Oxford scientists say: Looks like no other intelligent life in whole universe (but keep looking)

[Ursa major]

But again -- am I the only person here intrigued by the question -- But what if civilization survives for 300 years and in all that time there is no evidence (as there is none now) for such "aliens" existing? -- given the expectations that people have?

I think civilisations have survived for centuries, if not millennia, situations where people have deeply believed things that have turned out not to be true, or even close to the truth.

(Note that I'm specifically talking about practical things, e.g. things that science has discovered/uncovered over the centuries, not anything metaphysical, as we don't discuss the latter on the Chrons.)

 

[thunderbyrd]

you know, there are some who insist there's not even any intelligent life here. some days i agree.

 

[Extollager]

PM, thanks for those thoughts, but I'm still curious about thoughts if -- for all our technology, all our mathematical reasoning -- hundreds of years from now "we" still have nothing certain about the matter one way or the other: no reason absolutely to rule out the existence of intelligent life elsewhere, combined with absolutely no evidence that it exists. I think the majority of educated people (the people who make decisions about how tax money will be used, the people who appear in highbrow talk shows, the people who write for the upper middlebrow magazines and who write the school books) internalize this feeling: that all reasonable questions have answers if we just try hard enough, spend enough, and are patient enough. But what if the physical universe simply does not give us the answer on this, as years and even centuries roll past? What if we run up at last against a stubborn limitation on our achievement? We accept that we will die, but can we be content to accept leaving this question of "life in the universe" alone? Might we not be nagged by the idea that we mustn't give up in case just a little more money, a little more trying, a little more patience and we would get the answer? Wouldn't the people who say "Come on, we've spent enough time and money on this" be regarded as anti-intellectual? But how would we ever know when the time had come to give up?

 

[Extollager]

I think civilisations have survived for centuries, if not millennia, situations where people have deeply believed things that have turned out not to be true, or even close to the truth.

(Note that I'm specifically talking about practical things, e.g. things that science has discovered/uncovered over the centuries, not anything metaphysical, as we don't discuss the latter on the Chrons.)

Yes, understood, same here. But -- please read the message I just sent, but also this one. I'm thinking there is this "narrative" that is told and retold endlessly in a thousand forms lowbrow and highbrow, that we're the animal that finds out, and we do find out -- but if this intelligent life question just stumps us? What will we do if we are so severely challenged about that narrative -- after, say, 300 more years of trying to find the answer? And yet, personally, I think that is, under the thought-procedures here, quite possible. Will we have ever-better tools for space exploration and ever more accumulated effort to find the answer, and no answer? Would people in general be able to live contentedly with, at last, the conclusion that we just don't know & can't say, so far as we can tell?

 

[Ursa major]

What will we do if we are so severely challenged about that narrative

You talk about it as if it's some sort of universal and/or high-priority thing -- either amongst the population or those who run the place (business and government) -- rather than a relatively few people speculating about it (whether seriously or in aid of their fiction preferences).

It isn't something that's in the news on a regular basis**; governments do not have major departments/ministries considering the implications, the benefits, and/or the downsides of there being other intelligent beings in the universe. It isn't something that is, in serious terms, in everyone's thoughts (even among people who post here, even at the backs of their minds).

Frankly, the most challenging thing about the possible existence of other intelligent lifeforms would be if they rolled up here, unexpectedly (because they would be unexpected, by just about everyone).


The closest we get to anything like this is people wondering about just how intelligent some of the other creatures with which we "share" this world might be.


** - Indeed, such things (even pale shadows of this) that get in the news are sometimes treated in a jocular manner, as if some or other TV show had proved to be, in some or other way, vaguely predictive. Another sign might be the high regard in which science fiction has been held... or not....

