That's not a counter but it's definitely another possibility, just well known this time and known as "Adam's dolphins"

That and other books (like The Dancing Wu Li Masters) are a waste of time (and hopelessly out of date). Brian Greene (and others) has written a few books that help with our current understanding of how the universe is structured. Those other books, aside from being tipsy and a bit overwrought, are snared in a time warp of their own making. And also contain more than just a dash of gibberish and sleight of hand in the language department.

For a proponent of Absurdism in most threads (or so it seems), it is surprising to see such an overpowering preference for Western thought, and its popularized emphasis on order within complexity.

While balance implies order as well, in Eastern thought, it also places greater emphasis on the absurdity of existence and the pointlessness of the search for truth on the 'outside'. I thought this would appeal to someone like yourself.

It was a dog's life [my first incarnation]:





My second incarnation:





The third:





The fourth:





Present incarnation, binding the Universe together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te70C_4getQ

http://io9.com/how-seti-will-underst...ien-1725651134

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...search-for-et/

http://www.space.com/30404-alien-lif...kly_2015-08-28

Saying their is no Aliens is like scooping a tea cup into the ocean and saying "no fish".

The difference though is that if you carefully examine the content of that water from a real earth ocean cup you will find evidence of life that indicates there is higher animals alive in that water even if none is in the cup. You will find all kinds of remnants of that life and microorganisms and byproducts of life.

When you look at the universe you see no evidence of such correlations that higher life should have left. Granted this is not a very safe statement as we have not examined thoroughly yet the consequences for the universe of higher intelligence but the reasonable first look is a very suggestive "we are alone in the tech game in our galactic group neighborhood" guess. Its simply very hard to imagine that a civilization even only 1 mil y more advanced than our own hasnt colonized all the galaxy yet and we are not known already. It is very simple to do it or at least do things in part of the galaxy that look spectacular for their complexity.

We look out there and see billions of galaxies. And none has taken a path that leaves a global trace in its high tech activity??? None? Intelligent life that leads to high technology may be indeed as rare as 10^-20 or per solar system. That doesnt make lie unique here. It makes simply life rare enough to be consistent with what is observed.

I think everywhere where life is possible, it thrives.

Life might be ubiquitous, but technological life is likely rare. Aliens typically refers to technological life.

Intelligent life and nervous systems likely closer to the density of technological life.

I think purely because of the numbers involved, there must be plenty of life out there.. and in turn plenty of intelligent life.

The sheer size of the universe and the various crazy numbers it brings up are just hard for us to comprehend.

It's a few needles in a trillion haystacks, millions of lightyears apart..

Does the universes expansion not also make the likely hood of discovering interstellar life increasingly unlikely??

Faster than light travel (the methods 'possible') seems like something we would never achieve.. but one of the wright brothers said we would never fly NYC to Paris in fairness , so who knows!

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...-tyson-podcast

I don't mind if Aliens visit, they just have to come 'legally'.

That is bs by Snowden in my opinion. Our communications right now that can be seen by aliens have nothing to do with our internet and telephones etc that are encrypted. They are basically TV, Radio broadcasts and long distance space probe communications that are of course of very low intensity and will come to them very fragmented requiring corrections anyway. We are not protecting the general public domain signals and even if we did they would still retain signatures that differentiate them from natural sources. Even without encrypting them the aliens will have a hard time understanding them without severe processing done since they do not know in principle the equipment that reads them and how they operate or our language etc.

There are many signatures intelligent life leaves anyway unless they want to prevent that.

Let me ask you this; As we get more and more technologically advanced what do you think happen to our thermal emissions? World energy usage today is 10^21 J per year (that planet is emitting that excess energy that is wasted from this number that it wouldn't if we were not using it). How about the emission spectrum of the planet as we manipulate surfaces and solar radiation and reduce reflection but still emit thermal? Care to study what the total energy released from our computers is right now worldwide and how it can be seen from space as elevated thermal radiation from our cities? How does a city full of computer servers look compared to the nearby areas of agricultural activity or forests or mountains? How does a delta or our coastlines look from space? Now imagine that activity across a solar system. What does a civilization that creates engineering in large scale leave behind? A lot of thermal radiation where it shouldn't be (waste energy and the output eventually of most activity that uses energy to produce work)!


Think what i mean by that in a more prominent scale. Say the sun emits 4.6*10^38 J per year (1.5*10^31 W power). How must of this is in the thermal range? Tiny, basically what planets emit and whatever little part of the solar spectrum is in that range.

Now imagine we become level 2 civilization (we use a big fraction of the solar power now or generate as much from other means eg massive scale fusion reactors or whatever exotic ideas) what fraction of the energy of this system will then be emitted in thermal (since i mean eventually the result of doing work in large scale is such emission)? So study the spectrum of a solar system and you have a clue there about strange things happening there that are not of astrophysical origin ie not consistent with that type of star or plausible solar system planets!

I need to correct a couple numbers in my last post;

The sun power is 4*10^26 W and the energy in a year 1.2*10^34 J not the numbers i gave.


In particular based on these we now are at 10^-13 power consumption of the total output of the sun which if you think about it is not entirely unimportant.

