Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Discovery has a theory as to why we haven’t discovered evidence of intelligent alien civilisations; According to Discovery, the handful of planets which have just the right characteristics for life to thrive, are eventually destroyed by a technological environmental cataclysm.
Why Can’t We Find Aliens? Climate Change Killed Them
As we look deeper into our galaxy for signs of extraterrestrial life, we keep drawing a blank. Does this mean life on Earth is unique and we’re the only ones out here? Or could it just mean that all the aliens are dead?
…
“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra, lead author of the paper. “Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”
“Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable,” he said.
…
But now we have an intelligent lifeform that emerged as a dominant force, interrupting and exploiting our planet’s natural cycles. Humanity has inadvertently created a new bottleneck — let’s call it the “Industrial Bottleneck” — by causing irreversible changes to our delicate biosphere. Now, we’re seeing rapid impacts on our civilization as the balance in our climate is knocked off-kilter by the inexorable rise of greenhouse gases from industrial processes and energy needs.
Are these bottlenecks common throughout the cosmos? If an extraterrestrial lifeform “makes the grade” and survives the Gaian Bottleneck, does it then face another existential threat from their evolution into a industrial civilisation?
For now, this is all speculation, but what’s clear from observations of our own planet, is that the mother of all existential self-inflicted bottlenecks is on the horizon and, unless we find a way of reversing the damage we’ve caused to our environment, it seems we’ll quickly become just another lifeform that didn’t make the grade.
Read more: http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/why-cant-we-find-aliens-climate-change-killed-them-160121.htm
There’s evidence that intelligence is rare, either that or they are doing a very good job of hiding themselves. If even one other intelligence arose in our Galaxy at least half a million years ago, then where are they?.
However, a hypothesis of fiery death through technological climate apocalypse simply doesn’t make sense. In a few decades, a century at most, mankind will have the engineering capability to adjust the global thermostat to whatever we want, by pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere, installing orbital mirrors, nuclear fusion powered heaters, or through advanced technologies we simply haven’t considered yet. I’m sure we can think of circumstances which would prevent aliens following the same technological path to greater control of their environment, but surely such circumstances would be special cases, not generally applicable?
My theory is that intelligent aliens, if they exist, are difficult to find, because they mostly end up abandoning the real world. Their computer games become so compelling, so immersive, the intelligences which created them simply don’t bother with physical reality anymore.
Our society has already seen the emergency of video game addiction. How bad will such addiction problems be, when the VR is piped directly into your brain, through a neural interface, and computer generated game reality is utterly indistinguishable from physical reality? Except of course, in the computer generated universe you are a superhero or a god, or whatever other character takes your fancy?
So either warmists are the most intelligent beings in the universe OR the biggest fools.
I wonder which?!? GK
“There’s evidence that intelligence is rare”
(listen to last line of this) –
There’s NO evidence that intelligence (as defined of course by humans) is of any use whatsoever in the survival game; nor that it leads to technology.
Life seems to have started on earth maybe 4/5 billion years ago, with the dumbest things conceivable; not the smartest. And there’s little (maybe no) evidence that it has ever begun again since.
The life forms that exist around the ” black smokers ” don’t seem to be that different from ordinary life forms (those crab looking things for example.) so it is more probable that ordinary life moved into that niche at some geological time when those locations were more available to migratory critters; rather than solar energy free life forms starting up from nothing in the deep oceans.
We aren’t living in a ” Goldilocks zone “. Life started here because it could; and the black smoker flora/fauna prove that it could start in climate conditions far more hostile than any on earth; not because it did start there, but because it can exist there.
Life supposedly requires Phosphorous to exist. With my own eyes I have observed a life form (mold) growing and thriving in a quite phosphorous free habitat. That habitat was a reagent grade flask full of an Arsenic compound solution. Gee, I guess Arsenic is not at all like Phosphorous.
Well this thriving mold colony in that flask was obviously chowing down on that Arsenic.
The whole SETI fetish demonstrates that we aren’t particularly intelligent any how. I would venture that pound for pound some forms of Asian Crows / Ravens are more intelligent than humans. And those crows are a damned side more intelligent than dumb dogs like poodles.
Crows can solve multistep sequence dependent complex puzzles without being taught how; but poodles led by the nose through the same sequence step by step; never ever demonstrate that they have learned anything about the puzzle; or that it even is a puzzle for them to solve for a reward. Crows even figure out when the puzzle is modified to include similar steps which have been rendered quite un-necessary, and they don’t bother to even waste their time with those diversionary steps. No they don’t learn the necessary sequence by trial and error. They figure out the correct necessary and sufficient process steps, by observation, and then they go ahead and solve the puzzle in one swell foop.
G
Good one, George e, I concur.
But I feel slighted on behalf of the American Crow (not being cited, that is, HA HA) because they are also super intelligent at “problem solving”. Their IQ is far above that of our current student population.
Sam,
I did not exclude the black rascal American crows. I just didn’t include them. There is one Asian crow that is totally amazing, but good old yankee crows are pretty damn smart too. And by the way, I saw an Australian Cockatoo that could do incredible puzzle solving things. On the T&V)
Heck those cockatoos might be smarter than the human Aussies !!
Hey just joking there mates.
G
Is there anything that cannot be parodied by a Monty Python skit in “climate science”?
Very true George.
Octopi seem to have a similar ability.
George,
I knew that …. but had to say something other than “great post”. I have been a per se “student” of the Natural World for the past 70 years (started with catching Creek Chubs at the age of 4 or 5, then hunting, fishing and trapping during my teenage years) and have always avidly studied the actions and habits of animals and I can guarantee you, via my personal observations, that there are quite a few animal species whose members are not only quite intelligent, but are quite capable of “abstract reasoning”. And ps, I was also a student of the Sciences and earned my Degrees in both the Biological and the Physical.
“george e. smith
January 22, 2016 at 12:37 pm
Heck those cockatoos might be smarter than the human Aussies !!”
(In the voice of Kryten from Red Dwarf) /joke mode on. Might have something to do with a lobotomy pre-req to become an Aussie! /joke mode off
I’ll stick with being British and a New Zealander.
Our planet is alone. All the others do not have an oxygen based climate, but Co2, it retards the intelligent factor1
Life on planet earth is strong evidence of life elsewhere. However, there is very little evidence of intelligence on earth, which argues strongly against intelligence elsewhere.
Intelligence is useless unless tempered with wisdom.
The evidence shows that “life” can start quickly. There is evidence for single celled life just a few hundred million years after the crust formed on the earth.
However it stayed just that, single celled, until about 300 million years ago.
Life forms quickly, complex life takes a long time.
