Outer Space Thread

[go birds]

arthur dent the extremely insightful wet blanket :/

[Jocephus]

[jim]

I'd bet intelligent life is extremely rare - take a look at our own planet. Take all the organisms that are alive or ever have been alive, add up those years, use that as a denominator and put the number of years that "intelligent" (meaning can build civilizations) life has been on this earth and it's pretty close to 0. Sharks and cockroaches have been around for along time because natural selection seems to like those constructions. They will be around a long time from now as well. Humans? I think we are a blip on the time scale, I think we will be gone long before alot of those species.

This article here puts the odds of civilized life at 20% on planets that form life, which I think is far too high:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/space/ ... -odds1.htm

Instead of .2, try using .00002 in that equation - which seems to be about the odds based on our evidence on earth, and you get 1 in the galaxy. Us.

I think there is very likely complex life in the universe, I just question whether or not they are what we would call intelligent.

[Arthur Dent]

I think getting shark level intelligence is probably a lot more of a barrier than going from that to human intelligence. Intelligence is definitely not the most favored strategy in natural selection, but so long as there is a niche for the approach, it will probably get tried.

[jim]

No clue if this is true, but my HS biology teacher said that if you put each organism on a scale of least complex to most complex, an earth worm would be the midpoint.

[pioneer98]

Getting a bit off topic but I find the idea of "eusocial" species pretty fascinating. It might also be necessary for intelligent life resembling ours to exist. Eusocial means they have a home they defend, they work together and have roles within kind of a caste system - like Queen bees vs worker bees. People debate whether humans fit this strict definition but we definitely work together and have class levels (we even had kings and queens not that long ago). In any case, it seems like the most intelligent animals that did not have this social aspect were the neanderthals or around that level. To become more intelligent than that, they had to start working together more. For intelligent aliens to build something that we'd recognize as a civilization, they'd probably have to have this social aspect, too. Otherwise they'd just be small groups of random individuals roaming and hunting or something, like neanderthals or lions or whatever.

[Numbers]

water ice found on Pluto.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/6 ... arf-planet

[JCShutout]

I'm curious too. I wonder what, if any, evidence of human life would remain hundreds of millions after humans ceased to exist. I'd guess the pyramids, maybe, which is crazy if you think about how advanced we seem to think we are while still not being able to build anything nearly as survivable as that which they built centuries ago.

I'm reading Randle Munroe's What If (Great book btw if you love http://www.xkcd.com) and he either theorizes or cites someone who says that hundreds of millions of years from now, the only evidence of us left on Earth will be a weird-seeming layer of plastic/oil from our time here. Makes sense given how much oil/plastic we have everywhere.

I doubt the pyramids would be much more than rocky hills hundreds of millions of years from now. Think Cahokia, but sand storms.

[pioneer98]

The Most Mysterious Star In Our Galaxy

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

[IMADreamer]

It's probably not aliens but it's interesting.