Car 51 where are you? Consider these items from the web; Galaxy may be full of 'Earths,' alien life * Astronomer: There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Galaxy * Astronomer: While estimates among different experts vary, an acceptable range is between 100 billion and 200 billion galaxies, exist in the universe, from; Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, told Space.com. * A study by Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum just took (2014-15) the estimated number of stars in the universe—100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 100 sextillion—and tripled it. So the new number is 3 X 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. * As of 2013, WMAP (a NASA satellite) determined these parameters with an accuracy of better than than 1.5%. In turn, knowing the composition with this precision, we can estimate the age of the universe to about 0.4%: 13.77 ± 0.059 billion years! I am a serious amateur astronomer and a professional Christian (lol). By professional I mean I am an reverend red letter Christian, & studied Apocalyptic literature and comparative religion in seminary and college with several science minors. So I dream up some weird stuff! So I have been wondering why if life is not special and evolution is almost a given, why has ET been so exceptionally quite? There must be a reason and all the postulated ideas are a failure. Anyone have a few new ideas? I have a few, 1...life is special especially sentient life. 2.....The theory of evolution is flawed in some way. 3...Einstein is right and star trek is wrong....I mean the speed of light is the universes absolute speed limit, and some paradox forbids time travel. Also there may be something prohibits the folding or warping of space, including travel through worm holes or black holes. Anyway where are you car 51 ? (a play on words from the old car cult classic car 57 TV flick)… reva
It's called the Fermi Paradox. If sentient life is as prevalent as even the most conservative interpretations of the Drake equation suggest it must be, then where are they? Most scientists now go with your Einstein is right solution. Scary are the ideas that intelligent life quickly destroys itself or gamma ray bursters periodically sterilize the Galaxy Scarier still is Fred Saberhagen's Berserker scenario. An advanced civilization losing a big time war creates an intelligent doomsday machine. It kills the originating civilizations and then goes on to kill everything else expanding and searching for more life to destroy, forever.
Cool, I am a fan of science fiction but had not heard of the latter one. The dooms day machine is the antibiotic and we are the bacteria. It hasn't found us yet eh? Hey maybe the gamma ray busters ARE the dooms day machine? reva
To me the scariest scenario of them all would be that FTL travel literally is impossible and nothing can actually circumvent that. No warp bubbles that distort space or anything. THAT would be scary to me and extremely sad. Knowing that no matter what we will never be able to even know if anyone else is out there because the laws of physics simply say no you can't leave your tiny little corner of the cosmos. I personally think that life is out there both microbial and advanced. I think that nature may have seriously designed the Universe this way on purpose. If "Aliens" are anything remotely like our own "advanced" species (humans) then I understand completely why the Universe is so huge. Nature always has a way of fixing its own problems. Maybe each advanced civilization has its own galaxy to itself with thousands of unintelligent life forms scattered throughout the galaxy. By designing it this way it ensured that no matter what nobody will EVER get advanced enough to leave their own galaxy and find each other. Even if we figure out FTL travel it would still be impossible to leave this galaxy and go anywhere in any reasonable amount of time. So no matter how advanced a civilization gets we will always be out of each others reach keeping us safe from one another. Humanity is the most destructive thing this planet has ever seen. We manage to destroy the planet just by existing on it and we create massively destructive weapons to kill each other. We all have this romanticized version of the future where a world like Star Trek exists and everyone gets along with each other in some Utopia. I for one don't give us that much credit. Humans destroy planet Earth to make ourselves more comfortable. When we run out of resources here and develop advanced technology we are going to venture out and start destroying other planets for resources as well. We are seriously considering terraforming Mars in the distant future to make it "Earth like" so we can go live