Life needs a stable environment in order to have enough time to develop complexity.
There is evidence that the earth is unique in it’s ability to keep it’s environment stable enough for long enough.
The existence of a Jupiter sized planet in just the right place to protect the inner solar system from comets and asteroids.
The existence of a Saturn sized planet in just the right place to keep Jupiter from drifting into the inner solar system and sweeping all the rocky planets out of the solar system.
The Mars sized planet that crashed into the earth in the early days that gave the earth an oversized core that was able to generate a large magnetic field as well as stay molten long enough to continue to protect our atmosphere to this day. That same collision also gave us a moon that was large enough to stabilize the Earth’s rotation so that the axis would stay within 20 degrees of vertical, as defined by the orbital plane.
Beyond that, the sun formed close enough to the galactic core that there was enough heavy elements to create rocky cores to the planets, but not so close that increased density of stars meant that nearby super novas would wipe out life on a regular basis.
The sun was a solitary star, which meant all the planets could have stable orbits close enough to keep water in it’s liquid state. (Most star systems are binary or higher.)
And so on.
“The mystery of why we haven’t yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces,” said Chopra.
Or more to do with as mentioned. – “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
For now, this is all speculation, but what’s clear from observations of our own planet, is that the mother of all existential self-inflicted bottlenecks is on the horizon and, unless we find a way of reversing the damage we’ve caused to our environment, it seems we’ll quickly become just another lifeform that didn’t make the grade.
So let us all move back to the caves. Only problem is about 95% have to be gone for that to work, to which the sane reply, “Okay, you first!”
IF we ever discover bacterial ‘life’ within our solar system, could it have come from OUR EARTH? Some party pooper (SKEPTIC) from the past once suggested this about any ‘discovery’ of ‘life’ on Mars. His thinking is the way we should think about life on Mars or any other ‘planet(oid)’ – be skeptical.
Life outside our solar system? We may find tantalizing clues (gases / signatures), but nothing else, short of a ‘visitation’. How far have we got with the relatively near Mars methane as ‘proof’?
It’s all guesswork so far. Nobody yet ‘knows’ the probability of life spontaneously forming (or not) in our universe, despite the many billions of stars and galaxies. We are the only ‘proven’ example. I thought common sense would cut it, but it does not. Common sense does not make something true – only observations of actual ‘life’. If we found this ‘life’, would we know it was ‘life’? When did we find out about extremeophiles on Earth?
On a point of note: Back in the 1970s we went to Mars and tested for life. NASA said negative, the designer of one of the experiments said positive. Decades down someone suggested we may have ‘killed’ the ‘life’ by pouring ‘warm’? water over it!!!??? That’s life! See Dr. Levine, I think?? No time to check exact details, all from very vague memory, my apologies.
Good night.
Isn’t there a thumbprint on a moon lander that has “contaminated” the moon with Earth mater?
I think warmists are the biggest fools. AGW is a belief, a religion, not a science. Since the climate is always changing and nothing happening today is outside the range of natural variation. Determining human activity effects on climate, if any, are lost as noise in the range of natural variation. Being willing to trash the global economy and decimating global population without provable evidence that it is necessary, is insanity – flat out evil.
I’m a little tired of the “earth would be in balance if it weren’t for people” crowd. The life on earth has come damn close to getting wiped out before (end of the Permian anyone?) The concept, no, the conceit, that human activity is going to destroy civilization, let alone the biome, let alone “the earth” is ignorance distilled.
PBDS . . Pale blue dot syndrome ; )
Our “programmers” know better, I’m sure, and are faking belief in this trace gas crisis . . so conceit yes, but not that particular one, I quibble ; )
There is a famous hymn entitled “From Greenland’s icy mountains To India’s coral strand.” In one of the verses is the line “and only man is vile.” That line stood out to me when I was still a child, because I had read many books and stories about animals, killing each other and in general making the woods and fields dangerous places. I thought, Man is sinful and selfish, but the animals are selfish also; even plants, if you watch them over a long time period; whatever they can take over and reserve for themselves, they do. If humans really had the effects on the environment that the warmists claim, we (as humans) surely could at least mitigate the storm now bearing down on Virginia. Of course, it remains to be seen whether said storm (Jonas by name? I forget) actually comes; if it doesn’t, perhaps AGW is what prevented it. Or not.
Weeds! When we stop fighting them, they take over swiftly. Dangerous creatures indeed and they love CO2, too! This is a conspiracy of plant life which once dominated the land and first colonized it and then those creatures crept out of the oceans and began eating the Lords of the Earth. Ever since then, they dreamed of ruling again.
Ask Treebeard about all this… 🙂
Jonas is here. It’s already snowing in the Piedmont and AGW will be on hold for the next three days. I have to say NWS called this one right.
I have to agree. The demonization of mankind is just lunatic.
“Only humans kill their own kind”? Really, it’s only mankind that feels bad about it. Almost every other species has intraspecies killing, and most of those instances include cannibalism as well. Even herbivores will routinely kill and consume their children if they feel that survival is threatened.
We see the same exaltation (and really, dehumanization) of Indian cultures in America. Their “oneness with the Earth” and all other sort of claptrap, being willfully ignorant of the way they actually acted, which was more or less in line with all the other civilizations, exploiting all they could.
The idea that humans will eventually be lost in virtual reality or subsumed by our own creations is possible, but I think still overly negative. However, saying that it’s our unavoidable destiny to destroy ourselves? That’s just self-loathing
and only man is vile
================
That statement is so wrong on so many levels. Every day Nature kills billions of living plants and animals on the planet, often in despicable, torturous fashion, without the slightest concern for the individual.
Death itself is Nature’s invention, the sacrifice of the individual to promote the welfare of the group. And yet in doing so Nature has created a never ending battle for survival between the species, as each attempts to out evolve the other and maintain its existence.
Man’s puny efforts are but a flash in the pan in comparison.
“Only humans kill their own kind”
=================
total rot. the height of ignorance. Among predatory mammals for example, alpha males and females routinely kill the cubs of competitors, ensuring that their own cubs have the best chance of survival. Males routinely kill the pups of a rival male, to bring the female into heat so they can mate with her. Males of a great many species, both predators and prey, battle for females with the death of rival males not an uncommon result. Insects are similar. Ant colonies go to war with rivals. Females eat males after mating, to provide food for the next generation. Plants emit chemicals to inhibit the growth of other plants, including their own species. This is just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Life for most wild animals usually ends by being eaten – frequently while still conscious. The animal world is a cruel one. Animals don’t kill their own? Then why are male kittens quickly removed from the influence of their sires (if you want to keep them alive)? That’s just one example close to home.
