Fermi asked ...

[GreyGeek]

"Where are they?" in regard to intelligent life elsewhere in the observable universe.

The Drake Equation proposed that given the extreme number of possible sites for life to evolve even our own galaxy must be teeming with life.

A new study from Oxford University explores the Drake Equation but using coefficients determined by more realistic probabilities and concludes that humans are alone in our galaxy, the Milk Way.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf

[TWPonKubuntu]

And I thought I had already found alien life in other forums...

More seriously, from the prolog:

This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by
which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.

My interpretation of this statement is that it has been determined to be a waste of resources (time, money, equipment) to continue to hunt for extraterrestrial life, particularly advanced civilizations.

This is how science shoots itself in the foot... Tell yourself that your question (premise) is at fault and conclude that further research is not needed. QED, case closed. Nothing to see here, move along now...

[oshunluvr]

I picked up on something interesting along this vein in DC this weekend at a special exhibit in the National Art Gallery - "Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen". I think both of you would find it highly interesting.

I can't remember the authors name or this particular writing on display, but the gist of the text was that developing cultures had a fairly narrow band of time within which they could be contacted. Too early, and they wouldn't be receptive or able to receive or understand the communication nor be able to communicate extraterrestrially, too late and they would be to advanced to need or want the communication or might not want to communicate with us, as a lessor-developed species.

Drake's math not withstanding, it seems like a perfectly logical premise. If aliens came to visit us in ancient times, the event might end up as hieroglyphs on the walls of pyramids for example. If they observed recent or current activity - nuclear wars, for example - they are likely smart enough to sit back and watch to see if we kill ourselves off. If they wait it out, we survive and advance sufficiently beyond today's xenophobia and damaging protectionism to work together as a species (unlikely from today's viewpoint IMO) we might just find out we are in fact not alone.

Personally, I have gone back and forth on this issue. Astronauts are notably stable and well-vetted individuals (arguably no one more so) and have reported alien sightings while on the moon, or at least a presence. It's easily dismissed as hysteria but more difficult when it's not some back-woods hillbilly claiming abduction. It has been reported to me that the place known as "Area 51" exists - but it's not the location of alien evidence. That's elsewhere in the desert along with a few other things.

It is amazingly convenient that all the supposed alien ship crashes occurred in the 50's without benefit of ubiquitous cameras and the internet/twitter/etc. to spread the news. I also believe there's a strong likelihood that ours and other governments would keep any evidence well hidden and take extreme measures to do so. If for no other reason than to continue status quo so that the rich stay in charge and the military complex can continue to churn.

Can you imagine the immediate change in the world we know if an alien ship appeared off the coast of DC? All the B.S. about the stupid wall and damaging tariffs would cease in an instant.

[oshunluvr]

Anyway - I slide off-topic a bit. My point was that even with Drake's math there simply may not be a culture within our reach that also is timed correctly to allow communication.

[Qqmike]

a[n alien] culture within our reach that also is timed correctly to allow communication

And the other time direction, too: We have to communicate with ("catch") an advanced alien culture before it extinguishes (either through natural means (e.g., asteroid), culturally-induced means (e.g., pollution), or through some Idiot- Wall-Builder-in-Chief).

I've become a little skeptical of the use of the Drake equation, but I do understand how it is supposed to work.

Nonetheless, how about that recent find and conclusion about possible life (or conditions for life) on, was it, Jupiter's moon Europa?

[SpecialEd]

A>>>>>>>
Nonetheless, how about that recent find and conclusion about possible life (or conditions for life) on, was it, Jupiter's moon Europa?

Saturn's moon Enceladus?

[dibl]

...
I also believe there's a strong likelihood that ours and other governments would keep any evidence well hidden and take extreme measures to do so...

This would be the weak link in an argument for discovery of alien life. Having worked for the U.S. military for about 12 years. and skipping any discussion of security clearances that I may or may not have held, I know of zero evidence that the government is capable of concealing such a secret. If humans are involved in classifying information and storing it, then it inevitably leaks out, sooner or later. What secrets from the 1940s and 1950s still exist? None, I think.

[SpecialEd]

>>>>>What secrets from the 1940s and 1950s still exist? None, I think.

How would we know? That's why they're called secrets.

[Qqmike]

SpecialEd, maybe I was thinking of this story:

Chasing Signs of Life, Curiosity Rover Discovers Organic Building Blocks on Mars
https://www.popularmechanics.com/spa...locks-on-mars/

[jlittle]

I don't like the simplistic mathematics used in the Drake equation. Sure, similar approaches have been successful in producing useful results in other areas, but when there's several multiplying factors for things where we've "no idea" the error bar for the order of magnitude balloons out.

