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Horizon strange signals from outer space BBC2 - just now

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  • If you think how long there has been life on this planet and what a small window that life has been sending signals outwards. And you consider how long we will be doing this for - we could quite easily blow ourselves up or destroy the planet within the next 100 to 200 years. Then you have to assume intelligent life will always happen and possibly die out, but from what I can see, the purpose of life is just to continue. Insects can be argued to be more successful than us because they have been around much longer. The intelligence we have has given us an evolutionary edge but we needed a bit of luck to get here. Strength and size could quite easily do the job and you don't get intelligent life! Maybe dinosaurs would have evolved into a similar intelligence to us though!

    Anyway, my point is, we are looking for life that may only be able to send out messages for a small fraction of time. Mathematics and common sense should tell us there is almost certainly intelligent life out there somewhere - we just don't know how prevelant it is. But another factor that needs to line up is time. For a signal to reach us from 100 light years away, it needed to be sent 100 years ago. If the last signal was sent by a civilisation went out 110 years ago, we would have missed it, even if it didn't miss us! So the same mathematics that tells us life is probable, also tells us we are unlikely to find it.

    It all depends on our understanding, if these extra terrestrial life forms are as advanced as us or marginally ahead, you could be right.

    I believe however that they would be well ahead of us, they have probably explored the stars and their solar systems... yet our scientists don't believe it possible, because it hasn't been done whilst originating from our planet yet.

    Our scientists didn't believe the Earth was round
    They didn't believe man could fly.
    They didn't think we could breach the planet's atmosphere
    They didn't think we could all have tiny computers in our pockets that we could make calls from or research things on a database accessible from anywhere with a data signal!

    Our scientists have generally always thought they had 'proven' things couldn't be done, before others discovered what could be.
  • One of the attractive things about finding life on another planet would be to have beings who outside of ourselves appreciate the achievements of mankind - giving us affrimation that they matter, when they probably don't. Of course any intelligence that finds us may be far more intelligent and look down on us. And intelligence at a slightly lower level won't care. Does a cow look up at an aircraft and think 'Wow'? Almost certainly not.
  • edited May 2017
    Never forget they're always watching you

    image
  • Dazzler21 said:

    If you think how long there has been life on this planet and what a small window that life has been sending signals outwards. And you consider how long we will be doing this for - we could quite easily blow ourselves up or destroy the planet within the next 100 to 200 years. Then you have to assume intelligent life will always happen and possibly die out, but from what I can see, the purpose of life is just to continue. Insects can be argued to be more successful than us because they have been around much longer. The intelligence we have has given us an evolutionary edge but we needed a bit of luck to get here. Strength and size could quite easily do the job and you don't get intelligent life! Maybe dinosaurs would have evolved into a similar intelligence to us though!

    Anyway, my point is, we are looking for life that may only be able to send out messages for a small fraction of time. Mathematics and common sense should tell us there is almost certainly intelligent life out there somewhere - we just don't know how prevelant it is. But another factor that needs to line up is time. For a signal to reach us from 100 light years away, it needed to be sent 100 years ago. If the last signal was sent by a civilisation went out 110 years ago, we would have missed it, even if it didn't miss us! So the same mathematics that tells us life is probable, also tells us we are unlikely to find it.

    It all depends on our understanding, if these extra terrestrial life forms are as advanced as us or marginally ahead, you could be right.

    I believe however that they would be well ahead of us, they have probably explored the stars and their solar systems... yet our scientists don't believe it possible, because it hasn't been done whilst originating from our planet yet.

    Our scientists didn't believe the Earth was round
    They didn't believe man could fly.
    They didn't think we could breach the planet's atmosphere
    They didn't think we could all have tiny computers in our pockets that we could make calls from or research things on a database accessible from anywhere with a data signal!