People who grew up in the city have no idea what life is really like. Our societies are designed to protect people. Sometimes they fail, but mostly they succeed. I’m reminded of a tour in Kenya: we watched a lion approach a herd of zebras. Once he had picked his victim, the other zebras went back to munching. They were only ten feet away from the still struggling victim. But they were safe – no moving to help, and no longer any fear of the lion. That’s not the way our society works (overlooking the few instances where passersby ignore a victim). Even there, we have a police force that looks for such atrocities, and investigates it to find the culprit.
Yes, we are sinful and selfish. But we are more than that.
“If even one other intelligence arose in our Galaxy at least half a million years ago, then where are they?.”
====================================================================
Following the prime directive.
“If even one other intelligence arose in our Galaxy at least half a million years ago, then where are they?.”
======================
it really is the height of arrogance and ignorance to suggest that we could detect any advanced civilization able to travel to other star systems, unless they wanted us to.
Teaser
“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets that haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them, meaning that they find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennas on their head and making beep beep noises.”
Unfortunately, “news” magazines that once reported actual science now indulge in speculative fiction, playing anything for drama. That, and softening people up for the latest crack-brained “Save the Planet” fearmongering fad.
you are so right
It’s the people who are unbalanced!
There is an alternative that should be considered.
That “Idiocracy” is really a documentary and it applies to all “intelligent” races.
Fermi Paradox. There are no aliens.
….”Our society has already seen the emergency of video game addiction.”…
And all of those gamer a-h0l3s write wiki articles and vote. If you don’t have kids, you should be denied the right of suffrage.
Don’t smoke the evil weed. CO2 makes it a brain killer. Aliens partook of it and they don’t give a crap about their environment anymore. They’re not dead… Just eating Captain Crunch and watching TV. And ice cream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q6sUP4NHVs
Dahlquist, that brings back memories. Here’s an ancient Steppenwolf video, but w/the raunchiest of guitar riffs:
Good to know loons can’t vote.
Wu
I always make it a point to vote for the good alien in any election. If you ever had the chance to smoke with Willy, you would as well. Don’t be judgemental without knowing all the facts. Your predecessor should have instructed you in this.
Cthulhu 2016. This calls for another Dinesh D’Souza movie.
Paul , there have been convincing arguments that the holodeck (or an equivalent such as the Matrix) will be last invention. In short, any invention that would allow for perfect recreation of whatever we wanted would remove the need for further invention.
Why would you do anything else, including such mundanities as procreation? Why spend time with your wife when you could arrange escapades with Hollywood starlets or Helen of Troy, modified to remove all negative qualities? Why build a nice home when you could design a virtual one Minecraft-style, larger and not bound by trivialities such as budget or physics? In fact, the only reason to leave to the real world would be to take care of necessities and earn enough resources to spend more time in your holodeck.
While it does seem quite likely that a number of people will fall victim to this, I think that’s overly negative and thinks too poorly of humanity. After all, anyone who does play games will tell you that a God-Mode-Infinite-Money cheat makes any game boring. This is why so many Hollywood stars and Lottery winners implode.
I think people will reject such an existence, and still strive for other sorts of post-scarcity achievements: discovery being one of them, which would put a point in favor of finding intelligent life.
I’m reminded of the prophesy from Arthur C. Clarke in my youth. In one of his books, he wrote about how the Soviets deployed satellites and beamed porn to the U.S. We watched it all day long, our society fell apart because no one was working – just watching porn.
45+ years after reading that, I still don’t see that happening, although porn is available everywhere. (In fact, why am I even on this site???)
Hmm.
I have to agree.
I think the rejection of the cyborg-esque reality is well underway. I have ditched my cell phone and only use this ole desktop now. I spend as much time as I can with people, with nature, and carving wood objects in my shop. I think technology is a palisade of hollow trees, despite my deep career long immersion in it.
People are far more interesting and enjoyable than gadgets.
The google world is hell.
Read an article yesterday that something 20 to 30% of Japanese youth have no interest in dating or marriage, and an even larger number have no desire to ever have children even if they do get married.
I think the name of the TV series was Jumpers. It was the fist thing Scott Bakula was in. It was about a group of people who jumped to a new world every episode and were trying to find their way back to our Earth.
In one episode they were in a world where the alternate reality had reached the point where most people considered it superior to their real world. In this episode the team had to get the last boy and the last girl out of their simulators so that they could meet in real life.
If I may shamelessly steal the thread for some real science ..
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/feature-astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-unseen-solar-system
I think some people have to much time on their hands.
Eric Worrall all in fun
now I have to put a band-aide on because of hitting my head against the wall
screaming
michael
[The mods always recommend a big bandaid. A big, thick bandaid. Several bigger, thicker bandaids. .mod]
But… the very best thing about banging your head on the wall.
Is when you stop.
Discovery started out well, then started taking themselves way to seriously.
Pompous tedious drivel.
Watching paint dry is far more informative.
An alternate thesis, intelligence life will avoid semi evolved delusional killer apes until they absolutely cannot.
As long as our idiocy and group incompetence keeps us trapped in this gravity well..its no worries mate for other, non earth, life forms.
An alternate thesis, intelligence life will avoid semi evolved delusional killer apes until they absolutely cannot.
John what makes you think they are no different then us?
Oh and do remember that the semi evolved delusional killer ape resides in you as well as me. We just show it differently.
It is our greatest attribute and the one thing that will protects us once we get out there. Aliens or not. Space is such a hostile environment that only latent predator instincts will allow us to colonize.
What you don’t eat today will eat you tonight
michael
Sorry forgot the sarc tag Mike.
I have no trouble with what we are, if we did not have this nature we would still be herd beasts regarded as “lunch” by most predators.
As for other worlds being just like us, to a point yes, but ???.
The usual, technological civilization requires cooperation, trust, restraint and so on, but we carry our inheritance .
So must the aliens being imagined, if like us they act in their own self interest, what benefit would we bring them?
Until we climb into space on our own, would we be contributors or sponges, in the eyes of ET’s?
John Robertson January 21, 2016 at 10:27 pm
seems we are in agreement.
That said, we have only our own experiences and history to go on.
They may have come from a much gentler environment, No predators.
They may be giant Turkey’s and taste good.
Now wouldn’t that be funny
michael.
John what would be the correct wine, red or white?
No predators? Uneaten food walking about? No chance.
Aliens, sadly, have colonized Western Europe and their motto is, if it looks like a woman, smells good, shows a little skin, isn’t wearing a head covering and doesn’t scream loud enough or the alien himself is drunk, or not, it is okay to rape or molest the indigenous female population they have been invited to stay in. This is the new way of becoming an enlightened, open society. The liberal, leftist, suicidal, open society we all are hoping for and aspiring to become.
