Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

Devo - the name of the band was originally a contraction of "de-evolution"

the idea that we are no longer evolving, we are devolving. That humanity is getting weaker and weaker as a species.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

i think i can say i agree with that since we have removed many of the elements that spur evolution. that is why i think genetic research is so important.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

Why does it rain often in the pacific northwest but not in the pacific southwest? Environments are based on a number of conditions, and with the relatively small amount of knowledge we have about the composition of the universe, it's a good bet there are many conditions we don't yet know about. Dark matter has yet to be proven or dis proven. There was a time when the Atom was the smallest known particle. Now we know about Quarks and Gluons, and are just starting to understand their functions and behavior. There may yet be smaller particles, and particles smaller than them. As far as the periodic table goes, we only have local materials available to study, and only limited capacity to manipulate a sample at the atomic level. I'll go out on a limb and say what if black holes were considered an element, with some insanely high density. If that were the case, anything between element 118 and black hole has yet to be discovered. And I'm sure there are plenty of places in the universe with high enough energy to maintain materials of that density.

As far as time goes, I'm of the mindset that it's linear and infinite. Here's my reasoning- I think time is merely a concept, created by humans to help us keep track of things. Our time here on Earth is based on the rotation of the Earth itself, and it's position in rotating about the Sun. It's how we keep seconds, minutes, hours, etc. Merely a measurement of how long object A takes to move around object B. Or more recently with Atomic clocks, a measurement of the transition of Caesium-133 atoms. It's just a comparison we use for convenience. We've even extrapolated our concept of time to determine the earth is 4.4ish billion years old, and the universe anywhere between 14 and 18 billion of our years old, from the theoretical date of the big bang. Due to the nature of the big bang, and it having spawned the universe as we know it, there's really no way (at this point) to know what was there before the big bang. However, assuming the laws of conservation of mass and energy hold true throughout the universe, I think it's safe to assume *something* existed prior to the big bang, and as long as something exists to use as the basis for a comparison, so must time exist. Space time, or the combination of space (3 dimensions) with time (the 4th dimension?) would still seem to hold true, again, provided something existed before the big bang.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

i concur with mark. he however does a better job putting words to my thoughts. also our understanding of atoms is based on natural formations within our universe but what happens if quarks form in other manors for all we know there could be a whole new "class" of atomic structure. this is just one thing to consider along with all the unique biological aspects of life we might come across.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

this is an interesting subject that warrents further study

time is not a concept created by humans. Time is one of the 4 dimensions of our physical universe, and it cannot be broken out separately. Einstein has proven that time and space are interconnected, and react to each other.

The laws of physics as we are able to observe and measure them break down when you compress the entire universe back to the point of the big bang. The only possible solution is that time and space and matter and energy did not exist before the big bang. Therefore time is not infinte, it had a beginning.

"Dont think about that too long or blood will gush out of your nose!" -Lewis Black

as for matter and the laws of physics being the same throughout the galaxy or universe, the fact that we did not know about subatomic particles 100 years ago doenst mean they did not exist on the earth. They have always been here, and everywhere else. Thats the point I was trying to make. There is no reason to expect we will find totally different types of matter or energy in the next star system, or on the other side of the galaxy. Logic dictates the most basic laws of physics and the most basic forms of matter must be scattered everywhere throughout the universe.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

we live in a very small portion of the galaxy so ill simplify the point. lets say we didnt have space travel yet and you said that we can find an example of everything in the universe on earth. then we go to the moon and find moon rocks. emagine now that earth is a representation of earth. its kind of funny to think we have a sample of everything in the entire universe right in this galaxy. its like saying you have all of existance in your backyard. plus from light passing through galaxies we are able to tell the composition of other galaxies and i think we have already discovered things we cant explain. plus if you need a very detailed example look at the cats eye nebula you will not find a cats eye nebula in the milky way (unless its in it in which case pick another nebula) it is something that we have not explored and have no exmple of such a formation in our own galaxy. finally i find one large flaw with physics. measurement does not exist. seconds, inches, pounds, hertz are all human concept aplied to existance to help define it but ultimatly dont exist as anything except a abstract idea. its funny to think that physics is based on something that doesnt exist.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

I'll admit I don't know enough about astrophysics and Einstein's theorys to comment on that (though I'll definitely read up on whatever papers I can find online, it's interesting stuff).

