Long read.
I hope Pot is legal, and the girls are cute!
I don't know what cosmologists the author has been listening to but the night sky is far from empty and far from silent.
It may be devoid of signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence but that does not make it empty and silent. Not hardly.
But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing
The writer is likely to be disappointed. Conditions on Mars or the moons are good for the development of some form of life. I look forward to the discovery.
Dick accretion theory for planet formation is wrong. Thermonuclear fusion for sun formation is wrong. Evidence against these two wrong theories is suppressed by the orthodox science mafia. At www.thunderbolts.info, evidence for plasma-electric phenomena as the foundation for a new cosmology is being constructed and tested.
Where are they? They’re here. Go to disclosureproject.com.
I’m fairly convinced we aren’t alone in the universe. I’m also fairly convinced that interstellar wormhole traveling space monsters have never visited earth in their shiny little ships.
Widespread colonization has to overcome a significant “filter” not mentioned in the article - the sheer size of interstellar space.
A rather self-indulgent piece, with a few logical errors.
However, to examine the axiom, let’s start with the two obvious problems of “intelligence meeting intelligence” in the galaxy. They are distance and time.
Distance is pretty obvious. The nearest star to Sol is about 4 light years away. The nearest habitable star? Good question. Probably between 200-2000 light years away. But just because it can support some kind of life, doesn’t mean it does support life, much less intelligent life.
And this is where the time problem comes in. About 99% of the species that once lived on Earth are gone. A lot when you consider the profusion of life that currently exists. People have only been intelligent for maybe 100,000 years, and only technologically capable for a little over a hundred.
One hundred years in a world that is about 4.5 billion years old. In a galaxy about 12 billion years old.
About every 100 million years in the last half billion years, the Earth has had a major extinction event, wiping much of the slate clean, with most of the major forms of life having to start anew. There might have been 15 other such events that weren’t quite as bad, but still awful in that last 540 million years.
And there are far more things that *could* completely wipe out life on Earth than have been inflicted on us. And I mean a sterilized world, not even bacteria left.
So how long can an intelligent species last? If we remain on Earth, perhaps another 100,000 years, if we’re lucky.
200,000 out of 12 billion years. 1/60th of the life of the galaxy. If it is anything like other intelligent life forms, it really reduces our chances of meeting somebody else. If the distance doesn’t get you, the time will.
How many galactic empires could have risen and fallen in that time?
Don’t even get your hopes up for finding artifacts from alien civilizations. The best we could probably hope for is to find very long-lived nuclear isotopes that don’t occur in nature. The ones we have created will most certainly survive mankind.
Ironically, those may be our best chance at contacting another intelligent species. If we created an asteroid-like projectile, then sent it into space at high speed, even if it was completely melted ten thousand times, such isotopes would not be destroyed.
A couple of basic fallacies in this argument (even assuming that the basic Fermi Paradox argument is correct, and there is no explanation for "we haven't found any aliens" other than "there aren't any aliens to find"):
1. There's no reason to assume that one specific stage between solar system formation and highly advanced civilization is a narrow "choke point". Perhaps they're all somewhat narrower than we think (so that only a few worlds in a given galaxy get through them all) but none of them is special in that regard.
2. Having a narrow "choke point" behind us says nothing about how easy or difficult the steps still ahead might be. Connecting the two is a form of the "gambler's fallacy" -- it's equivalent to assuming that a coin that came up heads ten times in a row is less likely to turn up heads again in the future because that bit of luck has been "used up".
3. Even if there aren't any aliens out there, it doesn't necessarily mean that advanced technological civilizations are particularly unlikely. Somebody has to be first; maybe it's us.
Life elsewhere in the universe would certainly lead to some new and interesting interpretations of the Bible.
a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier….The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds…The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals.
Reading this I would almost think this guy was a proponent of Intelligent Design.
Life appears against great odds.
Life evolves to an intelligent level against great odds.
His Great Filter could easily have been the Great Architect.
Martians pee gasoline, 89 octane
Great Filter, singular?
I prefer the take on it I saw on the Science Channel a couple of weeks ago: “Intelligent life on Earth won the big jackpot in the lottery, not just once but ten or twenty consecutive times.” That’s the “Great Filter.” It’s a filtering process.
In other words, Earth has a large moon that stabilizes our seasons, a series of meteorite/comet impacts occurred at just the right moment in evolutionary history to allow humankind to arise, we may have had a couple of snowball earth episodes that occurred at just the right moment and pumped up oxygen levels to exactly where they needed to be to give rise ultimately to humans, we miraculously survived the Toba Event, etc., etc.
Jackpot, jackpot, jackpot, jackpot... We could’ve lost at any point, and should have, probabilistically speaking.
Any other similarly advanced form of intelligent life in the universe will have to get just as lucky as we did, and that’s extremely unlikely.
The Great Filtering is surely not finished with us yet either. We’ll certainly have to survive our own Sun going nova someday. We may have to survive a nearby supernova or gamma ray burster in the future, among other potentially even more catastrophic things we can anticipate (are you ready for the Milky Way and Andromeda to collide?).
IMHO, to be on the safe side and guarantee the continued existence of intelligent life for the remaining lifetime of the universe, we and/or our descendants will have to colonize all of the galaxies in the Local Group over the next two billion years or so.
Ping for Later.
read at home tonight BUMP!
God to Nick:
1. Who said you qualified as intelligent life?,
2. Who said that your views define the universe?, and
3. News flash - I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT!
You want interesting try this guy:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html
I hope so, too. We already have enough illegal aliens dropping in on us.
At least 30 years too late.
contracts were signed decades ago.
Of course, the ET’s broke them . . .
They LIKE abducting . . . implanting . . . raping . . . mutilating humans . . . for some unknown reason(s).
And the government essentially seems unable to do anything about it.
Governments are not popular when it becomes known that they can’t perform the basic function of keeping their people safe.
Besides, they love the devil’s agreement that results in technology for the greedy globalists in charge of such things.