The fact that we have not yet been contacted suggests they are intelligent. I imagine beacons in the Oort cloud warning off travelers from a primitive culture…
Mike, Chopra’s theory is an answer in search of a problem…….
Be careful when removing the bandaid.
I loved Mad Magazine.
And this picture freaks me out anyway.
From the article:
“Now, we’re seeing rapid impacts on our civilization as the balance in our climate is knocked off-kilter by the inexorable rise of greenhouse gases from industrial processes and energy needs.”
What balance? The industrial revolution is a result of human ingenuity as a result of our large power brains fed on red meat. Humans are a natural part of life on this rock. Approx 3% of ~400ppm/v CO2 is NOT going to destroy this rock EVAH! Even if we have a nuclear war which kills all humans, this rock will recover, continue on it’s path UNTIL our Sun consumes it in ~5 BILLION year (So the solar scientists say).
Another mindless article.
Is Aditya related to Deepak?
How stupid do they think we are? Successful life in the universe has to evolve to control their essentially ineffective “greenhouse gases”? Yeah, right. It is going to be fun when the world finally wakes up to find that there is not one shred of defensible evidence that CO2 has any detectable effect on our climate. Junk science made into a world-level crisis. What fools history will make of this time and us.
And, what rapid impacts? “Now, we’re seeing rapid impacts on our civilization as the balance in our climate is knocked off-kilter …” There is absolutely no evidence for any of this. There is not even one climate refugee. Any who claim to be are outright liars. Nothing we see happening to any parameter, climate or weather, etc, that is outside of normal ranges and not following our normal climate fluctuations. They are touting nothing but propaganda, pretending that they can now explain a lack of alien civilizations based on junk science of greenhouse gases. You cannot fix stupid, but you can incarcerate liars and con-artists.
+1
Hear, hear!
This is what happens when you let all the loonies out of the looney bin…You get Liberals !
“How stupid do they think we are?”
That’s one of the most insulting aspects of the fabricated crisis of climate change.
An awful lot of otherwise smart people prove that being smart is no protection against being stupid.
OT , Snow in Saudi Arabia, first time in 85 years ! Did that make the news anywhere?
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2016/01/saudi-arabia-witnesses-snow-for-1st-time-in-85-years-3280874.html
Look how far south the freeze line went. This has warmed up today from where it had been yesterday and in the week prior…http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=23.49,45.65,819
Snow last year in Saudi Arabia is reported all over the web. ABC has snow in July in the mountains. Wiki says it snows every three or four years.
Mebbe, you are correct. There have been huge blizzards every year for several years in a row, not just in Saudi Arabia, but in Egypt and other places in this region.
This story is flat out malarkey.
The snow in Egypt was much more unusual:
https://youtu.be/rjgjC_aOkQA
This guy documents cold weather all over the Earth. He does it because he thinks the Earth is heading for major cooling:
https://youtu.be/InreNy6PV-4
Occam’s Razor … Aliens don’t want to attract the attention of the U.N.? 🙂
They may also be concerned that humans will develop a ‘Great Green Star Fleet’ and come to preach.
The evolution of life on earth uses and is dependant on the terrestrial carbon cycle, and the values of CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere are fundamental to life. The biosphere has operated as a carbon sink for much of earths history, such that the atmosphere is seriously depleted in CO2 compared to historical levels, the fundamental purpose of the evolution of human intelligence is to reverse this trend and remove CO2 from the lithosphere, where residence times are measured in millenia . Unlike the H2O cycle which has short residence times the long residence time of carbon in the lithosphere has had a cooling effect which lead to the last glaciation.
Humans have evolved to burn fuel and recycle the atmospheric greenhouse and return climate norms to Miocene levels.
Life existed millions of years before it began to colonize the planet’s land masses and it is also responsible for helping change the atmosphere even before plants colonized the land. Our lovely atmosphere is thanks to plant life producing large amounts of oxygen.
And humans do affect this: our cities are not plant-friendly, they are essentially ‘deserts’ and some first world cities noticed that parks and trees lining streets means a much friendlier environment. But many mega-cities in the second and third world have few parks and much desolation.
Trees not only shade us and cause the cities to not heat up like deserts under the sun (yes, they are deserts!) but also produce oxygen right where one is standing, all very good things.
I always love this stuff. If there were aliens we would find them because they would radiate radio waves. Really? There are certainly electromagnetic stuff that we radiate, but it i less and less with each passing year. Very little on air radio or tv these days. Most of it is done with fiber optics. Oh sure, cell phones use some spectrum, but the power is quite weak and only good enough to get you to a tower at a reasonable distance. No more TF2 “ears” around, just lots of fiber. We have gone from spark transmitters to reasonable emf quiet in a bit over 100 years. Picking what little emf we radiated some number of light years away would have been tough. Picking up what we will radiate in the future will be close to impossible.
Folks assume that signals can travel light years and still be coherent. I’m assuming that any signals from an alien world might just look like background noise.
Check out goat nut Brinkley transmitting from Mexico with his 500KW AM super station back in the thirties. hahahahah
I read Arecebo could detect our broadcasts at about 1/3 ly.
There’s a simple explanation for the lack of signs of alien civilisations – their communications technologies are advanced to the point where they do not broadcast, or broadcast only very weak and undetectable signals. The lack of earthly evidence for aliens could be that the speed of light really is (despite the enormous amount of Sci-Fi to the contrary) a hard limit that cannot be exceeded by any means. At conventional speeds, it could take us as long as a million years to travel only 1,500 light years to the site of the (what could be) alien megastructures around KIC 8462852. That time span would be an extreme deterrent for any alien civilisation to visit anything but very nearby systems.
Enrico Fermi once asked (when talking about UFOs), “Where are they (if they’re out there)?
Frank Tipler calculated that self replicating von Neumann machines could visit EVERY planet in the galaxy within 10 million years.
Haven’t heard much from anyone out there in all these years, although once in a while something interesting does happen:
http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/pillars/New_Yorker_aliens.png
News Flash!
There is no such thing as self replicating machines…von Neumann or any other type.
And just because someone thought of it, does not mean there eventually will be.
Any alien with the technological skills and degree of civilization required to travel rapidly through space would take one look at the disappointing collection of warmongering humans that infest this planet and say,
“Oh my goodness, they are so far behind in development. They haven’t even got past the nuclear threshold and are still throwing things at one another. They even have archaic religions governing the way they interrelate. I think we should book this as a possible archeological site for the future, there may be something worth saving, but in the meantime we should leave them to sort it out”.
