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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/16/2008 7:40:23 AM | What about Witley Streiber? What about documented UFO videos/sightings? What about
the recent announcement from the Vatican that "It's ok to believe in Aliens-- they too are creatures of God and that to deny their existence is to seek to place constrictions on God's vast creativity". This is more than just mass hysteria-- SURELY something is "a foot" out there... that said my comments of course have no scientific basis other than what intuition tells me and has taught me as a poet. Think of how long it took for us to discover each other on this planet ALONE over the millenium... its not something meant to happen over night unless of course we've been watched for a VERY long time :)
Live well and prosper! --- Poeticbliss | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 4:22:19 PM | As far as I've read about extrasolar planets discovered so far, nearly all are very large and orbiting their respective suns (stars) very closely, in a matter of a few days. Smaller planets in more distant orbits would be much harder to find- they could be as common as grains of sand and we couldn't find the one next door (orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri pair, or Proxima Centauri, 4.36 and 4.22 LY distant, respectively).
So it's possible that "earthlike" plants may be more common than dirt. If you accept that life happened here accidentally, it's likely life happened elsewhere, just as a bit of cheese left unpackaged will eventually grow mold; expose an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, and water to solar radiation long enough and it just goes rancid...
I just think it's too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that this planet is somehow all that special.
Given that "earthlike" planets are common, and that life isn't all that unique, what are the chances that life will develop something we might recognize as "intelligent?"
Looking at the only samples we've got, out of many hundreds of thousands of species that exist or have existed on this bit of cosmic rock, the number of intelligent ones is eerily close to zero (1/really big number= next to nothing), so it seems that intelligence, if it actually exists anywhere, is very, very, very rare; odds are, if I take the Tardis to survey all the planets in the galaxy, I'd probably have to visit hundreds of thousands to find a decent plumber, for example (and yet more to find an honest lawyer, but that's a topic for another thread).
Yikes, maybe that's it!!! ET's parents, and all those other UFOs, were looking for a plumber!!! | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:00:13 PM | | 78 light years across? Makes sense. To me. About seven years ago at a house party a couple of guys were arguing about things they did not know the first thing about. One of them said, Tony was his name, "...they universe is 70 billion light years across, and everybody knows that." Maybe that was eight years ago. Because in those eigth years the diametre increased from 70 to 78. One a year, like it should, since we are talking about light years. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:09:38 PM | Dear QuietCowBoy, I 'd like to ask you two inane questions.
1. If an astronomical object falls on the boundary between large astronomical distances and small astronomical distances, then where do they bury the survivors?
2. Doesn't one need to define the reference system by which one insists whether the Earth revolves (or more safely said, moves) around the Sun or vice versa? If we consider the two as objects moving around the gravitational centre of the two, then yes, the Earth moves around the Sun, because their gravitational centre is within the Sun. But if you consider the motion of these two bodies purely from the point of view (pun not intended, haha) of movements in cartesian space, then either can be the centre of the movement, or neither even, having a third or fourth point outside of both to which the movement is related.
Furthermore, if you rotate the plane on which these to objects move, at the same direction and at the same angular velocity that these two bodies flip around each other, AND you reference the bodies to this plane, then the two bodies, the Sun and the Earth, are not moving at all, but just simply resting at a safe distance from each other, like two Sumo wrestlers during commercial brakes. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:23:36 PM |
"...they universe is 70 billion light years across, and everybody knows that." You do realize the difference between seventy BILLION light years, and 78 light years?
That our own Milky Way galaxy is probably 100,000 light years across?
Considering the scale of the Universe, 78 light years is practically our back yard. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:24:33 PM | Hehey, expat. You say there ain't not enough time to advance our technology to make a getaway from this planet to escape the Sun's engulfing flames whenever they'd come in.