I look hard at the data points given by our own planet. It's taken four billion years to produce the homo genus; but homo species spread across the world in a short time, from the arctic to deserts, and across wide oceans. Before us there's no trace of it happening before.

However, life appeared here suspiciously early, if the biogenic interpretations of stromatolites are correct. I also look at the chemical machinery of all life here and think it looks too inelegant even for evolution. The long time for multicellular life to appear doesn't fit well.

Regards, John Little

[SpecialEd]

SpecialEd, maybe I was thinking of this story:

Chasing Signs of Life, Curiosity Rover Discovers Organic Building Blocks on Mars
https://www.popularmechanics.com/spa...locks-on-mars/

Yes, but if we're talking about moons that begin with E: Saturn moon Enceladus offers 'tantalizing' new hint it's habitable


It's all interesting stuff. My second, auxillary, backup son, has a paying internship this summer collecting data from the Kepler satellite which is searching for exoplanets. (I don't pretend to understand everything he says.).

[oshunluvr]

Well, alien life vs. communication with alien life - big gap there.

Don, I too worked for the guvment my whole adult life (and still do via contract ) with a clearance or two of my own and there's a few secrets still there. Still, it seems more likely that "the men in black helicopters" might control that sort of info, over and above what the folks in elected office might. Of course, you have to let a little conspiracy theory in there to make it work.

[dibl]

Well, alien life vs. communication with alien life - big gap there.

Touche!

But seriously, government employees are just average people with feet of clay. They are far from perfect secret-keepers. Ask Wikileaks and their little buddies.

[GreyGeek]

The original article points out that as first formulated the Drake equation was simplistic. But, after 50 years of data accumulation it is possible to compute more realistic values for those coefficients. The result is that with coefficients that match today's measurements of such likelihoods, the existence of space traveling aliens in other parts of the Milky Way are close to, if not, zero.

Basically, as an object containing mass is accelerated closer to the speed of light the energy input is converted to mass, not speed, and the speed becomes asymptotic with the speed of light, C, a constant in any frame of reference. That makes the speed of light the basic speed limit of the universe for objects made of matter. However, Alcubierre's version of Einstein's Metric bends space-time instead of accelerating the mass of the ship. While matter cannot go faster than, or even as fast as, light, space-time can be moved at any speed. According to the Big Bang, space has spread out faster than the speed of light for billions of light years in all directions while time on Earth passed through only thousands of years. While space-time is expanding at rates far in excess of the speed of light, matter trapped in space-time is not, relative to the local space-time it is in.

I was optimistic when Dr. Harold "Sonny" White first proposed a form of Einstein's Metric for which energy requirement dropped from the total mass-energy of a planet the size of Jupiter, as required by the Alcubierre drive, down to the mass-energy of Voyager-1 (700 kilograms). But, there was a lot of hand-waving when discussing how he was going to fuel his craft. We say “mass-energy,” because no one quite knows how to fuel an Alcubierre type drive, with some research suggesting that it might require more energy than the mass of the observable universe, or possibly negative amounts of energy, i.e., negative energy, or Dark Energy. IF we used antimatter, after getting its cost of production down to $10 Billion per gram, it would take the entire economic output of the entire earth for the next forty years to fund the fuel requirements. If we could get it down to $10 Million per gram then the entire economic output of the Earth for 14 days would be required. If you are equating all that fuel hypothesizing with Unicorn fart fuel you are not alone.

The theory that life arose from inorganic matter 4-5 billion years ago from primordial ooze, and intelligent life evolved just a few hundred thousand years ago, causes many to speculate that intelligent life could have evolved 5-6 Billion years ago in some other part of the universe. Or 6-7 Billion years ago in yet another part. Taking that logic to its conclusion one could hypothesize that life could have arisen any time during the last 12 billion years ago in an infinite number of places in this Universe, which contains trillions of galaxies. Each civilization would pass though the same development phases we have. At our present technological stage we have mastery over the electromagnetic spectrum and are monitoring space signals on all conceivable wavelengths in hope of hearing signs of another technological civilization. That includes the optical portion of that spectrum, which allows us to view events even in other galaxies. Right now we are witnessing events that took place in the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago, and in our own galaxy events that took place tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.

What we can say is that we are not witnessing any civilization passing through its RF emission phase at the current time. We are not seeing any laser light, a sure sign of an advanced civilization, being emitted from any stellar body within millions of light years, radio or TV signals (or something similar) within thousands of light years, etc... So the question is still "Where are they?".