The late Ian M Banks wrote a Novella ( about an advanced humanoid and AI culture that visited Earth in the good ship Arbitrary during the 1970’s. Opinion was divided with one suggesting that the Culture make contact to help fix the mess, one going native and jumping ship and a third who was a rabid Star Trek fan suggesting it be tossed into a miniature black hole, that opinion may have been affected by the cancellation of the original series.
The ship which was an advanced AI sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious
Much how I feel about the Middle East.
It never ceases to amaze me how allegedly rational people can take it as an article of faith, that any advanced culture must also be atheist.
The desire for transcendence may be universal. But there’s no proof that there are any advanced cultures, merely conjecture and a phony equation.
I smell SETI trying to siphon off some of the green money.
The “number of civilizations in the galaxy” – is derived from a MODEL. One that has even less evidence for any of its assumptions than the AGW scam.
Like AGW, though, if they ever accept the null hypothesis, they are on the unemployment lines.
How many sharks do these people have to jump over before they finally go away?
They avoid us because silly articles like this make them cry.
Perhaps the reason we’ve yet to find extra-terrestrial intelligence is that we’re still developing it here, on this region’s still undeveloped petting zoo, the third planet from a rather ordinary small star.
Oh Puleeze. A life may be fragile but LIFE is robust and and powerful, that’s why my sidewalk is full of weeds. And since we have not uncovered life outside of our planet therefore climate change killed them off. For heaven’s sake strop your Occam’s Razor and use it and don’t create entities needlessly.
TPG
We as humans are barely literate in the field of science.Much of what we think we know is barely scratching the surface of all subjects in science.
Much we have to learn,then utilise that which we do learn to understand. Just concluded some experiments with results that are to say the least caused by something that science knows nothing of.
Tell more soon when we release our findings.
I haven’t seen evidence of intelligent life in the MSM lately. What have I missed?
I knew it.
And the aliens who escaped and came here committed suicide cuz they saw the same thing coming here.
Bosh! Drivel! Tommyrot! Balderdash! Felgercarb! Twaddle! Nonsense! Bunkum! Humbug! Garbage! Flapdoodle! Bilge! Poppycock! Malarkey! Tripe! Borosheetu! Hogwash! Baloney!
I feel much better, now.
Felgercarb!
I learn something new here every day. Thanks, jorgekafkazar.
Any sufficiently advanced alien develops nuclear weapons … Climate change is not required.
Or perhaps every sufficiently advanced alien race develops liberalism.
Hahahahahaahah! Just kidding.
It’s because carbon based life is self limiting – it runs out of carbon. Carbon, a trace element, is steadily being sequestered in the crust and the trend is that we will run out in a few tens of millions of years. If intelligent life on a planet doesn’t evolve before the atmospheric carbon runs out, life ends.
Then if they’re very lucky, the intelligent being invents industry, digs up the dead carbon and burns it to return life-giving CO2 to the atmosphere and life continues, saved by heavy industry.
All this nonsense about things we don’t know being pontificated upon when the current state of cosmology can’t even tell us for certain whether the universe has a limit or not. I think that seeing unusual signals in the night sky might just have a LOT more pedestrian solutions than being evidence of civilized life.
During the Cold War the self-inflicted bottleneck terminating all extraterrestrial technological civilizations used to be an all-out nuclear war in each case, but now it morphed into Climate Disruption. Their history seems to be rather malleable, I say.
Checked calendar…. not April 1.
Checked Discovery web site…. not a hoax, article actually there.
Pinched self…ouch… awake, not having a bad dream.
Where’s caitiecaitie? Maybe she can explain using science?
davidmhoffer asks:
Where’s caitiecaitie? Maybe she can explain using science?
That would be a first! ☺
Actually, the aliens tried to communicate with us last year but all they heard was caitiecaitie yelling ” the models said it was true “, so they went on their merry way with fingers in their ears !
Dear Discovery:
I will believe climate change destroyed other planetary aliens if you can explain to me how America’s astronauts traveled through the Van Allen Belts going and coming from, the moon. Perhaps this short documentary will help jog your memory. You can start at about 22:00 and watch the last 20 minutes if you’re pressed for time.
Watches the Skies
Chief, Semihole Indian Tribe
* * *
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Moon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4h2czZTTLM
Quite easily, according to James Van Allen. You’re not Lewendowsky, are you?
That claim about the van Allen belts was the only one I couldn’t refute readily from my memories of growing up with the space program. However, I never researched it, there’s just no reward dealing with that crowd.
However, when I met Harrison Schmitt at one of the ICCCs in Chicago, I asked him about it, and how much protection the command capsule provided. He said the main reason it wasn’t an issue was how quickly they passed through the belt. Keep in mind the belts are pretty close to the Earth, so Apollo was moving very quickly, slowing nearly all the way to the moon.
Oh, don’t watch that video, it’s just too annoying and full of misinterpretations.
In a few decades, a century at most, mankind will have the engineering capability to adjust the global thermostat to whatever we want, by pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere, installing orbital mirrors, nuclear fusion powered heaters, or through advanced technologies we simply haven’t considered yet
When I see that flying car then I’m ready to believe. More like the babe learning to tie its shoes then considering itself ready to run the Olympics
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yn2uyQJ1jc
🙂
Academia is full of industry hating people who if they had had their way would have prevented the industrial revolution that gave us the wealth prosperity health and abundant free time and communication technology which allows us to listen to these academic morons and laugh.
I much prefer Douglas Adam’s explanation. I don’t have the text to hand, so Wikipedia to the rescue:
“Earth is widely regarded with derision and scorn by most sentient beings in the galaxy. That most other races have shunned Earth is in part due to its primitive technological state and also for its invention of the game of cricket, an unfortunate product of racial memory that appears to make light of the horrendously genocidal Krikkit Wars, which right-thinking galactic citizens find immensely distasteful. Before the arrival of Ford Prefect and the Vogons, Earth’s main form of extraterrestrial contact was with “teasers”: bored rich kids who cruise the galaxy looking for planets yet to make interstellar contact, find some isolated spot, land in front of some credulous soul they know no one will ever believe, strut up and down in front of them with “silly antennas on their head” and make “beep-beep” noises at them. Ford regards this practice as “rather childish, really”. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy
For those unfamiliar, the Krikkits were dedicated to the obliteration of the universe. As I recall, their shock troops were white robots who dispatched little red bombs with bats.
Ah, the late, great Douglas Adams – gone too soon. I have several of his books currently in a prominent place in my bookcase. It might be time to re-read one or two, perhaps a Dirk Gently novel or two. 🙂
Some thoughts. Planet Earth has been around some four and a half BILLION years. Intelligent human life as we know it has been around some ten THOUSAND years. Current behaviour indicates this human life will be extinct in less than a hundred years.
