What if Alpha Centauri has no planets?

[Napalm102]

Oh come, if humanity is still around in 3 billion years, we'll have the technology to fly the Earth around as a spaceship thinking ultra longtime like that is stupid. Space colonization is more important for the next 10000 years or so.

But didn't you hear the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda in about 15 billion years or so now I won't sleep for the rest of my life in the anticipation of disaster.

 

[Kazbar]

After reading a page and a half of this debate (and sorry if this has already been brought up), but it's not so much a matter of there not being life elsewhere that's a problem. Life is rather easy to get to appear, actually. But would it be intelligent? Would it be able to communicate with us? Could it be in the right conditions to survive for the millions and billions of years to even become more than an easily eradicated, bacteria-like organism?

The answers to those questions are generally no. In that sense, we might just be alone in the universe.

 

[Negator_UK]

Life is rather easy to get to appear, actually.

I can't agree with this - there is no known mechanism for the cause of DNA/life (its still being researched) and until we get the answers to that there is no way of knowing the probability of its occurence.

On the other hand, once life is established we can very quickly plot a good deal of its development, albeit not at the same chemical detail. Senses, intelligence, culture, religion, wars and technology are all inevitable once life gets going, even on a microbial level, given time.

For me the main question is the difficulty of the very start of the process, not how the snowball gets bigger once it gets moving.

In that sense, we might just be alone in the universe.

I agree with you completely for the most diametrically opposed of reasons

 

[Wodan]

Life is rather easy to get to appear, actually.

On what basis do you form this theory? (Since the theory is suspect, I'm not sure it's worthwhile to examine the conclusions based on it.) I'd be interested in the basis as I'm curious now.

But would it be intelligent? Would it be able to communicate with us? Could it be in the right conditions to survive for the millions and billions of years to even become more than an easily eradicated, bacteria-like organism?

The answers to those questions are generally no.

If, big question yes but if, non-Earth life is found to exist in just one place, then the sheer size of the universe would indicate that the statistical probability of the answer to those questions being "yes" approaches unity.

The same size also means that such incidents could be somewhat widely separated, and thus all we have to do is get out there and we'll encounter intelligent life.

If FTL travel is not possible then a "wide separation" is a given. Since it will take literally years simply to get to the closest system, exploring any significant number of systems would take a tremendous effort. However, the payoff is huge... even if we don't find intelligent life an easier goal is finding a planet that can support Earth life with minimal terraforming.

Wodan

 

[r_rolo1]

Well, as a Biochemist of formation, I have to mildy disagree with Kazbar. We simply don't know how life appeard in here and, to say the truth , we don't have a good definiton of what life is, to start..... So we simply can't say if the appearance of life is easy or not.

The best definion of life that we have ( and a somewhat unsophisticated one ) is that life is a system with self replication possibilities ( this makes computer virus living things... ) and, besides computer virus ( and some hand made bio virus ) , we haven't had any kind of even promissing results on creating something that we can call alive ( to say the truth we can't even understand very well the methabolism of bacteria..... )

Other issue is life spread. Earth life had showed that it has huge adaptation abilities and there is absolutely no place in this planet surface that does not have a alive creature on it... This makes me think that Earth-style life could easily spread thought a galaxy if they find a way of getting out of the starting planet ( easier to say than to do... panspermia is not that easy to acheive unless there is a inteligent effort on it )

But even if we found a alien inteligence, I highly doubt that we could talk with them,, unless they want to go maths on it... we live in the same planet than Chimpazees ,dolphins, all the sort of whales, elephants and even octopus ( all very inteligent and communicating animals ) and we are are only starting to understand them.....

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Well, as a Biochemist of formation, I have to mildy disagree with Kazbar. We simply don't know how life appeard in here and, to say the truth , we don't have a good definiton of what life is, to start..... So we simply can't say if the appearance of life is easy or not.

The best definion of life that we have ( and a somewhat unsophisticated one ) is that life is a system with self replication possibilities ( this makes computer virus living things... ) and, besides computer virus ( and some hand made bio virus ) , we haven't had any kind of even promissing results on creating something that we can call alive ( to say the truth we can't even understand very well the methabolism of bacteria..... )

Other issue is life spread. Earth life had showed that it has huge adaptation abilities and there is absolutely no place in this planet surface that does not have a alive creature on it... This makes me think that Earth-style life could easily spread thought a galaxy if they find a way of getting out of the starting planet ( easier to say than to do... panspermia is not that easy to acheive unless there is a inteligent effort on it )

But even if we found a alien inteligence, I highly doubt that we could talk with them,, unless they want to go maths on it... we live in the same planet than Chimpazees ,dolphins, all the sort of whales, elephants and even octopus ( all very inteligent and communicating animals ) and we are are only starting to understand them.....

I hope we don't meet so me lame Star Trek aliens, like a giant housecat or the energy gas monster... I've got my fingers crossed for unicorn planet. :colbert:

Thats not true, living organisms could survive in space. Streptocaucus bacteria were found on something left on the moon by an early Apollo mission, and reawoke when returned to Earth. A meteor could blast a chunk of Earth rock into space. It passes Jupiter, which slingshots it into interstellar space. It arrives as a meteor on another planet orbiting another star. Panspermia compete. Very very very unlikely to happen, but in something so large as the univers, I'll bet it happens all the time.

I think when people talk about intelligent life on other planets, they mean human levels of intelligence. Thing about talking to dolphins is its a one way street, they don't have the capacity to study us the way we can study them.