To put that in proper perspective the sun produces power of 0.0002W per kgr of its mass and we as mankind on average consume at a rate of 60W per kgr of our body! When we started our march as H.Sapiens we were only using 1.5 W per kgr of our body. (of course a great deal of the planet still operates on 2-3 times or less of that 100k years ago number anyway which says a lot about our stupid system)


But imagine now in a future observation of the solar system to be actually appearing to outsiders like a system that emits in thermal 10^3 or even 10^6 times more than it should based on typical astrophysical and solar system behavior (ie total planetary emissions based on their net mass as its revealed by the motion of the sun when observed from far away), how easy it becomes to spot us existing there doing things in large scale between level 1 and 2 civilization without even looking at anything else other than the spectrum of the sun and the net thermal output from that system.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/wo...-where-to-look

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a6693886.html

I believe when I see it. Why, WHY are we alone?

Because nobody along the Orion arm likes patriarchal idiocy. You're selfish, stupid and can't take care of a single damn planet.

Cool art, fashion and bipedal forms though.

Ra: Your bodies, so easy to repair.
Nefertiti: Your minds, so easy to manipulate.

This one is awesome. I WANT TO BELIEVE!!

Another article about KIC 8462852

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astro..._baffling.html

I imagine we can model what a Dyson sphere type object might look like to some degree , so we should be able to use such a simulation towards some degree of confirmation. I don't know what I don't know about astronomy, so I could just be imagining beyond our knowledge and capability to study or simulate such a construct.

What's sort of cool is that we may be able to detect them, and they may not be able to detect us. If they are 1500 light years away, we may pick up some radio waves from them, but they can't see ours, since ours have only made it a hundred or so light years from us. Knowing where the more advanced civilizations are before they know where we are might be an important part of universal survival.

Then again, they may have seen us years ago with some unknown tech and have already dispatched the extermination drones.

Dyson sphere is a joke of a theory actually if you think about it! Who is going to bother to build a megastructure like that around their sun to capture its energy (and leave out 80% still lol) if they have such high technology to do exactly that?

Fusion is like a 0.5-1% mc^2 thing at best. If you can extract energy from black holes you can top that. But locally you can top it with fusion of your own rather than use your sun's solar energy output. The important thing about energy is the local production density. What good is it to collect all the energy of the sun if you have to develop a system that is billions of earth size area. Big deal. You need a local high power system and solar is only going to give you like 1GW per km^2 at best. At the same time fusion reactors in the same area can top this result since only fission alone can yield 150MW per 1/4-1/8 typical nuclear submarine size area meaning in 1 km^2 total area you can put hundreds of such things to top the total solar accumulated and create an even greater source of energy for that amount of space occupied (plus imagine that as fusion reactors not fission reactors to go even higher by a factor of 10).

All you need is to use the Hydrogen from the gas giants of your system. That can still last you many thousands of years doing that. You can generate that way much higher density of energy using artificial fusion or other exotic physics, topping easily the star's energy production using far less area than the area of 1 au radius sphere around the star. I mean the star gives you ~1kW per m^2 and other ways can top this. By the time you have the means to cover your star you have also the means to do the other more compact, more energy dense ideas instead to top that energy even, using far less area.


In other words you do not need to enclose the solar system for energy capture reasons. You only need to create a ton of artificial environments that have fusion power locally and spend the gas of your gas giants. Of course if you spend many centuries doing that you might end up having many colonies around the solar system to essentially cover it partially (like a partial Dyson sphere but not to capture the solar energy, just to do what i described instead) but this then makes your civilization old enough for other things also to have happened that make this single observation unreasonable to be explained that way. Why?


See it that way. If you are able to do all this to your system exactly why havent you done or started doing that also in the next 100 systems around it (it would take only 1-2 centuries lol) that have similar stars and are within reach if you have such technology already even if you did it at 0.1c speed expansion out rate.


This system is about 1500 light years away. Any civilization so close to us is already here aware of us because the chance they were just a few centuries ahead in technological development is astronomically unlikely (ie that were both so close in their technological development for them to not have yet dominated everything and definitely know about us due to our O2 that there was life here). Our rise as species is like say 1 mil years old. Only 200-300 years of that is high tech sector. Ie basically the phase a civilization expands to its solar system lasts only about 1k out of 1 mil years of the species in our case ie 0.1% of our history. And that itself is only 1 millionth the history of life or less in this system. You would expect 2 nearby civilizations to differ by hundreds of millions or billions of years in development not just a few centuries.


What is more interesting is to notice that Kepler had a chance to see say 150000 stars and noticing something atypical in one of them ie some ephemeral event in a system that lasts only 50-100k years before its cleared (something that doesnt persist long enough i mean to be a near permanent feature of a system and therefore not observed before in other systems as standard known occurrence that is frequent).

For example some major collision that created a huge dust field (until it re-collapses to new planets) is easily possible to be observed if you look at 150000 systems (ie 10 bil y/10^5~10^5 years window rarity is doable if you look at so many systems).

Even a collision or close encounter between 2 solar systems might have happened to lead to such dusty look at large scale for a while. I mean if 2 stars pass very close to each other their solar systems essentially scatter and their gas giant planets may sometimes collide or their comets and other asteroids etc may scatter with each other leading to many collisions and creating a near term chaos that lasts a few hundred thousand years if not more. This is a very rare thing for sure but if you can observe a few hundred thousand solar systems it may be possible to see it happen (that 100k years window say) at some point somewhere. Such close encounter can scatter away the smaller star and essentially "steal" or scatter away after collisions from that passing star its planets. At some speed of 200km/sec after 100k years that star can be away many light years by now (ie to appear unrelated to the bigger system) but having lost some of its solar system if not all to the encounter leaving behind the mess that took place which still hasnt cleared. I am not familiar whether they could have studied such a possible event for fun in simulations that collide 2 solar systems to see what happens as function of time.

Its vastly more likely that a more basic natural phenomenon explains all this and not some high complexity process that hints aliens.