 

[Vertigo]

PM, thanks for those thoughts, but I'm still curious about thoughts if -- for all our technology, all our mathematical reasoning -- hundreds of years from now "we" still have nothing certain about the matter one way or the other: no reason absolutely to rule out the existence of intelligent life elsewhere, combined with absolutely no evidence that it exists. I think the majority of educated people (the people who make decisions about how tax money will be used, the people who appear in highbrow talk shows, the people who write for the upper middlebrow magazines and who write the school books) internalize this feeling: that all reasonable questions have answers if we just try hard enough, spend enough, and are patient enough. But what if the physical universe simply does not give us the answer on this, as years and even centuries roll past? What if we run up at last against a stubborn limitation on our achievement? We accept that we will die, but can we be content to accept leaving this question of "life in the universe" alone? Might we not be nagged by the idea that we mustn't give up in case just a little more money, a little more trying, a little more patience and we would get the answer? Wouldn't the people who say "Come on, we've spent enough time and money on this" be regarded as anti-intellectual? But how would we ever know when the time had come to give up?

Of course, if there is no other life or intelligent life in the universe we will never be able to rule it out as it is effectively impossible to prove that there is no other life. So if there is no other life we can never know either way. Consequently there will always be that doubt until/if we find other life. It is to all intents and purposes impossible for us to ever prove that we are alone.

 

[Vertigo]

Probability is a slippery beast if you cannot define what the absolute probability of something is. And 'as good as' infinite is by definition infinitely short of infinite. So if the probability of something is say one in a trillion trillion trillion, and there are in the, actually finite, universe say a trillion trillion trillion environments that could support life then it is highly likely we are alone. If there are two trillion trillion trillion environments then maybe there are two. And so on. The problem is we have no way of knowing how many there are since the majority of the universe is unseeable being too far away for the speed of light to allow us to see it. And with only one example of life to work with it is literally impossible for us to estimate the chances of it occurring.

We will always have this dilemma, unless and until we discover other life, but even then we can never see beyond the limits imposed by the speed of light and the age of the universe. So until/if we discover other life, belief in the existence of other life will always be faith not science, never mind that of intelligent life.

 

[RJM Corbet]

In my opinion all our wonderful spacecraft and microscopes and telescopes and colliders and so on are really just ingenious extensions of our own five human animal senses. Ingenious and wonderful they truly are. As is the ingenuity and incredible intelligence of those who design and create them.

However to me there is no reason to assume the universe limits itself to what our human animal senses --and by extension our instruments -- are able to perceive. There may be life all around us, that we are not able to recognize as life, because there is no way for us to perceive that it is alive.

To me the planet earth is a living entity, that supports our life as humans as well as all other myriad living creatures -- as are probably most of the other planets in the universe -- and perhaps each with its own forms of life, but which we as human creatures will never be able to perceive as such.

And of course it does not follow that some of these life forms are unable to perceive us. There may be countless other varieties of higher life than man? And some that are able to reveal themselves to other more subtle human senses -- beings that are not limited by time and space.

Should we expect other intelligent life to truck around in clunky meat bodies and mechanical spacecraft limited to conditions of space and time?

 

[Extollager]

You talk about it as if it's some sort of universal and/or high-priority thing

Well, specifically I was speculating about people living several centuries from now. I'm assuming an accumulating investment in efforts to find ET life, and I see it as probable that belief in it will grow since, for one thing, there is so much popular entertainment, documentaries, etc. on the concept. But I wonder about the impact even 50 years from now if there remains zero evidence for it.

 

[Ursa major]

I'm assuming an accumulating investment in efforts to find ET life

Why would you do that?

I can see various scientists being interested in such things over the long term -- scientists being scientists (but then, budgetary limitations are budgetary limitations) -- but those scientists don't constitute a significant enough proportion of the general public to lead to people in general entering, some 300 years hence, a malaise** if no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere*** is found by then.


** - Even in Malaysia....

*** - "Elsewhere" being our local portion of the universe, given the huge size of the universe as a whole, and the restrictions imposed by the relatively low speed of light.

 

[paranoid marvin]

No human has left Earth's orbit since 1972. That's more than half a CENTURY ago. How are we supposed to reach Mars in the next 50 years?

Answer: we don't.

 

[Wayne Mack]

To me, there is evidence that life evolving to intelligence has low likelihood. Dinosaurs were on the Earth for about 170 million years without any development of intelligence. This seems to indicate non-intelligent life can be a very stable pattern. It took some very precise conditions to reset the dominant life forms and create conditions for a more intelligent animal branch to arise. lt is only mammals that moved beyond the intelligence of crows.