Agreed ;)

My point here wasn't that these particles didn't exist 100 years ago, or that they don't exist anywhere else in the universe. I meant to say we didn't know much about particle matter 100 years ago, and given the progress made in the past century, I can only wonder what we'll know 100 or 1000 years in the future. I'm saying at this stage in the game, there's still an unknown amount of knowledge we don't yet have. If these particles exist throughout the galaxy, their behavior may differ slightly from galaxy to galaxy, as conditions change. On Earth, the best we can do is throw some particles into an accelerator and smash them into each other to see what happens. In other solar systems or galaxies, the conditions in space itself may be closer to what's going on in our particle accelerators, and there's still plenty we're learning from such experiments about the nature of particles. I'm convinced sometime in the next few centuries discoveries will be made which rock the foundations of physics as we know it, just as discoveries were made indicating the Earth wasn't flat, the Earth revolved around the sun, and stars were really burning globs of gas hundreds of light years away.

Sometimes the hardest part of science is letting go of long assumed facts.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

I've always had trouble with time as a dimension, something that is that malleable doesn't rate in my opinion. After all, remember the name of Mr. Einstein's famous theory. I suspect rather that there is more complexity under there and we have only a little of the picture, much like the blind men and the elephant. I also rather suspect that this "relativeness" of time has something to do with Mr. Heisenberg, so if any of you figure that out please let us know, we are still looking for the TOE. Anyway, this brings me to my point: there is much we make use of today, that our observations let us use well, but don't ask us to explain why it works. Such questions as to where magnetism or gravity arise from have yet to be understood. Which brings on the remainder of my point: I think that as a species we have just barely scratched the surface of what there is to know, so folks, have fun! Let us know what you learn!

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

still do you believe we are alone?

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

I assume the question is directed to me?

Ans: Yes, absolutely.

One of the basic tenents of science is an assumed uniformity, an implied consistancy.

Going back to my career as an example again: when I was 18 I might have said to myself, instead of going to college I think I will take my money and get a sailboat and travel around the world. Maybe I will find an island that is solid gold and encrused with saphires and emeralds, and I will be the richest man on earth

but from what we know about gold and precious stones such a place is very unlikely

the same logic applies to exploring the galaxy, we might find all kinds of strange life and strange forms of matter and energy, but (this is the key) from what we know about matter and energy and life so far, the odds are we will not find any life out there at all.

Isnt that what science is all about? learning everything you can about the universe, and making a rational projection about the things you have not yet explored?

We have landed on,or at least crashed probes into Mercury, Venus, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, moons of Jupiter, and probed Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Voyager 1 is something like 5 or 10 times the orbit radius of Pluto out past the edge of our solar system. We have also landed a probe on an asteroid, and blew a chunk out of a comet. Add in the extensive study of our own sun and you have quite a bit of data and directly observed knowledge.

Now if we found all sorts of strange things on each stellar object we have directly observed here, I might be inclined to say the galaxy is a strange and upredictable place.

But everything we have explored and probed so far has been consistant with what we expected to find. No major surprizes.

Therefore, from a scientific perspective, based on everything we know so far, there probabally isnt life anywhere else in our galaxy, maybe not even in the entire universe.

I can imagine lots of things, like a solid gold island in the South Pacific, encrusted with precious gems, but I dont expect to find one.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

:ahh: WHAT? NO MAJOR SURPRISES? read about some of the things we find. examples like the storm on mars, traces of water on the moon and mars. virtually the abundance of unique effects on life that only space can have. we have found so many things in space that raised so many eyebrows at NASA that i don't know how you can say that. and i was asking the person above me if he thought their was life since he forgot to mention his opinion. finally i assure you space is full of gold and emeralds because NASA keeps raking them in.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

But at the same time, we only have one sample from which to collect data. I was always tought in science classes that more samples means more accurate conclusions. Unfortunately for us, the closest stars are 4.3 light years away. Even going 1/10th the speed of light (which may be possible in the relatively near future with developing modern propulsion techniques), that's at least 43 years away, plus 4.3 years for any transmitted data to make it's way back here.

