Perfection
The Great Head.
I wouldn't be so sure of this. Intelligence may not be inevitable for animals or a hypothetical ET facsimile.
How much intelligent life is there?
- Thread starter choxorn
- Start date
I don't know. Rational Thought? Imagination? A certain level of complexity?
We just don't have the data to make even an educated guess on the numbers of sapient species in the galaxy.
I think it's reasonable to believe there are others, as our solar system probably isn't that special, but we have no idea how many. We've only recently been able to detect planets around other stars.
Things like Drake's equation could work, but we don't have the data for those variables, so they don't...
I think it's reasonable to believe there are others, as our solar system probably isn't that special, but we have no idea how many. We've only recently been able to detect planets around other stars.
Things like Drake's equation could work, but we don't have the data for those variables, so they don't...
Perfection
The Great Head.
I might say that 1 is a halfway decent semi-educated guess, but it's pretty vague. Fermi Paradox and all shows some support for intelligent life not being very common.
Why not?
Also, just because numerous planets could potentially have life/intelligence, doesn't mean that will. It could be that planets that do have a probability of life/intelligence, have a low probability of life/intelligence.
You're right that many of those are far away from 1 in 1000 and some are probably even irrelevant. Not convincing imo.
Of course not - but please tell me what suggests that extremely rare coincidences are needed for the creation of life. And as the various objects and structure which we observe in the universe are highly symetrical and repetitive, I don't see why it's not valid to assume that this doesn't extend to smaller scales which we can't observe.
Imperialmajesty
Emperor
We simply don't have the information to make a judgment on whether life exists outside Earth or not. We don't even bloody know how many planets are in the galaxy, or the composition of the planets in the galaxy.
How about we simply let the geeks play around with SETI in the hope of getting lucky, while concentrating on the discovery of new planets and hopefully eventual expansion into the galaxy.
How about we simply let the geeks play around with SETI in the hope of getting lucky, while concentrating on the discovery of new planets and hopefully eventual expansion into the galaxy.
Perfection
The Great Head.
On what basis do you say that. Do you know what kind off galactic orbits are needed for life or what about the other patterns? I don't think you're basing your probabilities off of anything other than gut intuition. If you do please do tell!
Pick up a grain of sand, there's practically no chance that the universe contains a grain just like it.
There are only so many biochemical pathways to make life and each one might require such unique precise circumstances that the probability of it occurring elsewhere in the universe is extremely low. It is not implausible that it is so low, that even when you sum all probabilities of all the pathways together the resultant probability might be lower than potential starting sites.
Well lets start with stellar neighborhood. The average distance between stars is so great that planets will be influenced virtually entirely by the star they orbit. That is true pretty much everywhere in the milkyway save for the very central stars.
Star type: The sun is an average main sequence stars, plenty of those. I think this naturally goes with world orbit btw if one is concerned with creating the right temperatures. Taking a look at the solar system with Venus Earth and Mars it seems that we have some play here.
World chemical properties: Well, we can measure spectral lines of stars and we have models for nuclear synthesis. I haven't heard anything indicating a trend in our vicinity. Obviously only an indicator though.
Other solar system bodies: Large gas planets similar to Jupiter have been observed. Apart from catching meteorites I'm not sure they have any influence though.
I'll give you the other points as observing planets is a tricky buisness.
Baring a reset button along the lines of K-T, why wouldn't intelligence be a trait favoured by evolution?
Though you're right in being skeptical of our understanding of how life elsewhere would work! How DNA works here as a coding sequence might be unique to us! Now I have to wrap my head around a way for life to work without DNA/RNA so I can write some good scifi.
It really depends on how we define common. Fermi's Paradox assumes some things about scale of which I'm very skeptical. If there's another civilization within 1,000 light years of us, I'd think of that as life being common, but we'd have a very hard time detecting one another.
LucyDuke
staring at the clock
Nobody's saying it's impossible, just that we haven't yet got enough evidence for "yes".
Of course not, if you look at things at a small enough level, they're too chaotic for any two things to ever be exactly the same. But they can be pretty damn similar.
Because evolution doesn't have a goal. Even if it was favored, that doesn't mean that it will develop in the first place.
boogaboo
Josef Popper 4ever
I didn't read all the 200+ responses..
IMHO, we are alone in the galaxy. There were probably intelligent life, and the will be in the future, but intelligent life tends to self distruct themselves in a very short period of time (relative to galaxy life..), so... right NOW we are alone. IMHO.
IMHO, we are alone in the galaxy. There were probably intelligent life, and the will be in the future, but intelligent life tends to self distruct themselves in a very short period of time (relative to galaxy life..), so... right NOW we are alone. IMHO.
