass such a harsh test? Not many, I would bet.

However, it does give me faith that any spacefaring civilization we might encounter would have passed such a test, so hopefully they won't be horrible warmongering jerks to us.

 

[Hipper]

My take is that there may well be other intelligent life in the universe - the odds seem to favour this. The real question is 'will we ever be able to find it' (or they find us)?

If you look at our situation on Earth, yes life has been here for 3.6 billion years, sometimes quite precariously. To be created it needed certain specific conditions of chemistry including minerals and of course free water. It does seem possible that other similar forms of life could be created (haven't we discovered this with the bacteria around deep sea vents). Hominids of many types evolved around say two million years ago, but civilisation has been here say 10,000 years and was able to exploit the end of an ice age that lead to Homo sapiens being the dominant species. Of all this time, we have only been in space for sixty (maybe eighty if you include V2 rockets) years.

Seeing as we are bent on self destruction via over population/climate change/species extinction/poisoning of the planet I wonder if there is much longer for civilisation as we know it. Add to that regular ice ages, geological activity and other physics we have no control over it seems a pretty short window of opportunity for us to get out there in space. If we assume that applies to all habitable planets in the universe and with the incredible distances and times involved, I suggest the odds that we communicate with any similar beings are tiny.

 

[JohnBooty]

When you live for a few thousand (or more) of our years, the universe becomes that much smaller than it seems to us.

Heck yes to that, though, tempering my hope for such "wise, long-lived, farsighted creatures" is that physics and thermodynamics seem to place some upper bounds on how long an animal can live. There's a more or less direct correlation between longevity, size, and metabolism.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/kno...ize-and-temperature-why-they-matter-15157011/

Longer life = slower metabolism = larger size But, there are upper limits on how large an animal can possibly be.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-king-kong-should-have-been-blue-whale-180962603/

You can tweak various variables to get bigger and longer lived lifeforms, but then you start screwing other things up. Some of the structural issues with "large, long-lived" creatures go away if you reduce gravity. But reduce it too much and the planet can't retain an atmosphere. Some of them go away if you reduce the planet's temperature, but reduce it too much and you don't have liquid water any more and our best guess is that you need some kind of warm primordial soup for life to evolve in the first place.

The best hope for truly "wise, long-lived, farsighted creatures" might be... to create them.

I doubt evolution alone can produce anything much better than the short-sighted hairless apes that currently rule this planet. Maybe the only way something better can exist if a far-minded subset of species like us manages to actually design a "wise, far-sighted" lifeform and then we pass the baton, so to speak.

 

[dkinric]

Regarding our current understanding of physics to be solid and whether FTL is possible, I would point out we are seeing hints of FTL already, at least in massless matter. Theoretical negative matter is interesting as well. One exception to the "rule" throws into doubt the absoluteness of the rule and opens theoretical ways to manipulate it. Theoretically, of course.

Quantum entanglement moves faster than light.
If I have two electrons close together, they can vibrate in unison, according to the quantum theory. If I then separate them, an invisible umbilical cord emerges which connects the two electrons, even though they may be separated by many light years. If I jiggle one electron, the other electron "senses" this vibration instantly, faster than the speed of light. Einstein thought that this therefore disproved the quantum theory, since nothing can go faster than light.
But actually this experiment (the EPR experiment) has been done many times, and each time Einstein was wrong. Information does go faster than light, but Einstein has the last laugh. This is because the information that breaks the light barrier is random, and hence useless. (For example, let's say a friend always wears one red sock and one green sock. You don't know which leg wears which sock. If you suddenly see that one foot has a red sock, then you know instantly, faster than the speed of light, that the other sock is green. But this information is useless. You cannot send Morse code or usable information via red and green socks.)

Negative matter.
The most credible way of sending signals faster than light is via negative matter. You can do this either by:
a) compressing the space in front of your and expanding the space behind you, so that you surf on a tidal wave of warped space. You can calculate that this tidal wave travels faster than light if driven by negative matter (an exotic form of matter which has never been seen.)
b) using a wormhole, which is a portal or shortcut through space-time, like the Looking Glass of Alice.

 

[Randy Bessinger]

I think Mars exploration will tell us a lot. If all the ingredients were there in the past and the time necessary for those ingredients to form life are there, but there isn’t any, we may have to add to or scrap the Drake equation.

 

[Mart68]

Maybe they all live in symbiosis and therefor had no need to invent weapons of mass destruction. And insted using their time and resources to find ways to not destroy and drain the planet they live on. Just a thought

it would be typical that when we finally encounter an alien race it just makes us feel guilty and inadequate.

 

[tomtoo]

it would be typical that when we finally encounter an alien race it just makes us feel guilty and inadequate.

It would not make me feel guilty or inadequeate. If they managed to come here, it would make me feel curious like hell. One big question. HOW?

After that maybe other questions come up. But from an engineering point of view they are not so relevant. Its more social science, who cares?
WHY?

