It's called women IMO.

ZeeJustin should have replied to this thread 6 times to negate his advantage.

Lol no.

One would be making a pretty bold assumption unless one also assumes faster-than-light travel is possible. There's even less hard scientific evidence to support that claim than there is to believe there's other intelligent life.

On what basis are you claiming we've run good? Compared to what? That's coming very close to the old religious argument that goes something like 'look at how amazing we all are, we must be special', which is just a classic case of selection bias. Maybe life is exceedingly common and we're a horribly primitive and ******ed form of it. Maybe we're 'running bad' due to the very difficulties you've mentioned. How would you know unless you're making some major assumptions about what else is or isn't out there?

daryn, assuming you own a tv, I'd throw down at +120 that your tv is on. I can't think of why I wouldn't.

Also, the water being frozen is nice and all, I was just wondering HOW cold it was. I guess we probably don't have a way of knowing that.

I really really really need to take an astronomy class or get into a book or video or something. This stuff is too fascinating to continue to have no idea what's going on.

.5 totally exists.

Also, I'm wearing a t-shirt.

oh, i guess i misunderstood clark's post. sure i'd bet on life existing at +120.

and yeah haha.. that's why i said there was no chance he was the only one wearing a tshirt.. i was currently wearing one.

QFMFT

I honestly don't think the human brain can even begin to comprehend the sheer size of the universe. As ridiculous as it sounds, there are probably millions of planets with intelligent life forms on them.

God ****ing damn it.

This thread is an excellent litmus test by which to separate the genuinely intelligent from the also-rans who happen to be enamored with intellectual/nerd culture.

The basic structure of Daryn's argument is logically airtight and to not be an idiot, the greatest degree with which you can disagree with him is something like - well, actually, I think there are X Y and Z reasons we can say that the popularized estimates like Drake's equation aren't completely pulled out of someone's ass and are at least a somewhat reasonable place to start, etc etc - it's not like we know nothing, but yes I see your point, the way at which we arrive at our 'estimates' could in fact be wildly flawed and we don't really know anything about this.

IF YOU DEVIATE FURTHER, SPACE ALIENS ARE YOUR RELIGION - BOOM, HEADSHOT

xoxo,

Cardo

the sad part about all this arguing, is that none of us will know the answer to all these questions in our lifetimes.

unless we do

yeah prob 50/50

Not only that, but its inconceivable we know how it would be possible to travel from one side of the universe to the other, i mean we can touch on the theoretical of using artificial wormholes and alternate dimension with differing laws of physics etc etc but its likely there is a lot we havent even considered.

Don't we need some kind of definition of "life" for purposes of argument? If we encounter an object out there in the universe bearing no resemblance to anything we know, what defines it as being "life" or not?

There really isn't a single unequivocal definition that everyone would agree with, but maybe for purposes of this discussion we could decide on one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions

Or we could just look up what after centuries of study people have come up with as some kind of consensus on.

The universe is not infinite - well to be more precise, there are not an infinite number of stars.

People who believe the universe is teeming with life - what's your solution to the Fermi paradox? i.e, why don't we see it? Once you are able to travel to another star, you should be able to colonise the entire galaxy in a couple of million years (est. age of our galaxy is ~10bn years). They have had plenty of time. Why has nobody colonised our star? Or, why have they not left signs that they've colonised nearby stars?

To me, the most likely solution is the idea of the great filter, where you look at the steps between:

1) barren rock
2) ???
3) intelligent life colonises universe

Step 2 has to be incredibly unlikely or we would see intelligent life colonising the universe around us. That step is likely a combination of several things - like the formation of a eucaryotic cell, creation of mitochondria, development of intelligence etc, or environmental factors like lack of nearby gamma ray bursts, or perhaps you need a large moon to create life (via tidal effects to mix the primordial chemicals together).

If that filter's in our past, we could well be the only intelligent species in the universe. If the filter's in our future, there could be many at our level of development, and for some reason none of us make it any further. Under this idea, if we want there to be a future for our species, we want there to be no other intelligent life in the universe as it suggests the filter is in our past. The only optimistic scenario I can think of where the filter's in our future is where it turns out to be a lot, lot, lot harder to travel to other stars than we currently think it is.

Edit: Read a bit more of the thread - the idea of a great filter is to add an extraordinarily unlikely step to the Drake equation - one that'll take you from life existing on one in one million stars to one where life exists on one in a million millions of stars.

Edit2: Just to be clear - I think intelligent life is unlikely enough that it forms no more than a couple of times per 10bn years per galaxy, as otherwise we'd see evidence of it already.

...or it's incredibly difficult for a species to access the technology needed for interstellar travel without blowing themselves up first. After all, without the technology that was spawned by two world wars, we would have never made it to the moon.

Regardless, nice post.

Thanks, and yeh I agree, but that isn't very optimistic :]

Regarding seeing signs of aliens colonizing planets: can we actually see planets that are somewhat far away? I thought we only "saw" them by studying how the light from the stars are affected by their gravity and such. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I didn't say that there were, I did say that you need to accept those three premises for the argument to work. Although, I haven't done any reading on the topic in a very long time, afair stars are still forming and galaxies are colliding and still forming. So one could make the argument that in an infinitely large system, with infinite matter where subsystems are constantly being created, colliding and splitting apart that for all intents and purposes we can accept that there are an infinite number of stars.

You are correct sir, he did say that travelling through worm holes was possible, but afaik he didn't say it was possible to create wormholes. That would be bad ass. I also don't remember any implication that it was possible to fold space, I actually thought that that was impossible for various reasons (cannot form or bend to create angles in Nth dimensional space).

What we could potentially do is travel through a wormhole faster than the speed of light. Now if we could do that, and we arrive on the other side of the wormhole, we could potentially travel back through the wormhole and see ourselves before we travelled through the wormhole to begin with.

But now if we take that travelling wormhole thing, and we assume that there are more intelligent life forms out there that have also figured this out and have done it in practice, why have they not found us yet?

If you had the technology to go anywhere in the universe, why would you bother stopping by Earth? What could you possibly have to gain by observing a form of life that is so primitive and stupid that it hasn't even managed to colonize it's own moon yet?

We are probably about as interesting to them as a jar of mold.

Proving the unlikelihood of other intelligent life in our galaxy does not prove the unlikelihood of life in the universe. That would be like me checking my closet this morning for signs of intelligent life and concluding that since I didn't find any, I must be the only person on Earth. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, separarated by distances several orders of magnitude larger than what you're describing.

I'll concede that the universe isn't "teeming" with life, as that suggests a certain density which clearly is not the case, at least in our little region of it. But that's not inconsistent with the idea that there is "lots" of life out there in an absolute sense, even if it's relatively sparse when considering the size of the universe. I just don't buy the argument that says just because life exists, it must inevitably expand to fill the entire universe and must have done so already so that we'd know about it.

Unless you assume faster-than-light travel, another civilization 10 billion light years from us that evolved 5 billion years earlier than us still would not even have had time to travel here directly, much less get here by accident as they colonized their way across the universe. There could be a multitude of such cases and the fact that we haven't heard from them yet would not be that surprising. Now you can throw out the idea of FTL travel via wormholes and such, but that's really nothing more than science fiction at this point and frankly, requires a bigger leap of faith than believing other life could exist.

Now you are assuming thought processes of yet undiscovered alien life forms? wtf