    Our scientists have generally always thought they had 'proven' things couldn't be done, before others discovered what could be.
    Then you have to answer the question, why would they bother? I don't know, just speculating. I think time is the biggest barrier - it has to align. We don't know if intelligent life has a lifespan - it is quite feasible that we will blow ourselves up sooner or later or kill the planet through polution. If that is the case, a civilisation that existed 50,000 or even 10,000 years ago may no longer be around!
  • I agree with the odds but until proved I'll hold fire, deep sea vents on earth point the way for me, whatever fluid they may be living in that's where I'd start looking, europa is where I start, but I'm not paying for it.

    Double check the Labour manifesto. If you earn over £80k, you might also pay for flying the Little Green Men in and giving them a nice cushy council house. ;)
    In Blackpool 72 I trust, any financial shenanigans he'll sort it out.
    You know it makes sense: )
  • Dazzler21 said:

    If you think how long there has been life on this planet and what a small window that life has been sending signals outwards. And you consider how long we will be doing this for - we could quite easily blow ourselves up or destroy the planet within the next 100 to 200 years. Then you have to assume intelligent life will always happen and possibly die out, but from what I can see, the purpose of life is just to continue. Insects can be argued to be more successful than us because they have been around much longer. The intelligence we have has given us an evolutionary edge but we needed a bit of luck to get here. Strength and size could quite easily do the job and you don't get intelligent life! Maybe dinosaurs would have evolved into a similar intelligence to us though!

    Anyway, my point is, we are looking for life that may only be able to send out messages for a small fraction of time. Mathematics and common sense should tell us there is almost certainly intelligent life out there somewhere - we just don't know how prevelant it is. But another factor that needs to line up is time. For a signal to reach us from 100 light years away, it needed to be sent 100 years ago. If the last signal was sent by a civilisation went out 110 years ago, we would have missed it, even if it didn't miss us! So the same mathematics that tells us life is probable, also tells us we are unlikely to find it.

    It all depends on our understanding, if these extra terrestrial life forms are as advanced as us or marginally ahead, you could be right.

    I believe however that they would be well ahead of us, they have probably explored the stars and their solar systems... yet our scientists don't believe it possible, because it hasn't been done whilst originating from our planet yet.

    Our scientists didn't believe the Earth was round
    They didn't believe man could fly.
    They didn't think we could breach the planet's atmosphere
    They didn't think we could all have tiny computers in our pockets that we could make calls from or research things on a database accessible from anywhere with a data signal!

    Our scientists have generally always thought they had 'proven' things couldn't be done, before others discovered what could be.
    Then you have to answer the question, why would they bother? I don't know, just speculating. I think time is the biggest barrier - it has to align. We don't know if intelligent life has a lifespan - it is quite feasible that we will blow ourselves up sooner or later or kill the planet through polution. If that is the case, a civilisation that existed 50,000 or even 10,000 years ago may no longer be around!
    I still think you/we need to think of it as spacetime. To the best of my knowledge, we are limited to seeing further back than about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, because that's as far back as we can trace light in the observable universe. Prior to that, it was one big concoction of plasma, like a ridiculously hot soup of energy.

    They are pushing the boundaries all the time to try and find out why gravity is the odd one out and cannot unify with the strong, the weak and the electromagnetic forces. It has been proposed that there is something to link it all together (the very big, to the very small), like string theory, and there are some theories that prior to this point in the universe's history or maybe before or at the point of the Big Bang, gravity may have had something linking it to the quantum level. I think they called them gravitons (ie like protons and neutrons).

    This also brings in things like the multiverse theory. Basically what I'm saying is, anything is up for grabs imo, even the very fabric of spacetime itself being warped, twisted and reconfigured, allowing other life to be able to traverse the universe etc

    Also think of the maths 14.8 billion years x the size of the universe

    I'm not an expert, and this is from memory of what I've read, so if I'm a little out on facts I apologise