If alien life has similar problems it is no wonder we can’t discover evidence of any aliens.
Even conservative estimates put Homo Sapiens Sapiens in pretty much our format as 125,000 years+ – current behaviour indicates only THIS Civilisation might not last 100 years.
Fortunately for most of our history we have not been ‘this civilisation’ and the egoistic idea that we are somehow the ideal culmination of all that has gone before ignores the misery this society brings to almost everyone on the planet.
What I am suggesting is, chances are the ‘Consume or Perish’ economy is NOT the pinnacle of human life and shortly (looking like maybe a couple of months at the moment with the Dow Jones Industrial and Transportation Averages crashing) we may have an opportunity to build something much more suited to humans.
Are we really so egotistical we think if we can’t make things good, nobody else can either?
*giggles* So… because we can’t SEE them, other intelligences aren’t there? Really? I wonder if it has occurred to people that maybe, just perhaps, actual intelligent species…
1. Do NOT broadcast their presence to all and sundry because maybe they have had an evolution similar to the one we haven’t bothered learning from? Like… when the more advanced ‘others’ arrive on your shore, they arrive for THEIR benefit, not ours?
2. Maybe have evolved past broad spectrum analog signals and use some kind of direct to receiver digital signal for all communications? I mean think about it – we now use digital on a broad scale – would anyone notice 0’s and 1’s at any frequency? Unless you have the code used, they would appear pretty random.
e.g. the above para would be transmitted as:
0100110101100001011110010110001001100101001000000110100001100001011101100110010100100000011001010111011001101111011011000111011001100101011001000010000001110000011000010111001101110100001000000110001001110010011011110110000101100100001000000111001101110000011001010110001101110100011100100111010101101101001000000110000101101110011000010110110001101111011001110010000001110011011010010110011101101110011000010110110001110011001000000110000101101110011001000010000001110101011100110110010100100000011100110110111101101101011001010010000001101011011010010110111001100100001000000110111101100110001000000110010001101001011100100110010101100011011101000010000001110100011011110010000001110010011001010110001101100101011010010111011001100101011100100010000001100100011010010110011101101001011101000110000101101100001000000111001101101001011001110110111001100001011011000010000001100110011011110111001000100000011000010110110001101100001000000110001101101111011011010110110101110101011011100110100101100011011000010111010001101001011011110110111001110011001111110010000001001001001000000110110101100101011000010110111000100000011101000110100001101001011011100110101100100000011000010110001001101111011101010111010000100000011010010111010000100000001011010010000001110111011001010010000001101110011011110111011100100000011101010111001101100101001000000110010001101001011001110110100101110100011000010110110000100000011011110110111000100000011000010010000001100010011100100110111101100001011001000010000001110011011000110110000101101100011001010010000000101101001000000111011101101111011101010110110001100100001000000110000101101110011110010110111101101110011001010010000001101110011011110111010001101001011000110110010100100000001100000010011101110011001000000110000101101110011001000010000000110001001001110111001100100000011000010111010000100000011000010110111001111001001000000110011001110010011001010111000101110101011001010110111001100011011110010011111100100000010101010110111001101100011001010111001101110011001000000111100101101111011101010010000001101000011000010111011001100101001000000111010001101000011001010010000001100011011011110110010001100101001000000111010101110011011001010110010000101100001000000111010001101000011001010111100100100000011101110110111101110101011011000110010000100000011000010111000001110000011001010110000101110010001000000111000001110010011001010111010001110100011110010010000001110010011000010110111001100100011011110110110100101110
Now given I used an EARTH converter it ‘knew’ to make it 8 bit. Try removing all those spaces and work out what this means…
But all an alien would see is a string of 1’s and 0’s – I’m not sure how sophisticated our search engines are for SETI but would the above stream look any different from a random fluctuation if you DIDN’T know to use an 8 bit string?
3. So hundreds of thousands of people, including some VERY credible witnesses and even technology traces, are all incorrect and we have NO evidence of ‘others’ arriving? There is a term for people who let their personal beliefs prevent them from seeing actual data – we normally call them ‘Religious’ – Science should be non-Religious at all times.
4. And of course there is also the evidence we have that Earth has gone through far more extreme climactic conditions than anything we have seen since apes became bipedal and yet somehow Life still evolved into people who can look out into space and make really stupid announcements.
My apologies for the long string – I can’t seem to edit it to put in line breaks.
Um, the Ice Ages ARE ‘extreme weather changes’ since they plunge down in temperature and then suddenly shoot upwards again which is exactly why we evolved relatively rapidly, these big brains.
“extreme climactic conditions”
—
you mean climatic, climactic, or climacteric?
My friend went to a Bigfoot conference and brought me back a Bigfoot T-shirt. Does that count?
[The mods would count themselves as “impressed” if your friend had brought back Bigfoot’s T-shirt. .mod]
We are truly entering the IDIOCENE age. The evidence is all around us.
How many ants in an ant-nest, know that there is a human observing them?
Same applies, we are looking for the wrong technologies. I mean, everyone knows that aliens use neutrino transmitters – don’t they??
Ralph
It used to be Nuclear War that killed off the aliens.
I wonder what the next cause will be?
Perhaps the study of Science Fiction anthologies could tell exactly when the last change occurred and when the next one is happening.
Whatever it is, you’ll be gobsmacked that someone actually put it into a paper, let alone somebody may believe it.
Read the Player of Games. We need ships capable of kilolights to get anywhere.
In the words of Monty Python “I hope there is intelligent life out there because there’s bugger all down here on earth ”
Oh how wise they really were .
Maybe immortality turns put to be deadly boring, and the only escape is offing yourself.
turns out …
What is probably inevitable with every evolution of life forms with grotesquely bulbous heads and advanced abstract mental function (I won’t use the word intelligence) is the emergence of equivalents to the na3is, communists, islamofasc1sts and despotic pseudoscientist environmentalists.
Was it for this that clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
Wilfred Owen
“Global Warming Killed all the Aliens”
It has also killed of all the yeti and bigfoot off. I am sure (faux) Nobel laureate Michael Mann will be crying about it.
“When Michael Mann presents public lectures on climate change, he almost always ends with the same PowerPoint slide. It’s a photo of his daughter, Megan.
The now-8-year-old is standing in a plexiglass tunnel beneath a polar bear exhibit at the Pittsburgh Zoo, looking up at the tank that holds the massive arctic creatures. For Mann and his climate change supporters, it’s symbolic.”
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2014/01/michael_mann_the_penn_state_pr.html
It is certainly symbolic but not in the way the alarmists think!
