McKenna's hypothesis is actually very interesting, especially if you think of it in terms of how fast civilization has come in just a very short time since simians began ingesting those "extraterrestrial calling cards" - from knuckling the earth to touching the moon in just a matter of thousands, not billions, of years.

He raises very reasonable counterpoints addressing most of Fermi's assertions.

The opinion of those people is not something that concerns my beliefs regarding universal statistics of life or intelligent life existence at all.

Simply because, they are still people theorizing with an understanding of the life and lifeforms of our own environment but they're theorizing about life and environments they are unable to observe, have never been to and are light years away. It's an interesting exercise of course but, considering the immense magnitude of even earths "very immediate neighborhood" I doubt any person that thinks critically gives such opinions any gravity.

A Light year, for example....it's so often trivialized but, to put it into perspective the sheer expanse of our immediate door step, the unmanned Voyager 1 still requires another 17,500 years travel at its current velocity to reach the distance required for just one light year (current travel: 40 years and 11 billion miles).

So another 17500 years and Voyager will still have not reached one quarter of the distance to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri. And where were humans all those years ago, we'd just started creating pottery.

So I don't get overly concerned about earth bound theories on intelligent life existence within a 500 billion galaxy universe which is 93 billion light years in diameter. I really don't :)



I'm going to stand by the mathematical certainty, simply because statistics fully favor a rational belief.

There are several trillion statistical instances to be right about intelligent life as oppose to a detractors belief where (even if the largely incomprehensible universal statistics can boggle anyone's mind) they would still need to nullify several trillion instances for those who do believe to be wrong.

And those who accept the statistics only need (apart from our own planet of course) another one in a couple of trillion to be correct.

I'll take those odds as a certainty any day of the week.

i'm going with this

Look, I'm not trying to change opinions here. I know it seems that way due to how articulate I can state my opinions. You're going with the odds and that's a fair position, that's why I don't play the lottery, because I understand odds. But this is science, not vegas and it's odd to me to hear you describe the fact that scientists/anyone who gives the slightest plausibility to us being alone are lacking critical thinking because they don't apply vegas odds rules to studying science.

by applying new critical thinking to the fact that there is an overwhelming LACK of evidence allows science in its entirety to learn more about us, science, our world, the visible universe and more. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose by exploring the question from both sides.

By asking why hasn't the question been answered at all allows science to investigate the issue in new light, ask new questions, rephrase questions, look elsewhere, look differently. In other words, learn more.

In short, being open to the answer and investigating the issue from another angle is the essence of critical thinking.

OP is like a caveman before the telephone. Theres no cavemen on the other side of earth. how can there be, there is no proof. my eyes tell me there are no other cavemen. & someone elses paradox cant be unproven, so duh, we're the only ones here.

then the phone was invented. the caveman was wrong, all along.

maybe a dash of respect for the size of the universe combined with a perspective on how far left humans have to drive before achieving omniscience, then maybe the OP might stop trolling everyone & find something productive to do.

:)

:1orglaugh

lolz. the funny thing is you think you know better, but your complete lack of comprehension means you have to resort to insults instead of actually participating in the dialogue surrounding the fact that people exponentially smarter and more successful than you consider the question valid.


you telling them they are cavemen? :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh and I'm the one that lacks respect and is a troll.

what a complete fail of logic/arguing/debate/contribution to the topic.

it's completely hilarious to me how some of y'all are so far in over your heads on this topic all you can do is a drive-by insult attempting to denigrate others for thinking out of the box on something you really couldn't care less about yet feel the need to insult others on.

2 world renown physicists are cavemen according to you.

and I'm the troll.

you dumbfuck.

:1orglaugh

the really retarded part of this retard is how on one hand, I'm a caveman for pointing out the question is unanswered while I'm smart enough to know that by stating we are alone, I obviously knew I would automatically be in disagreement with the gfy brain trust.

fucking dolt.

I find the question interesting but I don't really care if there is extra terrestrial life. Knowing the answer won't change my life.

We might be alone and there might be life elsewhere. The idea that we haven't been visited doesn't prove anything. That's all as I need to know.

I'm going to put my position aside for now, humans are no more able to prove mine or any other at the moment.

However, consider the odds of intelligent life in the universe to humans current ability to answer the question.

Consider some basic variables and limitations:

Equipment we use to search (what it can tell us, what it can't)
Time we've actually spent searching for those signs specifically
Our imposed search limitations (scope, distance/time, frequencies, etc)
Funding or lack thereof to tackle the task in earnest.