It's an inference problem. I see a cat. It's an orange tabby. By looking at one cat, is it logical to infer no other cats in the world are orange tabbys? Statistically, we know one orange tabby exists. We also know there are hundreds of millions of cats on the planet. If I can only see other cats from 500 meters away, is it fair to say either statistically or otherwise that there are no other orange tabbys? I can see that there are a few other orange cats in the distance, but I can't see enough detail to tell what type of cat it is. If I took a sample of 1,000 random cats, examined them closely, say, from 10' away, and I see only that one orange tabby out of 1,000, I'd feel a little more confident that there is only one orange tabby. However, there are still hundreds of millions of other cats out there, many of which I can't see because they are too far away or hidden behind something. At that point, the best we can say is "Out of 1,000 cats, we see only 1 is an orange tabby." In reality, even our sample of 1,000 cats is miniscule compared to the hundreds of millions. Extrapolated out, even 1/1000 in the context of hundreds of millions comes out to a few tens of thousands of potential orange tabby's. We just don't know.

Unfortunately, the only way to answer the cat question conclusively is to survey every possible cat, and compile a database of types of cats. Only then can we find out for sure how many orange tabbys exist.

I can see on your site, you quote the number of stars in the galaxy as 40 million. A quick google search came up with numbers between 100 and 500 billion. Along the way, I came accross this:

"How many stars are there like our sun within the Milky Way?"
Quite a lot, but hard to estimate. There are perhaps 500 billion stars in the Milky Way, of which something like 0.002 G-type stars with the same luminosity as the sun, per cubic parsec. There are about 0.13 stars/cubic parsec in total, so that sun-like stars are about 1.5 percent of the total population, which makes for about 7 billion stars like our sun in spectral class and brightness by my estimates.

So we've got potentially 7 billion stars to look at. Planet discovery is in it's infancy, and I believe the smallest planet to be discovered yet is still 14 times more massive than Earth. I've read that an ideal solar system to support potential life would have a gas giant such as Jupiter in a protecting orbit, which isn't too uncommon according to recent planet discovery. Out of 7 billion potential sun-like stars I think your equation may need to be readjusted. The possibility of life can't be ruled out until all 7 billion stars have been surveyed for Earth-like planets.


So, some trillionaire builds a massive zeppelin of solid gold, encrusted with precious gems, builds some type of nuclear engine to get it off the ground, and it crashes into a sand bar in the pacific. It's really far fetched, but nothing's quite impossible ;)

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

I think the number of stars in our galaxy being 40 million might be the original number used in Drakes equation back in the early '60s. Im not certain.

but the effect of increasing the number of stars from 4E6 to 1E9 or 2E9 doesnt bring us much closer to 1E350 from 1E100

the vastness of the galaxy is far exceeded by the complexity of even a one cell organism, you have to look at both astronomy and biology

and biology says it is a waste of time to search those billions of stars one by one looking for life. I know this boggles the mind but there arent enough atoms in the entire universe to bring the odds of finding another planet with life on it anywhere near 1:1

Your analogy of studying cats by looking at only one up close somewhat ignores the amount of information we can gleen by studying the light that comes from stars, even if they are thousands of light years away, we can still tell how large they are, how fast they are consuming their fuel, what elements are present, which way they are moving relative to the earth, and how fast they are moving. We know that all stars are giant fusion reactors, where hydrogen is turned into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.

Its not like we are going to find plasma stars and gasoline stars and wood burning stars - we can tell from here that the same core mechanism is functioning in all of them.

Bythe way, your analogy falls into line with what I have been saying: a cat is an incredibly complex lifeform. The basic laws of physics, matter and energy are extremely simple by comparison. We cannot read the DNA of a cat that is 10 light years away, that would be impossible. But if you were to incinerate a cat 10 light years away, we could tell what elements it was composed of by means of spectral analysis of the light that it gives off as it burns.

Re: are we alone in the universe?
 

Ken,

That 1E350 is an interesting number. How did you come up with it?

Greg