 

[Ursa major]

How are we supposed to reach Mars in the next 50 years?

Does it matter if they reach the planet's surface in one piece (or, if they do, that they're alive)...?

 

[Extollager]

Why would you do that?

I can see various scientists being interested in such things over the long term -- scientists being scientists (but then, budgetary limitations are budgetary limitations) -- but those scientists don't constitute a significant enough proportion of the general public to lead to people in general entering, some 300 years hence, a malaise** if no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere*** is found by then.


** - Even in Malaysia....

*** - "Elsewhere" being our local portion of the universe, given the huge size of the universe as a whole, and the restrictions imposed by the relatively low speed of light.

I said "accumulating" investment simply because that's what we have. Every year money is spent on SETI, so in a year there's that much more that's been added to the total investment since who knows when? Likewise there's an ever-greater body of popular entertainment that's dealt with the theme. Likewise there are more people who report a belief in ET for the first time. No doubt some people who used to believe in ET don't any more; I would be interested in why those people let go of their earlier belief. Maybe things are different where you live, but in the United States you see headlines every few weeks, it seems, along the lines of "Scientists Say Distant Planet May Harbor Life." There's an enormous accumulation of such reports, and books, and movies, and so on. It may be that many scientists think the chief importance of Hubble is to gain knowledge of the early universe, but I'd betcha that for a lot of people the big deal there is that we are looking ever harder for some kind of evidence of, or at least encouragement for the belief in, ET. This time five years hence there'll be that much more investment accumulated, presumably.

 

[Extollager]

No human has left Earth's orbit since 1972. That's more than half a CENTURY ago. How are we supposed to reach Mars in the next 50 years?

Answer: we don't.

No indeed. Millions of people watch sf movies with convenient wormholes and so on. But the brutal fact is that a hundred years from now we probably won't even have gone to Mars. Yet many people probably think we'll go to the stars. I think we never will. But what about the people over the coming decades who realize that that is indeed the case. Earth + moon -- that's it, friends, and that's all it's ever going to be.

The Real Problem With a Human Trip to Mars: Radiation

The Real Problem With a Human Trip to Mars: Radiation

www.discovermagazine.com

 

[Ursa major]

I said "accumulating" investment simply because that's what we have. Every year money is spent on SETI, so in a year there's that much more that's been added to the total investment since who knows when?

Of course more money is spent if the spending continues over a number of years, but would it grow as a proportion of scientific spending (let alone the total spending of the world's population)? Is that at all likely?

If the spending on the search for alien intelligence was exponential (and continued being so over the decades and centuries), you might have a point, but why would it be exponential? Indeed, the less success there was in finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the less likely money would be spent on the endeavour... and as you contend that extraterrestrial intelligent life would not be discovered during those 300 years, you really should build into your calculations the feedback that such a continuing failure would likely deliver (long before any malaise set in beyond the scientists seeking grants to continue looking for aliens).

But really, you are inflating a tiny (barely more than infinitesimal) portion of scientific endeavour -- which covers a huge and disparate member of scientific fields, from pharmaceuticals to weapons development and all points either between or not -- into some sort of "popular" phenomenon.

 

[paranoid marvin]

It could be argued that the reason we stopped going to the Moon was lack of public interest. NASA is funded by the will of politicians who (in the main) desire the popularity of their voters. It was hard to justify the incredible cost of Moon landings to the American public now that they had achieved their goal.

Fast forward 50 years, and (apparently) the cost of a manned mission to Mars is $100-$500 billion. And it wouldn't surprise me if they were conservative estimates. The cost of the Mars Exploration rovers is a fraction of this amount, but will return far more ingmfornation about the planet than any brief human landing.

It simply isn't  worth sending a human to Mars, both in terms of cost, risk and the potential returns of such a venture. Yes, there is the prestige value of sticking a flag on the surface and declaring 'we got there first'. But when voters see just how much money it costs, and how much it will continue to cost, and the reaction may be somewhat different.

 

[Extollager]

Of course more money is spent if the spending continues over a number of years, but would it grow as a proportion of scientific spending (let alone the total spending of the world's population)? Is that at all likely?