Consider the size of the task at hand. Distances we cant travel, things we cant see, assumptions we have to make, things we don't understand etc

If you were to award a score out of 100, what would it be to first describe our technological abilities to perform the task ?

and a second score out of 100 to describe our efforts ?


Just curious basically.

you can't even insult someone properly, nevermind properly interpret what you just read. so i throw your own gauntlet back your way...

explain fermii's paradox, in your own words, with the math, & do it without cutting & pasting from someone else. Please dazzle us all with your mastery of science. try not to divert away with another comment like, thats a topic for another thread.

the worst part about you is your utter lack of humility, you literally think whatever comes out your ass is gold. So there is no discussion with you. only you putting up straw men, using other peoples thoughts as weapons, & endless deflections when you may have to think for yourself.

fuck off troll. :)

:thumbsup

though, as per my last post in this thread, how do we know we haven't been visited? We are only going on humans' interpretation of 'intelligence' :upsidedow

we (generally) assume other intelligent life would be in what we know as humanoid/animal form, and our interpretation of life/intelligence. The sheer scale of the universe and almost limitless possibilities that a universe that size possesses means (imo anyway, though I've not got around to putting out thesis and papers etc) we really could be the ants in an elephant's consciousness.

Then again, we very well could be the elephants, and the rest of the universe comprises of ants.

oh, and fermi's paradox - would that not apply to every form of intelligent life? So by the very fact that if there *were* intelligent life elsewhere, the theory would apply to them, yet would break down as we ourselves exist, but haven't made contact with anyone else?

Dear dumbfounded, I can easily explain Fermi' s paradox, buckle up fuck wad. Fermi was having lunch with colleagues chatting about extraterrestrials and posited the simple question "WHERE IS EVERYBODY?" From that simple question over lunch, here I am explauning it to someone who couldn't care less, just trying to sour a fun topic.

You're kinda sad really.

It may have been said already.....

But it is debatable that Humans are intetilligent life.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:1orglaugh

There is an obvious flaw in the OP's line of thinking. As an "intelligent civilization" we have only been able to send signals that would travel through space for about a century - which is nothing in terms of light years. And we have not even had a manned space mission to another planet in our own solar system. There could literally be billions of planets out there with comparable civilizations, but our technology is far too limited at this time to even detect them - and I won't even start about how small the budget is for S.E.T.I. and some other factors. In light of our limited abilities, how can we say the fact that we have not been visited is conclusive proof of anything?

Sometimes it helps to visualize a situation, so here is my favorite YouTube video, the Hubble Deep Field video. It helps put some perspective on the amount of other solar systems we are talking about in the entire Universe.

Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux) - YouTube

I fucking love science

:1orglaugh :thumbsup

Exactly,

Universal time/distance is so often trivialized that I wonder if it's done mostly for convenience purposes or just so it's easier for some to digest the magnitude.

We can say "our nearest sun like star is only about 4 light years away" that sounds achievable and very positive. Certainly as opposed to the reality of our current technology "if we travel for 80000 years we can get to our nearest sun like star" that just sounds depressing and pointless.

Even as we improve our own ability to travel faster at what point do you start a mission ?

Currently unachievable example: Reduce travel time to our nearest star from 80000 years to 500

It's still a mission duration that if it arrived today, it would have started at the same time Copernicus first proclaimed "the sun is the center of the solar system" in 1510. So a little pointless to worry about 80000 year missions since if it were arriving today, it would left earth when the first Homo sapiens walked.

And within the 500 years it took us to arrive, progress would surely have produced a quicker way. You could essentially have developed technology that would substantially overtake your original mission while you were waiting.

1)The 500 year mission sets off, 250 years later they've reached the halfway point
2)At the same time they reached halway, some bright spark invents FTL travel reducing the travel time to the original destination to 4 years.
3) FTL mission goes ahead and arrives in 4 years
4) Those poor fucks left on the original mission, still with 250 years travel left. FML ;)



Unless we travel at near to light speed, light speed or faster, travel is going to take an awfully long time. It's going to take a long time even at those speeds.


Observation is really the best we have right now and our nearest potentially habitable planets by recent discovery are still an incredible 12 light years away. If they were inhabited by a species with the ability to search, receive and understand our transmissions and be transmitting in a way we can understand theirs, we'd know....probably. Anything else and we wont know anything.