It has been done, already and actually. The Lichtenstein space program shot up a space vehicle with two fertilized embrios (both in a single-celled stage of development) that are the fruits of Ludwig Baron Helmut Bergmann Judli von Steigerholtzstein, the ruler of Lichtenstein and his consort, and the other, of the same guy and Valentina Tyereshkova, the first female in space. These embrios are frozen and kept frozen by a cooling system that will be shut off once the space capsule exits the solar system. The three degrees kelvin (or kalvin?) (Kalvin and Hobbes, Kalvin Klein... too many names) that permeates empty space is cold enought to keep the embrios from rotting. Once the capsule is near the vicinity of a planet, it will scout it via distance-learning methods for a humanitarian, loving, scientifically-minded and advanced civilization. If the scouting mission is successfull, the capsule will descend into the planet and offer the embrios to science, and ask them to thaw them out and hatch them in a rescuscitation tent, the plans of which will be included in the capsule.
Bang, humanity survives.
This fact does not take away from that fact, that I found your joke much funnier. These civilizations on all kinds of wrolds, busily creating greater and greater wealth for their species, advancing thought and living conditions, pushing out the frontiers of their knowledge, only to realize that no matter what they do, on Tuesday at two in the afternoon their derriers will get fatally fried by their runaway sun. This in and by itself is not funny, but multiply the experience a million times, and watch them each on the screen, you won't be able to stop laughing. Brilliant, my dear lady. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:33:44 PM | New Phylum, there is no need for you to think that you won't survive to the time of first contact. Where there is a will, there is a way. Simply invent an elyxir that will expand your life expectancy to 200 billion light years, and presto! you're bound to talk to some alien other than a Hungarian.
I tend to disagree that these other planets must be at the same developmental phase in their technology. If the place is a hundred light years away from us, then they must be exactly a hundred years ahead of us if we want to read their signals, or they must be exactly a hundred years behind us if we want them to read our signals. Or a billion years either way, if they are a billion light years away from us.
I would have given more credit to Stepher Hawking than to seriously expect that we can establish some form of radio contact with far away civilizations. Please read my skeptical thoughts on why that is an impossible task, published elsewhere in this topic. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/17/2008 10:38:43 PM | Well noted, Beau. I concede, there IS a difference between 70 and 70 billion. But it's all a matter of what you're used to. You have to know where I come from in order to understand my aloof attitude over a few billion.
I come from a country which saw inflation after the second world war that was faster than that in Germany. In hours the currency deteriorated by a factor of a billion. (Ten to the nineth.) (Or ninth?) And that rate kept up for months.
Since this post-WWII mathematical experience, we, Hungarians, usually pay no attention to such small details as a difference of magnitude in the order of nine or ten. That's small change to us. We carry infinity in our back pockets and in our hearts. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 12:04:36 AM |
"...we, Hungarians, usually pay no attention to such small details as a difference of magnitude in the order of nine or ten. That's small change to us."
An attitude apparently shared by members of the US Congress... and the present occupant of the White House. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 12:39:48 AM | Please forgive me for posting something frivolous here, but this is becoming a truly fun read. I think my favorite thread since I joined this fishy place.
5'4" - There is a screenplay in there somewhere! Sat here and had a good little chuckle reading about your scenario x millions. Enjoying the way your mind works. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 1:35:10 AM | Mars as an alternative? Possible but not probable.
If our move there is made to escape an exploding sun, I hardly think so. Ain't Mars closer to the Sun than Earth? Or is that Venus that's between us and Mercury?
In my opinion it'd be easier to colonize Venus. True, it's surface temperature is like 400 degrees celsius, and no man-made probe survived in its atmosphere long enough to hit solid ground, but on the upside it does have an atmosphere. It's full of methane, which is a greenhouse gas, that's why it's so hot up there on Venus. But methane is made of carbon and hydrogen, the two major building blocks of proteins aside from oxygen.
So here's a planet, which resembles Earth from five billion years ago, give or take half a billion. Life never got established there, though it had been bombarded by the same meteorites as Earth was, or, more precisely, by meteorites of very similar consistency to those bombarding Earth.
There are two conclusions to be made: 1. Life is impossible to jump-start on Venus. 2. Venus could support life if given a chance, but the meteorite contents are not inclusive in their contents to create life by their contents alone.