there. Who are we to do that? If Mars was supposed to have people on it then it would be like Earth. Who are we to go around "fixing" planets to make them how we want? I'm no hypocrite, I say these things about humanity but I am human of course and I reap the benefits of our destructive lifestyle. But I just see what "humans" have done to our own little planet in order to advance ourselves. We require more and more natural resources every day as we get more and more advanced. Once/if we reach the age of interstellar travel we are going to need more resources than this little planet has to offer. We have to get it from somewhere and that somewhere will be other worlds. I see our future human selves as being the same as the early explorers on Earth. Sure at first we will be happy and excited to see those "weird" people across the ocean when the ship first lands. After the honeymoon period wears off we will start destroying things and taking what we want. Just like we fight to the death for resources here we are going to do the same thing for resources in the distant future. An advanced human based galactic civilization isn't going to just say "well we are advanced enough now lets chill out because we don't want to damage that fragile planet over there by taking their resources". We don't say that now and we damn sure aren't going to say it then either. We destroy planet Earth now knowing full well that we have no way of even remotely trying to go anywhere once this place is screwed. I can't imagine how we will be once we figure out how to actually leave this place. If we don't care now then we sure as hell aren't going to care when we actually do have a way to escape. Aliens might be the exact same way that we are. That's honestly why I think the Universe created the Laws of Physics. Just like nature fixes itself on Earth with a delicate balance of predators, prey, ecosystems, etc, the nature of the Universe has already figured out how to fix this problem. Make the Universe mindbogglingly HUGE so that none of you crazy destructive people will ever run into each other no matter how smart you become.
Since we have yet to prove Einstein wrong, FTL remains the subject of fanciful speculation. If he is wrong, then our first inkling might be when the aliens show up. Detecting intelligent life requires them to do something along the same lines as our civilization has done. Begin radiating signals that travel at the speed of light. We have been doing so for roughly 100 years. Our sphere of "we are here" announcements has a radius of only 100 light years. A comparative quantum sized area. I strongly believe that this universe holds a massive amount of life, some of it even sapient. But that is a belief wholly formed from imagination, faith and mathematical probabilities.
I don't believe in a teleological universe. Existence is its own purpose, to paraphrase the lady Just because it would take a really long time doesn't mean we can't travel to the stars. Travel to the Spice Islands used to take literally years yet a steady and ongoing trade with them was still a major component of life from Medieval times. I've seen visions of the future that have huge Empires flung across the Galaxy based on trade routes taking literally generations for one trip. We have a very old institution that could handle the accounting there, but I'll leave it as a mental exercise for you to figure out what it is. (answers here, I'm actually trying to see if there's any I've missed) You may be right in how destructive man/sentience is. It's only about one lifetime since an ideology as evil as you propose came close to running the world, AGAIN. OTOH that may be our best hope. I've never yet heard of a civilization that thought ITSELF evil and that stayed in charge for all that long. We do, eventually, rise up and show Cobra Kickpuppy the door, though sometimes it takes a while
Interesting post and a great expansion of older ideas but with fresh input. I tend to agree with all your post. All is not lost for maned or ET exploration though! I have been trying to flesh out a SF book about an explorer sent on a mission at snail mail speed. Well our fastest space craft to date is just above 100,000 mph, however with nuclear pulse engines that speed would increase to millions of miles per hour. The nuclear pulse engine is really a near 1950-60s technology we could build interstellar craft today with a top speed of up to 10 or 11 % of light speed! Adding ion engines to give it a slow gentle push after it gets brutalized to say 12% light speed via the nuclear pulse engines, that velocity could increase even more with ion motors, perhaps to 20% c. Anyway in the book our hero would be in suspended cryogenic sleep that might last 1000 or 10,000 years. He or she or both would only be awakened only when objects of interest showed up, or the ship needed repairing that robots could not do etc. So what I am saying ET might still visit and we may still be able to visit ET, but the perfect coming together would be far far less likely that what the drake suggests! And maybe if we get to the point where we understand quantum entanglement instant communications across millions of light years might be possible! So talk is better than nothing eh? thanks for your post, I gotta run I have lemon bar cookies in the oven and I smell em" lol .... reva