If the spending on the search for alien intelligence was exponential (and continued being so over the decades and centuries), you might have a point, but why would it be exponential? Indeed, the less success there was in finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the less likely money would be spent on the endeavour... and as you contend that extraterrestrial intelligent life would not be discovered during those 300 years, you really should build into your calculations the feedback that such a continuing failure would likely deliver (long before any malaise set in beyond the scientists seeking grants to continue looking for aliens).

But really, you are inflating a tiny (barely more than infinitesimal) portion of scientific endeavour -- which covers a huge and disparate member of scientific fields, from pharmaceuticals to weapons development and all points either between or not -- into some sort of "popular" phenomenon.

My concern is with public interest and public perception, kind of a sociological science fiction procedure. But perhaps this discussion has run its course.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The science is that allowing (obviously) for abiogenesis and the consequent spread of bacterial life, the jump from bacteria to eukaryote by endosymbiosis between bacteria and archaea is hugely unlikely.

It is regarded as an absolutely unique and one-time-only never repeated event upon the planet earth. Bacteria and archaea swarm the earth in billions of trillions -- so why isn't it happening all the time?

I'm sure I've read recently that this has happened multiple times throughout the history of life, so far as we understand it - I'll keep an eye out for the reference. We have both chloroplasts and mitochondria as capture events for starters.

Also, I'm increasing getting the impression that speciation among microorganisms is very much a forced issue of categorization - that they spend so much time sharing genes that we may not be able to tell the difference between one single individual being captured by symbiosis or entire different populations, especially if the captured microorganism lose genes over time that would otherwise differentiate them. In other words, there is never a "single capture event" but instead many events over time of a shared set of genes from different populations, and that speciation among prokaryotes is a very fluid concept.

In fact, I think we profoundly misunderstand the history of life - that the story of early life is effectively about the evolution of a soup of proteins, into a soup of RNA, then a soup of DNA. It's only when we get into the hyper-specialization of advanced eukaryotes that it becomes less obvious, but even then the issue of gene transfer is still an active mechanism. I think the problem may be simply because humans are so used to defining the world in terms of hyper-specialized of advanced eukaryotes that our frame of references fails to account to less specialized and more basic prokaryotes, and our bias ends up blinding us.

What puzzles me at the moment is how the host cell replicates the captured one in more advanced eukaryotes, because so far as I understand it the captured one certainly isn't replicating with its own DNA - that instead, the host cell is replicating it using its own DNA, as if the host cell were nothing more than an organelle. For example, I don't believe seeds contain chloroplasts in their cells, so the cells in seeds have to build them, along with the chloroplast DNA. I really need to research this properly, though.

belief in the existence of other life will always be faith not science

To me it's the other way around - that we have such a strong cultural bias into thinking humans and the place we live is so special that believing life could only exist on Earth is the greater act of Faith. After all, life on Earth seems to be following a perfectly normal set of physical laws, that to argue life doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe would be effectively stating that the same laws of physics don't exist elsewhere in the universe!

 

[paranoid marvin]

Why would you do that?

I can see various scientists being interested in such things over the long term -- scientists being scientists (but then, budgetary limitations are budgetary limitations) -- but those scientists don't constitute a significant enough proportion of the general public to lead to people in general entering, some 300 years hence, a malaise** if no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere*** is found by then.


** - Even in Malaysia....

*** - "Elsewhere" being our local portion of the universe, given the huge size of the universe as a whole, and the restrictions imposed by the relatively low speed of light.

Scientists have families to feed and lives to live. It would be interesting to know how many of them have devoted their lives to finding ET, and how just want a well paid job. If you can combine the two then great, but I suspect that most would prioritise the latter over the former.

In relation to the speed of light and the distance between planets, stars and galaxies. It's impractical for the two to co-exist; like having an empty motorway with a 2 mph speed restriction in place. What's the point in having so a wide, expansive universe if you can only ever stare up at it?

Which (without any kind of scientific reasoning) gives me hope that there is some way to get from A to B faster; we just have to find out what it is. And once we do, everything will change.