They could be inhabited by nothing but potential, there could be a developing specie but its still eating it own poop or maybe their first radio went live last week (equivalent anyway). Either way, we'd know nothing today but, in a few decades or more it could be different. As each year goes past, our own transmission drift a little further out and if they exist, others transmission might travel closer to the boonies which is essentially where our planet is. The window for life discovery with what we have is beyond infinitesimal.

Saying "no other life" at this stage to me would be like someone standing at center of the Milky Way sitting next to him an ant. They pick the ant up, look a few feet to their sides and say "sorry bud, it's really just us"

while it's important to look for flaws in the OP overview, i'm not certain this is a flaw. It's not just our tech looking out, it's alien tech looking to us. So sure we've been looking for a short while but that doesn't effect the huge lack of any evidence advanced alien civilizations are looking for us.

We have about 5000 years of written history on which to base the "fact" of never being visited. Maybe we were visited in that time period and didn't recognize the visitors as anything extraordinary.

Also, humans could have been visited in the past but interpreted it as something else.

regarding this i always like to cite the bible, something that i usually consider mostly fiction

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage...ch=Ezekiel%201

this is from the old testament, something that can be found in there since hundreds of years

whoever wrote that, had either smoked really strong stuff or really saw something that was quite extraordinary for that time...

:winkwink:

Aliens Exist And Will Be Found Pretty Soon, Say Scientists

It used to be that if you asked an astronomer if there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, you?d get some sort of hedged response involving the vastness of the universe and statistical probabilities that you?d expect from a diligent scientist.

I?ve asked this question recently of a few astronomers from NASA, and also from the massive Keck observatory in Hawaii, and I?ve received a version of that same old response, but with a new preface that has become more common in recent years. It?s usually something like: ?Well, we might be able to answer that question relatively soon.?

This past week, a few scientists took it a step further and gave the U.S. Congress a relative date by which they expect we?ll have discovered signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

?It is not hyperbolic to suggest that scientists could very well discover extraterrestrial intelligence within two decades? time or less, given resources to conduct the search,? Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, said in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

So there you have it. Aliens by 2034. That?s actually a few decades ahead of the date of first contact in the fictional ?Star Trek? series ? April 5, 2063.

It is worth noting that in the last decade, Shostak was floating the date 2025 as a likely end to our apparent cosmic isolation, and as recently as February he was talking about a date ?two dozen years out.? So, clearly Shostak isn?t trying to win any bets by calling the specific date we find E.T., but rather the point is that the current rate of technological advancement makes it likely that we?ll be able to find that evidence within a single generation.

Much of the credit for this level of confidence among Astrobiologists like Shostak can be credited to discoveries made by the latest generation of telescopes, perhaps most notably the Kepler planet-hunting space telescope, which continues to deliver a steady stream of of revelations about just how common not only distant planets, but potential Earth analogs are in far-off solar systems.

?Recent analyses of Kepler data suggest that as many as one star in five will have a habitable, Earth-size planet in orbit around it,? Shostak told the lawmakers. ?This number could be too large by perhaps a factor of two or three, but even so it implies that the Milky Way is home to 10 to 80 billion cousins of Earth.?
English: Illustration of the James Webb Space ...

Illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, even the nearest of these Earth cousins will remain much too distant for us to visit in person for the foreseeable future, but that doesn?t mean we can?t continue to scan the heavens for evidence that alien civilizations exist beyond our own rock, locked to our own star as it is. Shostak?s favored method of searching for extra-terrestrial life (SETI) is to keep a giant digital ear to the sky for alien radio transmissions, but these efforts have never been fully funded to the level necessary to do the comprehensive search required to find the proverbial E.T. needle in the massive haystack that is the universe.

Shostak hopes that by investing in SETI now, we will be able to take advantage of our dramatically increased computing power to tune into a very distant talk show or whatever it is that aliens might have broadcast at one point. And while he didn?t mention them during what was essentially a pitch for funding for radio SETI, there are other projects coming up that will surely help bolster the search and perhaps even Shostak?s timeline for that existential discovery.

Kepler and the other leading telescopes that have greatly contributed to our relatively new understanding of how plentiful planets are throughout the universe are nearing the end of their usefulness. The next several years will see the debut of many next generation telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and huge terrestrial ?scopes in Hawaii, Chile and elsewhere that will complement the search, making it all the more likely that we really will be able to say relatively soon that we are not alone.

nice find. It suggests that we are the most advanced then, since we'd find alien life before they found us.