“Global Warming Killed all the Aliens”
And it all started around when when video killed the radio star.
Do radio stars have planetary systems that support video life forms? Is a video life form one that can be seen but not heard?
Will video life forms kill and kill again or are they satisfied with having killed their own sun? What drives their global warming system once the sun dies?
So many questions, so little time…
Pellegrino’s Postulate (Flying to Valhalla): prudent races assume at least one other is predatory and destructive, so they pre-emptively destroy every life-bearing planet. They are collectively very efficient.
The aliens came, they saw, they decided that there’s no intelligent life here.
The Vegetable Men from Dendros 5 in the Arboreal Galaxy absolutely thrive on CO2. They have moved way beyond radio communications because they communicate like plants on earth do.
“My theory is that intelligent aliens, if they exist, are difficult to find, because they mostly end up abandoning the real world. Their computer games become so compelling, so immersive, the intelligences which created them simply don’t bother with physical reality anymore.”
Or “monsters from the Id” – reference to “Forbidden Planet”.
I thought skeptics were silly for believing in UFOs. It appears that warmists are only silly for believing UFO’s do exist because it goes against the global warming gospel and that, bottom line, they do actually believe there are/were aliens. Seems warmists are believers, too.
“In a few decades, a century at most, mankind will have the engineering capability to adjust the global thermostat to whatever we want, by pumping aerosols into the upper atmosphere, installing orbital mirrors, nuclear fusion powered heaters, or through advanced technologies we simply haven’t considered yet.”
Climate science has a bright future. :-/
How about this? Species evolve to a point where even the stupid of the species thrive because natural evolution is paused because of technology. Since the stupid outnumber the smart they control the governing forces of the planet. The stupid rulers direct the scientists of their employ to solve non-existent problems that further the rulers’ own goals of retaining power. They ignore the actual goal of survival of the species which is to get off of their planet before the inevitable asteroid strike/ice age/super volcano occurs. Some real planetary scale catastrophe occurs and they are ill prepared. Most are wiped out. Some survive. Repeat process from beginning.
That was the exact problem we had where I came from. Fortunately some of us got away.
You’re originally from Detroit then, Tom?
There’s also the fact that we live in the galactic equivalent of the middle of f-ing nowhere. If you invented the car you wouldn’t pick Podunk, North Dakota to be the first place you drove to.
I saw this article on a plane yesterday. I have to confess that I was the one who posted the comment that they’d jumped the shark. Very off the cuff and sarcastic, but I was totally flabbergasted that Discover would publish this piece.
The existence of extra-terrestrial origin intelligent life forms has not yet been observed in a verifiable way. The only data we have on intelligent life forms is Earth’s intelligent life form. So, we know that intelligent life formation of the carbon based humanoid type is 100% possible.
We know nothing else, though we can envision and dream about the stuff of Star Wars and Star Trek. The stories are stimulating, but they are just stories.
John
Perhaps as intelligent life strives to find out the origins of the Universe they build fantastic machines underground. Machines capable of accelerating atomic particles to light speeds then crash them into each other and accidentally creates a blac…………
Back when Global Thermonuclear destruction was the “Crisis Du Jour” Carl Sagan had postulated that all other intelligent life might ultimately destroy itself with Nuclear Bombs.
Same story line, different crisis
now, here I always thought that life on this planet evolved from a pile of garbage left behind by a group of inter-galactic picnickers. Sure that they left other planets in the same shape.
“the handful of planets which have just the right characteristics for life to thrive, are eventually destroyed by a technological environmental cataclysm” Why not? There’s as much data to support this as there is to support catastrophic global warming.
Actually I seen one of them little boogers. Landed down there by the barn one day. Wife come a hollerin’ in the house. I grabbed my shotgun and run out there. Door opened and this wobbly thing come out and started towards me wavin’ with one hand and stickin’ the othern out. They was a bunch more staring out a window. I shouted: “you get on out of here you trashy ole’ thing.” He just kept on comin’ ‘n that’s when I blasted him. Ship took off. We got us a couple of big scoops ‘n carried it out to the field and buried it. Damnedest thing you ever saw.
You have to be a superior grade of moron to believe that warming the planet by a degree or two will cause the extinction of man.
MarkW on January 22, 2016 at 10:20 am
– – – – – –
MarkW,
Richard Lindzen has articulated some thoughts about how strange it is that some people think small changes in climate are so fearsome.
I would alternately say, you have to possess an irrational set of fundamental concepts to conclude that warming the planet by a degree or two will cause extinction of (or even a major impact on) any significant numbers of even the least most dynamically adaptable life forms on Earth.
John
SETI is another of today’s secular religions. Not to begrudge the search, but the same wild-eyed certainty amongst its adherents as with AGW. It comes down to “spontaneous generation” which was refuted 150 years ago (ignore that fruit fly hovering around your desert), er, except for the first one 4 billion years ago which stays. If spontaneous generation is wrong, then that occurence 4 billion years ago was a freak event. Now of course, we know ET must be true because other, older, civilizations conquered the Galaxy and colonized the Earth before we evolved — er, not. Eschew swapping old religions for new — there are no ETs out there.
Perhaps we are the first and most advanced society in the Galaxy.
This is like saying that there are no intelligent and conscious plants today because, while they did exist in the past, they all killed themselves when they became depressed as they realized they couldn’t move.
The real reason that all the stars are so very far apart? They’re just as dumb “there” as we are here.
So, I wonder, what’s to stop the folks who (to my mind) tried to use the CAGW crisis to set up a global Government under their control, from faking “contact” with ET’s and using that crisis to get what they want . . It appears not much . .
They would have to produce evidence, if they had claimed to have contacted ET.
Sure . . but I have no way of effectively disputing faked evidence of contact . . and I doubt anyone else does either.
OK, it is Friday. Time for some funnies, so I offer . . . . .
‘The Happy Alien Arrival Story’
Year 2016 a planetoid like object about the size of the planet Mercury is detected at distance of 0.5 au from Earth and it is determined that it is slowing down. It is detected to probably be intercepting near Earth.
Later in 2016 analysis shows the Mercury sized planetoid-like object is 80% densely compressed coal which is cleverly reinforced structurally with steel. About 18 percent of its mass seems to be a force field held atmosphere of compressed oxygen. There appears to be a propulsion system which somehow uses coal.
Early in 2017 the aliens make first contact. They are permanent travelers surveying the universe. They say they come in peace to trade their extensive survey knowledge of the universe for some water (to make oxygen) and for all the coal we are willing to sell them.
Everyone lived happily ever after.
John
So “(Extraterrestrial) Climate Change” has negated the need for “The Men in Black”?