In fact, on earth some amino acids have been manufactured by random events in the early atmosphere and in polar ice caps. Maybe they were alone by themselves enough to create life, maybe they needed the boost of a meteorite coctail to do that.
Anyhow, if we could drop oxygen-producing blue algae on Mars, maybe in a couple of million years they would create a livable atmosphere there. Of course it would need to be immunized and generally swept up and dusted before man moved there.
We'd better hurry up and start. Who here wants to take up the first bunch of algae to Venus with them? | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 10:44:00 AM | I think Mars (farther from the Sun than Earth) would be a better choice if it becomes necessary to inhabit another planet, but why would we? Given the technology to lift people from the surface of the Earth, why would we then want to trap them at the bottom of another gravity well?
A more logical first step would be shifting manufacturing to Earth's moon (strange that all the other moons in the Solar System have names, ours, except for infrequent use of the name "Luna," is simply called "The Moon"). From there, orbital or interplanetary "Habitats," could be constructed from Lunar materials using solar energy, launched into Solar orbit using a Maglev rail system, and positioned an appropriate distance from the Sun. Once life has been established on the Habitats, materials mined from larger asteroids and comets would be processed for manufacturing the necessary artifacts and consumables for living in Space.
Not my original idea, this was proposed by Gerard K O'Neill more than 30 years ago ("The Colonization of Space") before Richard Nixon effectively gutted the manned Apollo space program and destroyed any possibility of colonies on the moon for many decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society The consensus by the late 1990s among those who were active in the early years of the L5 Society is that space colonies or even a serious human presence in space is unlikely to come for many years. Most of them regret the opportunity was missed, not least because solar energy from space would help cope with some of the world's urgent problems, particularly energy and global warming. Though economic analysis indicated the SPS/space colony concept had merit, it foundered on short political and economic horizons and the fact that the transport cost to space was about 10,000 times too high for individuals to fund when compared to the Plymouth Rock and Mormon colonies. (See the chapter "Pilgrims, Saints and Spacemen" in Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe for an analysis.) | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 1:05:09 PM |
2. Doesn't one need to define the reference system by which one insists whether the Earth revolves (or more safely said, moves) around the Sun or vice versa? If we consider the two as objects moving around the gravitational centre of the two, then yes, the Earth moves around the Sun, because their gravitational centre is within the Sun. But if you consider the motion of these two bodies purely from the point of view (pun not intended, haha) of movements in cartesian space, then either can be the centre of the movement, or neither even, having a third or fourth point outside of both to which the movement is related.
Furthermore, if you rotate the plane on which these to objects move, at the same direction and at the same angular velocity that these two bodies flip around each other, AND you reference the bodies to this plane, then the two bodies, the Sun and the Earth, are not moving at all, but just simply resting at a safe distance from each other, like two Sumo wrestlers during commercial brakes.
If there were just two objects in the solar system, galaxy and universe your argument might have a point but as we know that is true. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 1:49:27 PM | In my opinion it'd be easier to colonize Venus. True, it's surface temperature is like 400 degrees Celsius, and no man-made probe survived in its atmosphere long enough to hit solid ground, but on the upside it does have an atmosphere. It's full of methane, which is a greenhouse gas, that's why it's so hot up there on Venus.
The atmosphere of Venus consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide.
The Russian Venera program landed Venera 9 and Venera 10 on the surface of Venus sending the first images of the Venusian landscape. The Venera 11 and Venera 12 probes detected a constant stream of lightning, and Venera 12 recorded a powerful clap of thunder soon after it landed.
The Venera program ran from February 1961 to October 1983. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 2:34:21 PM | "The atmosphere of Venus consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide."
Thanks, Otto, for this very valuable and useful information for the purposes of this discussion. Was there any hydrogen detected on Venus? If yes, then we have all the ingredients that the maker needs to make life. Carbon-based life that is, which is similar to forms of it occurring on Earth. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/18/2008 2:44:41 PM | Dear QuietCowBoy,
You say we need to reduce the number of bodies in the solar system and systems surrounding it to just the Earth and the Sun to create a reference system in which the relationship of movement of the Sun to the Earth is arbitrary, as in a Cartesian coordinate system.