  • It is all mind blowing - what we know now may of course change. What we do know is mind blowing in itself. We can travel forward in time (we are doing so now) but we can't travel backwards, but when we look into space we are looking back through time. Our undertsanding of time is in the context of our day to day lives, but there is so much more to know. But there will always be much more than we can ever know!
  • The universe and life is pretty mind blowing eh....
  • As Chris Kamara would say - 'unbelievable'
  • Just watched it and thought it was great. Very interesting.
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  • I've got no doubt that there'll be life out there and that much of it will be intelligent. I do find that stuff about Dyson Spheres rather fanciful though.
  • Thinking Man's Totty

    Not bad, but she's no Lucy Worsley (or Janina Ramirez... or Victoria Coren-Mitchell, for that matter.)
    Sorry to bring this thread back on subject, but I disagree AA.
  • What I don't agree with is that our technological growth will continue on this exponential curve, I think it will hit peaks and troughs and plateaus held back by limitations of size (eventually) but also resources, physics, and even our own brains, that's not barring war and disaster.
  • Can any lifeform honestly be described as intelligent if it caused all life to be wiped out by war or pollution?
  • There is definitely intelligent life in every solar system. The only known exceptions, recorded in the Universe Book of Strange Facts, are two small areas of Earth known as Bermondsey and South Norwood.
  • Can any lifeform honestly be described as intelligent if it caused all life to be wiped out by war or pollution?

    If it wiped itself out, there would be nobody to care if they were classed as intelligent or not!
  • Watched it on Iplayer last night, very interesting.

    I thought the point made about the time it takes signals from us to reach there destination, meaning, even if we did get a reply, we may not be around to receive it!
  • So if you want to be annoying, you could send a message out there like - Do you want to know the meaning of everything?
  • Thinking Man's Totty

    Not bad, but she's no Lucy Worsley (or Janina Ramirez... or Victoria Coren-Mitchell, for that matter.)
    I absolutely agree, she is much hotter than any of the others you mention.
  • sam3110 said:

    I agree with the odds but until proved I'll hold fire, deep sea vents on earth point the way for me, whatever fluid they may be living in that's where I'd start looking, europa is where I start, but I'm not paying for it.

    I'd imagine there is planets out there with life that is far more advanced than us, who probably know of our existence and haven't been able to reach us due to sheer distances involved. Our furthest probe is barely out of our own solar system, and has been travelling for a number of years. Hell, 500 years ago (which in the universe's lifespan is nothing at all) we were all still arguing that the world was flat and didn't know of the existence of land and people on our own frigging planet, let alone what's out there in the sky.

    There is life out there, it's just a matter of when we contact eachother, but it's almost certain that 2 different lifeforms within the universe would have contacted eachother by now, and possibly even met, whether in peace or in conflict
    Voyager 2 I think has travelled 11 light hours away from Earth and consider that the closest set of planets similar to ours and may consist of life is 40,000 light years away the chances of us getting there anytime soon are slim. But if we all got along and decided to put all our efforts into technology and science instead of getting more nuclear weapons than the other fella then we might just be able to keep the human race alive a little longer than it is expected right now.
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  • Discovering intelligent life elsewhere can only lead to more conflict.

    There are human divides between nations, colour, race and religion. In the UK we have division between Scotland and England, Liverpool and Manchester and the north and south (and that’s just the River Thames). There are gangs on estates who are divided by a few streets.

    No, lets just hope that intelligent life on another World just stay put.
  • Great programme last night about how they think the dinosaurs became extinct. Very watchable & very helpful that it starred Dr Alice Roberts

    meteorite ?
  • shine166 said:

    Great programme last night about how they think the dinosaurs became extinct. Very watchable & very helpful that it starred Dr Alice Roberts

    meteorite ?
    Yep, she's meaty alright :wink:
  • bobmunro said:

    sam3110 said:

    I agree with the odds but until proved I'll hold fire, deep sea vents on earth point the way for me, whatever fluid they may be living in that's where I'd start looking, europa is where I start, but I'm not paying for it.