Correct, and even though I am a (believe or not) scientific optimistic certain things have quelled my optimism for FTL travel. FTL communication has far greater possibilities of becoming a usable technology due to recent experiments exploring quantum entanglement IMO but even that happening anytime soon is a weak possibility in my best uneducated (in QFT) guess. Tiny bubble eh? As hawking says and NM515 hints maybe that is a good thing. I would be happy to have big ears and a little voice due to a good chance 'they being dragons out there'! I strongly believe that this universe holds a massive amount of life, some of it even sapient. But that is a belief wholly formed from imagination, faith and mathematical probabilities.[/QUOTE] I agree and when I get out my instrument (a reflector telescope or binoculars) or just naked eye observing I still get that little boy rush of ....'what if'.... reva
I have to believe the universe does have a purpose, but even with my faith I have no real clue as to what it is. The universe is so freaking vast, Even solar system distances boggle the mind. Here is a example that allowed me to visualize the distances involved in our solar system and to our nearest star....; from the web; One way to help visualize the relative distances in the solar system is to imagine a model in which the solar system is reduced in size by a factor of a billion (109). The Earth is then about 1.3 cm in diameter (the size of a grape). The Moon orbits about a foot away. The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter (about the height of a man) and 150 meters (about a city block) from the Earth. Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter (the size of a large grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Saturn (the size of an orange) is 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune (lemons) are 20 and 30 blocks away. A human on this scale is the size of an atom; the nearest star would be over 40,000 km away! Man! that stuff never ceases to amaze me. The nearest star which is only about four to five light years away would be ...40,000 km or 24854.8 miles away! Then think some stars and this is in our own galaxy which is one of 200 billion galaxies are millions of light years away....its just profound my friends... reva
I thought we already are being visited by ETs, in starships, or some sort of machine that allows them to get here. That is, if you believe all of those military officers, cops, airline pilots, who were not like the woman who exclaims she is so special that aliens impregnated her. Far too many credible men have seen some sort of craft flying about, and where there is so much smoke, there is fire involved, or in this case some intelligence navigating our atmosphere. Now, you can just dismiss all of those credible witnesses, because you are from Missouri, and you will not trust anyone, even professionals, and you have to be shown. I think there are many people who are just waiting on our gov't to admit that someone is coming here, but we cannot do a thing about it, for we are probably little more than interesting fleas, if that, to them. But these fleas have elephant sized egos.
Here is something that I believe you will find fascinating. http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html Everyone knows that space is "big" but few people actually understand just how "big" it really is.
Indeed, some of the stars we see have already burnt out thousands or maybe millions of years ago. That is how vast the Universe seems to be. It is more than possible that intelligent life visited Earth from another star system millions of years ago and won't be back for eons. If they were traveling anywhere near the speed of light it would be possible for them to visit us and return all the while thousands/millions of years would elapse for us.
You apply the same flawed logic "that much smoke must be fire" that have given us tales of mermaids and kracken and yeti and the host of mythical monsters. Beasts that some firmly believe exist and many have claimed to have seen and yet there isn't a single piece of evidence to support their existence. Kinda like angels.