Well, that is absolutely not the case. If you pick an arbitrary point, plane, or line that you pick as a reference to describe the Earth and the Sun's movement, and you move, rotate or both move and rotate these reference structures, then you could still have all the other planets and moons and debris and galaxies and suchnot still be in the whole picture. The movement of other bodies will be a bit circuitous to describe. The path of their movement will be radically different on the graph paper, but it still will be the same to each other as before. You can even complicate the issue furhter: if you want to take the moon Titan of Jupiter and describe its movement to the earth, with the reference point being the Titan, on a Cartesian system, you still can do it, AND describe the movements of the Sun, Pluto, Asteroids, galixies, the whole of existence, etc. within the referencial Cartesian co-ordinate system.
There is nothing that would, could, or should stop anyone from doing this, except, of course, the lack of enough math skills and the lack of the knowledge of necessary facts / analytical geometry to do it. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/19/2008 7:38:10 AM |
Dear QuietCowBoy,
You say we need to reduce the number of bodies in the solar system and systems surrounding it to just the Earth and the Sun to create a reference system in which the relationship of movement of the Sun to the Earth is arbitrary, as in a Cartesian coordinate system.
Well, that is absolutely not the case. If you pick an arbitrary point, plane, or line that you pick as a reference to describe the Earth and the Sun's movement, and you move, rotate or both move and rotate these reference structures, then you could still have all the other planets and moons and debris and galaxies and suchnot still be in the whole picture. The movement of other bodies will be a bit circuitous to describe. The path of their movement will be radically different on the graph paper, but it still will be the same to each other as before. You can even complicate the issue furhter: if you want to take the moon Titan of Jupiter and describe its movement to the earth, with the reference point being the Titan, on a Cartesian system, you still can do it, AND describe the movements of the Sun, Pluto, Asteroids, galixies, the whole of existence, etc. within the referencial Cartesian co-ordinate system.
There is nothing that would, could, or should stop anyone from doing this, except, of course, the lack of enough math skills and the lack of the knowledge of necessary facts / analytical geometry to do it.
Go ahead and do it and get back to us. After its all said and done, come up with a physical reason that your coordinate system makes sense. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/19/2008 11:30:03 AM | Otto Bon is correct but one thing he didn't add is that the rotation of Venus is almost as long as its revolution around the sun and is reverse of what we (and every other planet in the solar system) rotate. If you could see a sunrise on Venus, it would be from the west and setting in the east. Some have hypothesized that this might have been the result of a similar impact of a planetesimal in the early formation of the solar system as that which formed our moon.
Not to mention, Venus is all but devoid of water. Lacking a protective magnetic field and being that much closer to the sun have stripped the atmosphere very effectively. Sorry, but it looks like Venus is right out of the question for colonization. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/19/2008 2:00:24 PM | I saw some PBS program a couple of years ago that revealed how Venus becomes completely covered in molten lava every so many millions of years. The entire surface of the planet fractures and molten material floods everywhere.
Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Okay, not all that nice to visit either. 
From: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2210venus.html
And then there will be a period of totally catastrophic surface volcanism with a time of flame and you have virtually a complete magma ocean on the entire surface of the planet.
Hey, fire up that grill, baby!  | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/19/2008 8:37:17 PM | It's really funny how we perceive time and options of continuing the life of our species on another planet, when the most technologically advanced civilization in history and time perceived things a lot differently then us.
I'm referring to the Egyptians. I understand that we are very confident in our technology but it is only a matter of understanding effort over time. The Egyptians created one of the largest structures on our planet for the sole purpose of not traveling to the afterlife but rather preserving their remains/DNA for the 'Afterlife' meaning the future in which our species can be cloned again or perhaps reflourished through technology that either our species or another more advanced species would then find. Think about the reasoning behind them creating a structure that has Astronomical patterns and significance that can only be recognized from the sky?
