NASA: Countdown to the Very First CONTACT !
- Thread starter addictionary
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You seriously misunderstood the quote. She's talking about LIFE, not about intelligent life.
Most scientists would probably feel that the chances of life elsewhere in the galaxy are good. And the chances that life exists close enough to us that we will be able to observe such life also seems pretty good. But the question of whether there is any other INTELLIGENT life in the galaxy is one where there is absolutely no consensus. And no reputable scientist that I know of feels like we'll be contacting other intelligent life in the next 20 years.
addictionary
Well-Known Member
Thanks for spoiling the hype colty. Now the ETs will think "Man these guys are no fun. Let's bail."
The significant thing is to find life. If life evolved independently more than once in a single galaxy, then obviously intelligent life can be expected to have evolved somewhere. I'm talking about animal intelligence here, and not human level intelligence. The former is inevitable if multicellular life exists. Even human level intelligence becomes very likely if we find complex animals in the Milky Way.
Hotdog
Well-Known Member
What do you consider "relatively close" ?
The nearest star to earth is 4.24 light years away. That means that even if we could find a way to travel at the speed if light, it would still take 4.24 years to get there. And that's just talking about the NEAREST star.
What that means is, we either are going to have to figure out make worm holes, or we probably aren't going to visit any planets outside our solar system ever. That's the cold stark reality. I don't think that any scientists believe we can get solid matter to move at the speed of light either.
will be awkward when they spot us and start invading us lol
Ever is a pretty long time. Imagine what the world is going to be like 20 years from now. How about a 1000? How about a trillion? If humanity survives long enough, technical knowledge will make current hurdles trivial. For example, if you can beam the information that makes you up directly into the desired location to be reconstructed, you could travel across the universe instantly (subjectively). Even if it takes a million objective years, what does it matter to a species with level of technical sophistication? And that's without going into things outside of known laws of physics, like wormholes.
Can you explain this from your high level perspective? I just cannot wrap my mind around the idea of anyone with even a cursory modern education not thinking intelligent life elsewhere is a guarantee. I understand that it's highly technical and all but if you could give the basics of the other side's argument I'd appreciate it.
I know you didn't ask me, but since I too am a science guy, I think I'll butt in.
Why would it be a guarantee? We don't have enough information to make that assessment. We only have evidence of life on Earth. The other planets in the solar system seem barren, but one can hope we'll find evidence of microbial life at one point. But so far, we only have Earth. Now on Earth, life seems to have only happened once. All of life on Earth descends from the same common ancestor. Why did life only evolve once? Either because those are the only viable self-replicating molecules able to sustain the level of complexity required for life, or that life evolved more than once but only a single branch won out.
In the case of the former, life would need very specific conditions to come into being and survive long enough for natural selection to take hold. If the latter is true, we would simply have no idea how common life is. We wouldn't have the data on the other possibilities. I personally think the first scenario is more likely. Assuming that it is, then life, at the bacterial level should exist elsewhere. We know that some aminoacids exist in nature. We found them on comets and in the dust of faraway nebulae. We also know that there are literally billions of Earth like planets in the galaxy, and that a portion of them is in the so-called Goldilocks Zone, with temperatures that allow for liquid water and complex chemistry to exist.
If I was a betting man, I would bet simple life exists in the galaxy. But it brings us to the next level; multicellular life. How easy is that? Single cell life existed on Earth for 2.5 BILLION years, before multicellular life decided to make an appearance, less than a billion years ago. Why did it so long? Would the process take less or more time elsewhere? If it's more, then we run the risk of expanding sun making temperature too hot for complexity (as will happen to our own solar system). Even if bacteria exists in the galaxy, who is to say bacterial planets survived in the right conditions long enough for more complex forms to emerge?
And it brings us to the last level; human intelligence. This also happened only once on Earth. In a billion years of animal life, a technological species evolved once. All of those extinction events and iteration produced a single human-level species. What are the chances of that happening? That's unknown.
It is important to keep in mind that only the galaxy is relevant, not the universe at large. Anything beyond the galaxy is too far for communication, or even detection. What are the chances another human-like creature evolved in the 200 billion or so stars in the galaxy? It is far from guaranteed.
Thank you.
I wonder the same thing myself. Convergence seems to stop at intelligence, which is counter intuitive to evolutionary theory. I expect Mermaids dammit!
What Siro said. You may also be interested in reading about the Drake Equation, which is fairly useless for numerical estimates but which might give you a sense of what might be required for intelligent life to exist elsewhere in the galaxy. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