I have learned to keep an open mind. So your conclusions etc are more than credible IMO. Not only have the astronauts and professional people seen and documented some objects that are not so easily explained away there are a few so called natural events that seem suspicious. Most are obviously ball lightning, and some are strange but look natural like the brown mountain lights that are very close to where I live, and yes they are eerie! I side with the geologists who say tectonic stresses create those lights. I do take issue with the official explanation of the Tunguska meteor (or comet) explosion over Siberia in 1903. It was a one megaton blast which made it a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. There were no fragments etc, which are explained away by saying it was an air burst. I am no astrophysicist or even general scientist but something big enough to produce an one meg plus explosion is going to have frags. I am not saying it was a ET craft but I am not closing my mind to the possibility either. l am with you on the trained witnesses such as astronauts and airline pilots reporting UFO type events. One of the most fantastic and believable was the Jal jet going to Alaska, the UFO was picked up on radar etc... See notes for excerpt. Lol correct! I was thinking the other night trying to come up with some stuff for my SciFi book and it occurred to me life on earth is over 3 billion years old! If an advanced race visited us it just might be a billion years more advanced than we humans!! That is how much we are advanced from bacteria. That is just too incomprehensible to even think about but it is possible!!! Of course such a race would have surpassed 'God status' over 900,000,000 years ago by a generous guesstimate....now think, what if that race was nine to twelve billion years ahead of us..... i feel very small right now....lol Notes >>>>> Excerpt from the web article; Japan Air Lines flight 1628 was a UFO incident that occurred on November 17, 1986 involving a Japanese Boeing 747 cargo aircraft. The aircraft was en route from Paris to Narita, Tokyo[1] with a cargo of Beaujolais wine.[2] On the Reykjavík to Anchorage section of the flight, at 5:11 PM over eastern Alaska, the crew first witnessed two unidentified objects to their left. These abruptly rose from below and closed in to escort their aircraft. Each had two rectangular arrays of what appeared to be glowing nozzles or thrusters, though their bodies remained obscured by darkness. When closest, the aircraft's cabin was lit up and the captain could feel their heat in his face. These two craft departed before a third, much larger disk-shaped object started trailing them, causing the pilots to request a change of course. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_flight_1628_incident reva
Thanks so much for the address! My active X or something was wrong but I got to see some of it...and yes I did find the animation 'fascinating Jim'...ooops my mind wonders. Thanks again.. reva
True depending on the velocity and the length of time in transit. I sometimes think that maybe Jesus is on his way back in a near light speed starship, but he can communicate with us (believers) via prayer on the quantum entanglement com...maybe he is a Patton like I will return to the Philippines, Arnold terminator like 'Ill be back' alien, or maybe even an alien father of the human race that has become endeared with us much like we learn to love certain pets nearly as much as family members. Hey this is my dream, so I can lucid dream if I want! Lol...just playing~ reva
That'd be McArthur but, I get your point. Yeah AHHHHHHnold.... Extending your dream.....Could it be (ala the Ancient Aliens guys) that ancient civilizations were visited by extraterrestrials? Perhaps the whole point of their visitations was to prepare the human race for the implantation of a hybrid...like Jesus. (Pinching myself) OK I'm awake now....
I knew there were flies in the ointment that were just dying to muck up a good thread. Anyway its your logic that is flawed. There is evidence for items that are related and that enhances the possibility of ET. NASA even funded SETI when it began. So its the same old story, your ilk only accepts evidence that they approve of themselves so there will never be approved evidence for anything ! Lol. The best thing atheists can do is accept the fact they have lost the battle. They are the tiniest of minorities for a reason. So my friend so get used to it. Even the best scientists atheist and otherwise has to admit that intelligent ET life is at least possible. Then they must admit that if some type of ET live exists they have to admit that its possible that life is highly advanced. Then it follows that ET could indeed create universes and.....drum roll please; ta da.... people like us. In fact researchers tell us that even earthly scientists one day will be able to create universes in the lab! So I will take your reply to say that you believe no life exists around the 3 X 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000 on planets or other places in our universe. Not one bacteria not one proto life nothing...man is special and life is the most supreme specialty. lol you sound a lot like the old church of Galileo's day. Lol, fitting that is! reva
Ha ha yes, thanks for the correction! I have a confession I read the chariots of the Gods etc but try as I might I can not make myself believe his stuff. He makes way too many leaps of faith and his books are error filled, but I do give him credit for popularizing the idea. Have you watched any of the History Channels take on Ancient astronauts? I have to laugh every time that guy with the wild hair comes on, man it just destroys even my respect I have for them. I means it looks...well you know. Ok...I think there may be little bits of good information in the series and the books, but that's about as much credit as I can give.... Seriously I feel science especially the hi zoot cutting edge of science ie as in string theory etc of theoretical physics has been going down the wrong path for some time. It seems with the slightly questionable discovery of something like the higgs Boson (which may or may not be the HB) and other emergent needs science may have a major chiropractic adjustment coming in the very near future of the way fundamental physics are applied. I hope that made sense... If not I will repair it later... reva
Ya those shows are hilarious and ya the 'guy with the hair' cracks me up too. I think he has his own show now. For more entertainment watch 'Mountain Monsters'....Buncha of hillbillys with guns chasing 'creatures' that don't exist. They never seem to find one but react like one is there. Classic campy.... Theoretical physics has been (for the past few decades) those who believe in a 'god particle' (building block of everything) and those that adhere to the theory that there isn't a basic particle.