If you haven't seen the Discovery Channel show on Life after humans, then you should and watch intently. The reason is that it plainly explains that our greatest structures and knowledge of modern man will wither away and decompose and within less then 1,000 years our grand knowledge and evidence of even our existence will be nothing but eroded piles of dust. YET it will take much longer for what our modern society considers primitive for the Pyramids to erode.
If we consider all things equal then the energy put in will not get us the result that we wish to get and that is the population of our species on another planet or star system. If we are all on the brink of destroying this planet/being killed off by pandemic/hit by an asteroid/super volcano eruption/Global Warming/Over Population/Nuclear War/Gamma Ray burst. Then how is it that we feel that we have a greater chance of waiting out technology versus primitively preserving our DNA in materials and larger encasings that will erode the least and allow the possibility of our species to continue whether directly or indirectly?
Does that not seem like the most plausible and has the highest chance of success? | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/20/2008 1:26:52 AM | well... I highly DOUBT that, Im fully confident we're CONSTSNTLY under the watchful eye of more than one 'other' form of ET life from across the cosmos.
knowing what a horribly simple and savage species humans are, I wouldnt want us knowing who or where they are either.
Ive never seen one but I believe theyre out there.
I dont blame them for wanting to remain out of view, contact, and completely out of detection for as long as they have been to this point.
We'd only cause them nothing but major problems.
We probably already have.
All alone in space and time?
They could only BE so lucky.
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/21/2008 9:21:06 PM | | To Expat et al: Part of the reason this is a fun to read thread or forum is because you do have to have at least a small amount of intelligence to be able to post something on it and the courage to do so and all are encouraged to comment freely. No one is trying to ruin it with stupidity and all comments seem to be treated with some degree of respect. I started the thread and have not abandoned it, however I have not added a comment lately because I am collecting thoughts on how any new theories I may present in the near future would be looked upon. It is encouraging to see the interest and knowledge that the participants have shown thus far. I will continue to monitor and appreciate the response. Daniel | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/27/2008 12:07:37 AM | I wouldn't take Witley Streiber that serioulsy. Read one of his books when I was 14. I think the whole grey thing seems limited and uncreative. Why would aliens be humanoid? Thats something humans would impose on beings on other worlds. I would think aliens would look very different from us in ways we can't imagine.
Granted it's not impossible. If they do exist they might not even be aliens there could be another explanation like a different race of humans.
Anyways being more serious I don't take those ideas too seriously. I used to listen to Coast to coast and every guy that came on there pretty much had a book to sell. It was interesting to listen to those theories but I wouldn't take them seriously.
A lot of the stuff could easily be scientifically explained. It's only due to me not being an absolutist and the fact that I like holding an open mind. That I don't completly debunk everything.
I've suffered things like Sleep paralysis and it's convinced me that there aren't abductions. Being frozen for a few secs and then coming out of it after 20 seconds is enough to make you realize that no one is there. And if there was why would they be there for only 20 seconds. The mind can play tricks on you pretty easily. | |
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| We are all alone in space and time.
Posted: 5/27/2008 11:52:47 PM | This is my not so new thought for the day. I give it too expat57 because she has shown herself to be a thinker not just a sayer. I always wondered what possible good could mosquitoes have. All they do is bite and spread disease and cause suffering and death. But is this all they do? What I have to say may or may not have been written before, but I am not aware of reading it. In my observations in the Panhandle swamp area of Florida it is becoming more and more obvious to me that every living creature is opportunistic and even things that each creature do to other creatures that are seemingly good, are actually done for the doer. For instance lets take just the mosquito . It sucks plant sap for nourishment, but to lay eggs it needs a blood meal. It gets the blood meal from a human for instance. While it gets blood, it gives a type of injection that is used to thin the blood in the area to make it easier to draw up. While doing this it also may be inoculating it victim with various virus's and germs unknowingly to keep it's victim alive for further food storage. Maybe we are being constantly infected and inoculated by all these insects. And could it be even that the alien is in these inoculations constantly looking for new environments in which to exist.Kind of off the thread, but maybe not. What say anyone on this? Daniel  | |
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