There is even a bigger question. The Big Bang began at a single point in space, smaller than the point of a pin, at a single point in time, out of nothing. Ex Nihilo. Matter from nothing. Energy from nothing. Physics from nothing.

For matter to accelerate requires a force. A Prime Mover. God? In his book, "A Brief History of Time", Hawkins admitted that physics was an "admixture of science and philosophy". Specifically, the Cosmological Constant, which states that the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic. Homogeneous because no matter which direction we look, at a sufficiently large scale, the universe appears to have the same properties at every point and follows all the laws of Physics that we know. An observer anywhere in the universe will see what we see and observe the same laws of physics we observe. Isotropic implies uniformity in all directions, but that is being called into question. Karl Popper calls both of these terms "dogmas" and not facts. He's not alone. Scientific American profiled the Stephen Hawking co-author, cosmologist George Ellis, quoting him as stating that:

“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds... What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”

To avoid the problem of a "Prime Mover" (i.e. God) Hawkins and others worked on a different theory involving more than four dimensions. It sprang from string theory and after several iterations it became known as the "M-Theory". ("M" stands for "Membrane"). From it physics now preaches the "multiverse". When you, or anyone else, comes to a decision point about anything, at any time, and you are faced with two or more choices, M-Theory says that your life continues along one choice and another you continues along the second choice. By choosing you've created two universes where only one existed before. So, everything, no matter how improbably, no matter how large the odds against it, becomes possible. Ergo, a prime mover is not needed. The odds of a strand of RNA evolving out of a primordial soup is 1/10^60th? No matter. At each power of ten a choice is available for both a yes and a no, and given enough time the RNA strand appears in some version of our Universe.

M-Theory poses an even bigger problem. It cannot be falsified. It cannot be tested. Physic is a science based on taking measurements of collected or observed matter at rest or in action. We cannot leave our universe to collect matter in some other universe for testing or measurement purposes. Our observable universe has no walls against which an outside universe could "bump" into, leaving marks of its presence, although some claim they see such. We can't even collect Dark Energy or Dark Matter in this universe. Dark Matter supposedly does not interact with normal matter yet we surmise its presence to explain observations that stars in the outer edges of rotating galaxies are rotating faster than they should, based on Newton's and Kepler's laws of motion, because of the presence of Dark Matter, which does not interact with normal matter. Confusing? You are not alone.

Most scientists want to find life on Mars or some other body in this solar system. Most are rooting for the existence of aliens and UFOs for the same reason. The same reason M-Theory was created.

A couple decades ago I was setting in my living room while a severe thunderstorm was occurring outside. Suddenly a bolt of lightening hit the light pole just outside the corner of my house. Instantly a bright reddish-orange ball plasma, about a foot in diameter, flashed out of the wall socket and slowly drifted across the room toward me. As it traveled through the air for about 10 feet it slowly settled (I would have thought that it would have risen) and then touched the carpet about 2 feet from me. It left a singe mark in the carpet. The electrical cord connecting the Thomas Grandfather Clock plugged to that outlet had melted, leaving its stench in the air. That was the first and only time I've ever seen what has been called "ball lightening".

While I was a freshman at college I was being "initiated" into a fraternity. It involved playing capture the flag. To avoid damaging our clothes we stripped to our shorts and played the game that way. About an hour into the game we were all brought up short by the passage of a long dark tube flying silently about 150-200' over head. I estimated it to be about 12' in diameter and about 60' long. It had some ports along the side which glowed orange red. We all grabbed our clothes, jumped into our cars and drove back to campus AFAP. From 1961 to 1982 that was my UFO story. While taking flight training I was passing over that same lake and mentioned to my flight instructor what I had seen 20 years before. He pulled out the Jensen flight plates and pointed to a track called the "Oil Burner Route". It was the route taken by low flying B-52's practicing under the radar penetration techniques using specific routes in the midwest part of the USA. The lights were blacked out and interior lights were red to avoid light blindness, so the windows glowed red. My UFO tale evaporated. IMO, tales of aliens will evaporate too, as we realize the impossibility of faster than light travel even by bending space-time.

Also, IMO, all the videos of UFO (that are not faked) are merely of craft created by one of the major world governments. Aurora, which produces "donut on a rope" contrails and shows as a black triangle with three glowing emitters on its underbelly, at night, is evidence of a craft that can hover or travel beyond Mach 4 at altitude, a speed reached by the SR-72, as Oshunluver related in another post.

[Qqmike]

GreyGeek: For matter to accelerate requires a force.

I should re-read some of the material I have here, but some of this business (e.g., inflation) has to do with tapping gravity (= negative energy) as a force source.