However, on Carl Sagan's Cosmos, I heard him say that whales have a more complex way of communicating than the most complex human language.

 

[r_rolo1]

^^You're right about the microorganisms surviving in space. But the big problem is for them to get out of the star system where they generated. Carl Sagan made the math 60 years ago and, unless they are ejected linked to another object, the solar wind + light pressure could only expell a microorganism out of the star gravity if the microorganism started in the solar equivalent of Uranus/ Neptune zone, far more cooler than in our Habitable area ( P:S in here I'm assuming Earth-like life in a Earth-like planet ). Or you assume that their home planet could eject a chunk of material @ solar escape speed ( in our case it is or a determined and inteligent effort or a cataclismic encounter with a Moon ( or bigger ) sized object.... or as you say, a lot ( really a lot ) of luck ( I highly doubt that even a big meteor can project a Earth fragment onto Jupiter ) ) or there need to exist microbes far in the non-habitable area. As we are talking about Earth like life ( watery ), that is unlikely besides propositaded placing there.

Resuming: Earth like life is not suited for panspermia, at least without inteligence

 

[Wodan]

You mean intelligence of the panspermic life, or intelligence by some conveying agency, which might or might not be Earth-like itself?

Wodan

 

[r_rolo1]

Any of them would do, but the second looks much more probable.

 

[Circuit]

Whether this would make a difference in this thread, I don't know. But NBC News just said a few minutes ago that ice has been discovered on Mars, and water is necessary for life (on Earth, at least). We should know real soon if life either was or is on Mars.

 

[raigainousa]

Technically Magalhães ( Why do people insist in the Castillian form? He was Portuguese after all .... ) did make a world round trip: he had been in Molucas and Phillipines before coming from the other side of the world

How puny... he was killed by our first hero...Lapu-Lapu...which is also a name of fish to our country...Phiippines...

Hopefully everyone will become disillusioned with space and stop spending such obscene amounts of money on "my spaceship is bigger than yours" missions to flex their national egos.

Problably the do that just to appease the alien believers.

Of course, space missions have their positive sides and lots of good has come from them. However, I feel that space gets a disproportionate amount of the budget for scientific research because it's shiny and glamorous, and that lots of extremely expensive missions have failed to produce enough return, comparatively speaking. I'd much rather see that cash invested in more reliable and higher yielding projects.

Like sending satellites to space such as the Hubble Space Telescope, in which pictures can now be found in your desktop.

What is so forgotten about this is the fact that most of the expensive project happened at Cold War.

Or that money could be invested in the CERTAIN FACT that millions of people starve to death and die of horrible diseases RIGHT NOW, here on Earth. We shouldn't run before we can walk.

Certainly.

Incidentally, I agree that warfare is a horrible waste of resources, but that doesn't legitimise the amount of spending on space. Furthermore, spending on space equals ~2.5% of the world's military budget, 25 times your estimate.

Well, space exploration just started on developing ICBM's. Until Sputnik.

Whether this would make a difference in this thread, I don't know. But NBC News just said a few minutes ago that ice has been discovered on Mars, and water is necessary for life (on Earth, at least). We should know real soon if life either was or is on Mars.

I'm skeptical, but I look forward whether it is true or not. NASA says it just need physical and chemical factors for life to form. But remember James Lovelock. It just makes finding life worse.

 

[r_rolo1]

We already knew for some decades that Mars had water ice in its polar caps (by sprectometrical info )... that annoucement is simply show-off

 

[TheMeInTeam]

What the? This OP title reminds me of the old old game "outpost"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(computer_game)

"if you fail, all of humanity will be destroyed, have a nice day".

If you think civ micro was ever bad...

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Heh, Outpost sucked so bad. I never figured out how to set up supply routes, and I ran out of resources even though I built a nanofactory. Plus, having to change research on every lab was such a pain in the ass when I had like 50 labs.
BTW, did you ever find an Earth-like planet in Outpost? The manual claims there should be some, but I never found one. Outpost 2 was great, but didn't go very far because the first one was so aweful.

This is very off topic, but my ideal game would be something like Civ, with elements of HoMM and Total Annihilation, possible RTS. Maybe I should pursue a degree in computer programming.

In fact, this whole thread is kind of off topic.

 

[Acal]

Alpha Centauri is a binary star system, they don't belive that any planets could have formed around a double star system and if they did they'd be like Mercury.

 

[Wodan]

Alpha Centauri is a binary star system, they don't belive that any planets could have formed around a double star system and if they did they'd be like Mercury.

There's a lot that could "go wrong" with that theory. The binary component might have joined after the formation of the planets. It could simply be a supra large "Jupiter" which had sufficient mass to coalesce into a second star. etc.

Wodan

 

[Acal]

There's a lot that could "go wrong" with that theory. The binary component might have joined after the formation of the planets. It could simply be a supra large "Jupiter" which had sufficient mass to coalesce into a second star. etc.

Wodan

Very doubtful that a gas giant so large would form so close to the system's star. A binary star system is where two stars are close together closer then Mercury is to the sun.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

The chances of there being a habitable planet there were extremely unlikely anyway, so assuming there is one was already science fiction.

 

[r_rolo1]

Correction to Acal and Wodan:

Centauri system is actually a trinary system : Alpha A and Alpha B act pretty much like a binary system and Proxima centauri orbits around the center of gravity of A-B binomium....

Not that I'm seeing a Earth-like system in the middle of this mess... it is just too chaotic.

 

[Magma_Dragoon]

Its not too chaotic.