But I liked that movie!
So… I always figured we couldn’t find intelligent life because the odds of there being intelligent life at our level right now – out there in the big are pretty small to begin with when you consider the bajillions of stars and bajillions and bajillions of planets orbiting them. But more importantly, we broadcast far and wide into space for what… 100 years? Just over 100 years? And now nearly everything is moving through cables and being beamed directly etc. If I wasn intelligent race out there in some distant place and was just starting to get the signals we are now sending, I’d be (1) thinking that we were clearly killing ourselves (unless they can tell movies from reality) and (2) we were slowly dieing off because the signals they were receiving were dietapering off.
And then lets not forget the faster than light barrier and the fact we broadcast for 100 years or so… if every other race did that, we could still be 1000s, 100s of 1000s or millions of years off receiving their signal. From a geologic perspective, our galaxy has only just started to get the right ingredients for life as we know it anyway! Could be another planet on the opposite side of the galaxy got intelligent life at the same time as us and we still wouldn’t know about it and won’t for another 100,000+ years!
The signals would be extremely weak at interstellar distances.
And that points up the other part of this that never seems to get mentioned: Space is very big. The distance to the nearest star is 4.5 years, at the speed of light.
Now, it may be that there is no such dang thing as warp drives, worm hole transport, suspended animation for hundreds of years followed by machines waking you up when you eventually arrive at another star…in short, they may be out there, but are very far away and are as stuck in their solar system as we are in ours.
Having said that, it will turn out to have been a bad idea if the wrong sort hear our signals and come investigating, and enslave us all for all of eternity.
*shiver*
This is as possible as that they would travel all this way and hide from us, or just keep going because our personal habits offend their delicate sensibilities.
This ‘no aliens because of environmental disaster’ parallels the ‘no aliens because of nuclear winter’ line used during the cold war. It is a great argument because it sounds science-y,it is impossible to prove wrong and it’s scary.
Not bothering with physical reality? That’s a classic. The AGW crowd gave up on physical reality years ago and lives inside a model world where virtual disasters lurk behind every subroutine.
If I were an alien, with any intelligence at all, and I noticed a planet full of savages, treehuggers and, most of all, socialists, the last thing I would do is announce my presence.
You would realise that all that would happen would be constant demands to build some idealist’s utopia with your technology and a hand held out for more cash.
Until such time as we discover life on another planet, planetoid, asteroid or whatever, the only scientific conclusion to be drawn is that life is unique. Anything else is pure speculation.
Let me see if I have this straight: The premise of this article is that every intelligent civilization eventually gives rise to a cult of climate lying warmistas?
and just imagine how huge all their bureaucracies grew … and the tax revenues from whatever atmospheric elements they had !!
has anyone offered extraterrestrial real estate to AlGore yet ??
The alien life forms were waived off by the extremist headline writers and pseudoscience living here. There is a warning buoy floating out near the edge of this solar system to give notice to all who come near or those who are thinking about opening a comm channel. Silence………
The conclusion from the article should be that we have nothing to worry about. The article itself is proof that there is no intelligence here!
There are no alien communities with the ability to travel or contact us because their societal evolution branched towards the sustainability/diversity/socialist ideals & goals long ago. They practice a form of culling their young, based on genetic/behavioral testing; those with individuality and self sufficiency traits are removed.
Their evolution continued down that branch until they achieved complete stagnation and they have stayed there for the last 12,000,000 years … stable, sustainable and content to know that they simply exist. They are oh so slowly evolving into the conscious faith/divination that their mere existence as a life form (they pretty much think of themselves as a single slumbering entity) is something on the negative side of the karma scale. They are becoming the complete opposite of the BORG … their motto is “Join Us, Existence Is Futile”.
Nirvana
There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the earth. If one or more hadn’t happened, what direction would life have taken? Would humanity have arisen at all? I think we’re extremely lucky that the dinosaurs were wiped out, because reptiles ruled the world for 200 million years! They were doing fine until the asteroid came. The evolution of intelligent life seems to involve an enormous amount of luck.
One and a half million clay tablets found buried in Sumer, from the Sumerian civilisation tell our history, I will not write it here, but the tablets have been translated. Nothing is as it seems.
?the 1.5 million clay tablets found in Sumer were ancient forms of credit cards?
John
Everyone ignores the obvious scientific reality, because it is uncomfortable to what we like to believe. According to Einstein and every test, we can devise, the Speed of Light is an absolute barrier for physical travel. This means that given our short lifespans and the immense distances between the stars, there has never been, is not now, and never will be any form of realistic contact between different planetary systems.
Never.
We don’t like to believe that this world, with the inclusion of the uninhabitable planets in our solar system, is it for our race. But the reality is that we’re never leaving, and no one is ever coming. The human race will live here,and one day the human race will die here, and no one will remember us. We can’t stand to think that.
But that’s what the science says.
So, is there intelligent life out there? What does it matter? They have to follow the same physical laws we do, and that means they’re never coming here, and we’re never going there. We live on an island surrounded by a barrier that can never be crossed.
Some interesting speculation on the importance of a large moon to the emergence of intelligent life:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLMnChNhsd8?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360%5D
Didn’t we hear this rubbish from AUS Greens leader Bob Brown in his notorious “Fellow Earthians” speech 3 years ago? Even the world’s looniest Greens (see “Sarah Sea Patrol”) found this too out there and prevailed on the laughing stock to retire.
Yes, when he left politics. He’s just been arrested at a protest aganist logging in Tasmania. The guy should be thrown in jail!
Alien life will be both discovered and proven by mathematical analysis of dna, rna, and the like. Perhaps hidden in a code within a code within a code, will be information available only to life forms with sufficient math ability. We may know a lot less math than we think.
The issue with all the comments below about how animals do all these things to their own kind, blah, blah, blah, is: humans are the only species that studies its own brain. We act completely different than any other species in very human ways. You don’t see any other species using science; birds don’t do maths.
We can’t sit here and justify our animalistic, illogical natures using other species as evidence, simply because we’re not typical animals; we’re something different, theological opinions aside, even.
To sum it up, this crap is even dumber than the Y2K scare. We haven’t even scratched the surface of our own galactic neighborhood, let alone the visible Universe in the search for habitable planets. Anyone that would write such crap doesn’t know very much about Astronomy and it’s history. Less than a century ago it was accepted science that the Universe consisted of our own Galaxy. We don’t even know for sure how many Ringlets make up Saturn’s rings or how far the Oort cloud really extends and why long term comets that come from it get perturbed out of their orbit to come flying into the inner solar system and this guy is writing excuses for why intelligent alien life has not been found or heard from?