 

[RayDunzl]

There are potentially a lot of ways they could detect life at a great distance. Performing spectography on light that passes through our atmosphere, looking for phosphene and other markers. I mean, even us puny humans can do that today, but not at the required resolution. Or some kind of crazy high res radio astronomy that lets them see that we're transmitting all kinds of stuff through the air. Heck, might be as simple as looking at our CO2/temperature trends for the telltale signs of a fossil-fuel consumption frenzy.

That "data" forms a sphere about 100 lightyears in radius.

If "they" are farther away, they haven't seen or heard modern "us" yet, by my reckoning.

 

[Pluto]

The best hope for truly "wise, long-lived, farsighted creatures" might be... to create them

True. While you cite excellent references in defence of the relationship between size / metabolism / lifespan, don't forget the possibility that sufficiently high tech medicine may well, in due course, be able to make lifespans near-indefinite.

Perhaps the worst kind of creatures humanity could possibly encounter in a universe of infinite possibilities are those who possess the technology to make themselves quasi-immortal while retaining the banal belligerence of insects whose evolutionary development was driven by everything else on their home world stamping on them.

 

[tomtoo]

That "data" forms a sphere about 100 lightyears in radius.

If "they" are farther away, they haven't seen or heard modern "us" yet, by my reckoning.

Fun is speculation. Lets say physics stays same, but its extremly advanced.
They could have scaned earth more than 1000000 years ago and would have seen, a peak in oxygen thats hard to explain. Than they would send technological highly advanced sonds to examine more. So there was no need for us to show us. It could be just curiosity to find other live. This would make the radius much bigger without any over light speed technologie.

Edit says: Like to add, i think the probability to have first contact with just a technological device is much higher than to meet the builder directly.

 

[Pluto]

I think Mars exploration will tell us a lot

All that need happen is for us to discover Life 2.0 on Mars, here or indeed anywhere and that discovery alone is likely to answer the single biggest question of all.

And create a zillion new questions.

 

[Slayer]

Without getting into a long drawn out debate over the question of life (intelligent or not) on another planet. We should try and remember just because we have short life spans, doesn't mean this would be true for other species on another planet. After all, we have the, Turritopsiss dohrnii, also known as the immortal jellyfish which marine biologist believe can live forever.
So this could easily be true for another humanoid species somewhere else in the universe.

Yes, I have seen strange things in the air and underwater in my Marine Corps days. Does this mean aliens, I could not say one way or the other.
The most intriguing to me was a USO, back in 1984 when I was on the USS Enterprise and we watched for several minutes an illuminated object circle our ship on multiple occasions at speeds that we were not capable of doing under water. And I have no idea what is was, but it was rather exciting at the time. We were told to just forget about it and that's basically what we did.
So I will just try and keep an open mind and remember anything is possible. Just because we haven't figured out how to do something, doesn't mean somewhere else they may have mastered it.
It would seem almost sad and tragic to think with this incomprehensibly large Universe and we would be the only intelligent life forms.

 

[pozz]

Turritopsiss dohrnii

At the cellular level, sure, it's immortal, but individuals die all the time and their lifespan isn't infinite. It's the reproduction cycle and ability to revert to an immature collection of polyps that give it that particular trait.

Point taken though. Bacteria extremophiles also come to mind. Could be places out there where they evolved and developed biological complexity.

 

[JohnBooty]

That "data" forms a sphere about 100 lightyears in radius.

If they're looking for signs of industrialization and radio transmission, yes. They'd have to be pretty close to spot that.

If they're looking for phosphine gas or other potential telltale markers of (not necessarily intelligent/industrialized) life then that sphere would potentially be closer to 3.5 billion lightyears in radius. That would potentially narrow down their list of potential candidates quite a bit.

Also imagine the probes had some smarts built in and could choose their own destinations. With the earlier example of sending out 10,000 probes maybe you don't even program in their final destinations. Instead, send out 10,000 probes in 10,000 directions. So even if each individual probe is operating with a "limited" 100 light year radius of detection, well, now at least you have 10,000 of those spheres.

(eventually. obviously they overlap at the beginning.)

 

[JohnBooty]

Perhaps the worst kind of creatures humanity could possibly encounter in a universe of infinite possibilities are those who possess the technology to make themselves quasi-immortal while retaining the banal belligerence of insects whose evolutionary development was driven by everything else on their home world stamping on them.

Lol, yeah. Though it's perhaps hard to imagine multiple simultaneous apex intelligent tool-building life forms evolving and reaching space from the same planet. Seems like they would wind up butting heads over resources. Whatever we encounter will probably be the bully, not the bullied. But, if they are too bully-ish... I optimistically think they wipe themselves out before stepping out into space in a significant way.

 

[sq225917]

I have no doubt that their is, has been or will be again life on other planets, but I doubt that there is overlap between our existence and there's, the time it takes to communicate anything meaningful and our joint abilities to send, receive or interpret this information and respond.

Never mind being able to send anything physical across the divide.

We're largely selfish arseholes, we'll all be long extinct before we reach star trek status.