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Unread 15-07-2005, 14:31
Marc P. Marc P. is offline
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Re: are we alone in the universe?

Here's the problem as I see it. As has been mentioned previously and numerous times, the universe is very big. I'll add that it's also very old. In terms of astronomy, Earth is only +/- 4.4 billion years old. I saw a special on either the National Geographic channel or the Discovery channel a few months back which chronicled the development of the Earth from debris field to the formation of our solar system, to the development of life. According to the show, the earliest signs of life on Earth showed up only a few hundred thousand years after the planet formed. They were simple bacteria, and helped process the hydrogen and carbon dioxide rich atmosphere into the oxygen we all know and love. What's not yet known is what kicked off the reaction which led to the amino acids to form into bacteria.

The problem is humanity has developed the tools to help observe and understand the nature of the universe only in more recent years. The telescope was invented around 1608, and computers and space telescopes have only really been in service since the early 90s. (Hubble was in development since 1977, but wasn't launched until 1990). So, for all intents and purposes, humanity has really only had eyes in the sky since 1608, and the ability to track stellar events since the early 90s. So we have roughly 400 years of data. Out of the 16 billion year old universe, we've only been watching it for 0.000000025% of it's existence. That's like watching 1/125th of a single frame of a 2 hour movie on TV (at 30fps). Of course, we can apply our knowledge of physics as we know it and extrapolate approximate positions, speeds, distances, etc. based on what we see. But what we see now is less than a fraction of what's happened/happening out there. Add to that the problem of the speed of light, where what we see from the other side of the galaxy happened thousands of years ago, and the picture becomes a bit murky. Add in a dash of the human lifespan, and we have a pretty good recipe for misconceptions and misunderstandings.

It took until the late 1400's for people to understand the world was round instead of flat, and the 1500's to find out the Earth rotated around the Sun. That's roughly 500 years ago. Space is a new frontier we're only beginning to explore and understand. Things like dark matter and anti-gravity particles have yet to be definitively discovered, and for all we know there could be structures of even more curious things floating around up there. Therefore, at this point any equations are based on a number of unconfirmed variables.

Also, the assumption that all life is based on DNA is a bit presumptuous. They key words are "life as we know it." Like Ken, I don't want this to become a religious debate, but let's say for the sake of argument that life on earth did start from a spontaneous chemical reaction, producing bacteria which then evolved into higher life as conditions became more favorable. Given that if all life rose from simple amino acids and then bacteria, it only makes sense that all life here would share the same structure in DNA. However, the theoretical existence of silicon based life-forms means there may be life in places carbon-based life couldn't possibly survive. In any case, my feeling is there's really not enough data either way to draw any sure conclusions. My personal feeling is we are not alone. Perhaps more advanced civilizations have visited our solar system at one point, or still do. If they have, maybe they consider our species to be too primitive, selfish, and greedy to make any meaningful contact worthwhile. I'd also guess if they have the technology to travel between stars, they would have the capability of hiding themselves from our relatively primitive telescopes.
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