I didn't say that evolution had a goal. Only that I would, generally, correlate intelligence with better survival.
Imperialmajesty
Emperor
If intelligent life was anything like ours, then yes, the likely hood of self-destruction would be high.
However, I don't think it inevitable that intelligent life would come into being via pathways similar to us. For all we know we might be an exception in a galaxy filled with completely different intelligent lifeforms.
Perfection
The Great Head.
Most of the time this true, but it's the potential for close encounters that can be disastrous. It is hypothesized that even distant encounters can wreak havoc by triggering a maelstrom of infilling cometary material.
Well actually the sun is pretty big for main sequence (~ top 10%), but you can't simply treat a main sequence star as the light bulb you let you planet nestle up nice and cozy to and everything will be merry. Stars are giant dynamic furnaces and there are plenty of examples of stars exhibiting swings in luminosity, especially while they're young. Stars also change luminosity as they age, perhaps causing formally habitable worlds to become uninhabitable. These issues have the potential to exclude a lot of stars!
But that's not the whole story! Orbital eccentricity comes into play here. Most discovered planets have much higher eccentricities then Earth's. Temperature variation is certainly an effect of this. Another issue is stability, Earth's eccentricity slowly shifts around but remains within a small range of values, but other planets may not (in fact Mercury is an example), so even if they are not eccentric now, they might have been earlier.
That really doesn't address the issue though.
Cathing meteorites, spawning meteorites, orbital impacts on the planet itself.
Well, intelligence as in just generally getting smarter, sure that would probably be favored, but intelligence of the human sort, probably not as much. Human intelligence, is extremely costly from an evolutionary perspective and requires a unique environment for it to come into place. Wolves might get smarter, but it's doubtful that they'll grow opposible thumbs and make rocket ships.
Well, some of the magic of the Fermi paradox comes from the longevity of the galaxy. Consider if there were 10 intelligences out in our galaxy (far less dense then your suggestion), and each lasts on average a million years, then in the past 2 billion years there should have been about 20,000 civilizations, Why didn't a single one of them colonize the entire galaxy (which presumably we'd detect)? If it was as you proposed, then we're taling 2 million civilizations, not one of them which managed to pull off the feat. And that's not taking into the account the potential for civilizations in nearby galaxies to pull off the colonization in ours. We are ingenious spreading machines, that I believe are fully capable of colonizing the entire galaxy within a few million years a split second on the timescale of the galaxy, and yet we don't see that that's happened. That's the core of the Fermi paradox.
They can be similar, but are they similar enough. Say I take a casting of my rock to use as key to secret shrine to Fifty. Those rocks that were very close, might still not be good enough if I have a fairly precise casting. The sme might be true of chemical environments, it could be that forms near that needed to start life don't do anything at all and only the exact rare combination unlocks the power of evolution.
Formaldehyde
Both Fair And Balanced
Forgive me for not reading anything beyond the first and last page of this thread, but has anybody mentioned Carl Sagan yet? Don't you just love how he says "billion"?
Link to video.
Link to video.
Perfection
The Great Head.
The drake equation is fun, but ultimately composed of non-rigorous numbers. I wouldn't for a second trust Sagan's numbers to be remotely accurate or true, excepting the first two maybe three terms.
Lord Parkin
aka emperor
You're forgetting that a rather large proportion of stars are binary though.
Say a million years from now humans are out colonizing the galaxy, and come across a very primitive intelligent species on some distant planet. Which is more likely, that the advanced humans will go and interact with them straight away - or instead just observe from afar in the interests of science?
I'm just saying that even if a species got around to colonizing the entire galaxy (a pretty big ask, by the way - would they really bother to check out every planet on every star system, and often enough to see intelligent life cropping up?), there's still no reason that we'd necessarily detect them. It's entirely possible that any aliens that have found us won't want to disturb us, because they want us as their pet science project; their "zoo".
Perfection
The Great Head.
Well, what is far more likely is we would find those planets that in 1, 10, 100 or 1 billion years away from intelligent life. There's a huge window to colonize before intelligent life starts.
I would be surprised if they didn't. Planets contain valuable resources worth gathering.
This is possible, but I find these sorts of arguments to be conspiracy theory-esque. Why would an alien race 300 million years ago, avoid the plethora of resources in our solar system just to allow a potential technological race 300 million years in the future a barren solar system?there's still no reason that we'd necessarily detect them. It's entirely possible that any aliens that have found us won't want to disturb us, because they want us as their pet science project; their "zoo".
Now, I'm not all and out ruling out the possibilities, the Fermi paradox isn't very strong, but it does ask compelling questions.
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