My logic is not flawed. SETI has so far yielded ZERO results - although I support its continuing efforts. Please provide me with ANY evidence of ET's existing much less visiting earth. Surely you aren't one of the von Donniken crowd. I am an atheist but I am unclear what battle you are referring to. You should be aware that the numbers of atheists and agnostics have been and are steadily rising? Not to mention all those non practicing religionists who by not practicing their religion are not fulfilling their god's demands and laws. I believe that life exists in many places in the universe as I have stated previously and repeatedly. Given the laws of probability its as close to certainty that life exists elsewhere. It It also possible that it is technologically advanced sapient life. But it sure as hell doesn't follow that ETs could create universes. That isn't logic, it is a flight of pure fancy. Some Researchers MAY speculate that some day scientist will be able to create universes in the lab, but that is also a product of imagination and based purely on speculation. You are confused. My post was in response to the claim ET has visited earth. Apparently the "proof" is in the numerous reports of UFO sightings, the usual conspiracy theory junk and the specious "wheres there's smoke" argument the poster made.
So you support funding flawed logic? I didn't say that, what I said is that some eyewitness reports of UFOs etc etc can not be explained away. By flawed logic I am simply saying and said in my replies that ET intelligent life is possible. Not probable but POSSIBLE, big difference. If you are not aware of what the church did to Galileo maybe you should read about it. Its common knowledge in academic circles and even just popular talk of the rift between the church and science in some areas. You are saying that but then you turn around and attack onemind as having flawed logic for suggesting life could exist in the universe etc etc, so what is it? With this latest post you are agreeing with everything you seemed to disagree with in the prior post. Soo I am asking you what are you taking issue with? Never say never. You might want to read more about the new theories and other stuff that is a hell of a lot weirder than even some of the wilder religious claims. The following is not the site I was looking for but it at least shows proof of concept. And remember this was done with dim witted ole humans just out of the stone age, lol; Physicists create world’s first multiverse of universes ... www.extremetech.com › Extreme ... College Park and Towson University are reporting that they have created multiple universes ... multiverse of universes in the lab; ... researchers created a ... The above is more than pure speculation and so was the other site. I will post them as well soon. No you are confused! I and I think onemind as well said ET MAY or COULD or its not outside the realm of possibility. That is a lot different than claiming that it actually happened. No wrong (again) No one here that I know of is saying that its 100% certain that an ET race (one like you said could exist) visited. What everyone including myself is that its possible and that the probabilities range for or against depending on the claims etc. Thanks for your reply maybe we can start anew now that we understand each other? reva
Ha ha, man he discredits the show with his hair doo.. I do feel bad about making fun of him because I do 'love' the dude for his passion etc. and I sometimes get angry when people make fun of someone just because of their appearance, but it is what it is eh? So at the risk of being a hypocrite (you ought to see my turtle wax hair doo) I still think its funny. .. And 'Mountain Monsters' is so embarrassing because I am from east Tennessee and all of those programs from the Monsters to 'Moonshiners' to back woods justice is totally a lie....anyway, .lol, thanks for your reply! reva
Well, you are left with...Did life naturally evolve on the Earth? If so, isn't it logical that life would also evolve in extraterrestrial galaxies? OR....Was life PLANTED on Earth....If so, isn't it logical that life would also exist in extraterrestrial galaxies?
You said that^ much better than I, lol. A long time ago my English grammar teacher said I must learn to use an economy of words if I hope to write professionally some day, she was right, and I still haven't learned that skill ! reva