    I'd imagine there is planets out there with life that is far more advanced than us, who probably know of our existence and haven't been able to reach us due to sheer distances involved. Our furthest probe is barely out of our own solar system, and has been travelling for a number of years. Hell, 500 years ago (which in the universe's lifespan is nothing at all) we were all still arguing that the world was flat and didn't know of the existence of land and people on our own frigging planet, let alone what's out there in the sky.

    There is life out there, it's just a matter of when we contact eachother, but it's almost certain that 2 different lifeforms within the universe would have contacted eachother by now, and possibly even met, whether in peace or in conflict
    Is there intelligent life out there? Almost certainly.

    Will we ever be able to make contact? Almost certainly not - unless Einstein was wrong about the maximum speed being the speed of light. Interstellar travel for any life form, however advanced, is probably impossible.
    Errr....Millennium Falcon?
    Stig said:

    I've got no doubt that there'll be life out there and that much of it will be intelligent. I do find that stuff about Dyson Spheres rather fanciful though.

    The Death Star?

    Come on chaps of course it's possible!
  • edited May 2017

    bobmunro said:

    sam3110 said:

    I agree with the odds but until proved I'll hold fire, deep sea vents on earth point the way for me, whatever fluid they may be living in that's where I'd start looking, europa is where I start, but I'm not paying for it.

    I'd imagine there is planets out there with life that is far more advanced than us, who probably know of our existence and haven't been able to reach us due to sheer distances involved. Our furthest probe is barely out of our own solar system, and has been travelling for a number of years. Hell, 500 years ago (which in the universe's lifespan is nothing at all) we were all still arguing that the world was flat and didn't know of the existence of land and people on our own frigging planet, let alone what's out there in the sky.

    There is life out there, it's just a matter of when we contact eachother, but it's almost certain that 2 different lifeforms within the universe would have contacted eachother by now, and possibly even met, whether in peace or in conflict
    Is there intelligent life out there? Almost certainly.

    Will we ever be able to make contact? Almost certainly not - unless Einstein was wrong about the maximum speed being the speed of light. Interstellar travel for any life form, however advanced, is probably impossible.
    Errr....Millennium Falcon?
    Stig said:

    I've got no doubt that there'll be life out there and that much of it will be intelligent. I do find that stuff about Dyson Spheres rather fanciful though.

    The Death Star?

    Come on chaps of course it's possible!
    When I was a kid they thought it was impossible to do the Kessel Run in less than 14 parsecs.
  • A parsec is a unit of length and it was 12 not 14.

    To do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs makes no sense, unless it means that the Kessel Run is usually only completed by taking a route that is more than 12 parsecs in distance.

    Which would mean Han found a short cut... All those Nerds out there that highlight it not making sense (normally), don't get that Han was boasting about his piloting ability and skill in finding shorter routes others cannot see/find.
  • Dazzler21 said:

    A parsec is a unit of length and it was 12 not 14.

    To do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs makes no sense, unless it means that the Kessel Run is usually only completed by taking a route that is more than 12 parsecs in distance.

    Which would mean Han found a short cut... All those Nerds out there that highlight it not making sense (normally), don't get that Han was boasting about his piloting ability and skill in finding shorter routes others cannot see/find.

    He probably fitted a turbo.
  • Dazzler21 said:

    A parsec is a unit of length and it was 12 not 14.

    To do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs makes no sense, unless it means that the Kessel Run is usually only completed by taking a route that is more than 12 parsecs in distance.

    Which would mean Han found a short cut... All those Nerds out there that highlight it not making sense (normally), don't get that Han was boasting about his piloting ability and skill in finding shorter routes others cannot see/find.

    A supernerd explained this to me once. Apparently the Kessel Run is a route that is supposed to go through a huge field of black holes. Han Solo found a shorter route by ducking and diving and flying closer to the black holes than anybody else - because he is an awesome pilot, Chewbacca is an awesome nav and the Millenium Falcon is an awesome superfast, black hole dodging spaceship.

    So, I guess Lucasarts patched this one up retrospectively in one of their novels/comics/animations somewhere.
  • Space Volcanoes tonight people
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