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There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or

There is life on Mars -- JPL just doesn't want to tell us. Follow this logic: 1) two planets in habitable zone - both spontaneously cause life; 2) then many or most habitable zone planets have life; 3) Of the trillions of stars in our galaxy, there must be multitudes that have hosted intelligent life; 4) we don't hear SETI signals; 5) that means SETI must have snuffed themselves out with some super-technology; 6) ergo, cannot tell the masses, because they will freak out knowing that we are all doomed, including all our offspring.

xvector 7y ago
I wonder if Type 3 civilizations might engulf their star in a Dyson Sphere to block out light and make it harder to find. A dark forest where the life-bearing trees aren’t even visible.
- Hextinium 7y ago
  The thing about that is all the energy from a star is still being radiated, just in infared. So if this was true a IR telescope should see a star like object with no visible light but a large amount of infared emitted.
  - CryptoPunk 7y ago
    Apparently Dyson spheres can be undetectable with IR telescopes: https://www.tillett.info/2016/08/03/carnot-efficient-dyson-spheres-are-undetectable-by-infrared-surveys/ https://www.tillett.info/2016/08/03/carnot-efficient-dyson-s...
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    People have looked. There are some candidates that have not been ruled out, but are not particularly promising. Do a Google Scholar Search for "IRAS dyson spheres" and you'll get oodles of papers describing attempts, new places we might look (I recall one suggesting they might all be surrounding the galaxy's central blackhole), current theoretical limits of our ability to search, new methods we might use to find them, etc.
fsloth 7y ago
The biological plausible explanation is that there simply has not been enough time for other civilizations to form up. It took us 4 billion years to reach civilization from primordial goo. Apparently not many planets remain habitable that long. It does not matter if you have a trillion planets if they don't remain stable long enough.
- philwelch 7y ago
  In all the vastness of the universe, “we were the first” is a stupendously implausible hypothesis compared to “we were the only”.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    If "we were the only" is true so is "we were the first" ... However, there exists or has existed one planet with the first civilization ever.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      And the odds that it’s us are astronomically even longer than the odds that I’m going to win the next Powerball, and I’m probably not even buying a ticket.
    - keithnoizu 7y ago
      it's not even entirely a given that we are the first, as it's unlikely any evidence of a small tribe of sentient dino villagers for example would persist to the present day.
      - stOneskull 7y ago
        Like a petal on the flower, or an apple on the tree, it's likely that planets fruit at about the same time.
        dkersten 7y ago
pstuart 7y ago
> they will freak out knowing that we are all doomed, including all our offspring Um, sorry to break it to you but the horse has left the barn in regards to future prospects.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Things may get pretty shitty for them, but if I could wager on such a thing, I'd wager on the species surviving.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    who would you collect from if you wagered against, and how would you take it with you?
    - pyrale 7y ago
      One could say we are already collecting from our offspring.
    - alexanderdmitri 7y ago
      Basically Pascal's wager: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
    - cgriswald 7y ago
      The wager is problematic for both sides. There's no end-point in which someone who was wagering for could collect.
archgoon 7y ago
It seems quite implausible that JPL would have sufficient confidence that things would play out as you say (everyone freaks out because everyone is convinced by this line of reasoning) to deny themselves a rather good opportunity to get people excited about space exploration.
ianai 7y ago
We already know we’re all doomed. The sun bakes us in somewhere around 5 billion years.
- mongol 7y ago
  Earth will become inhabitable faster than that. The timeline at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future is thought provoking.
- pavelrub 7y ago
  That’s more than enough time to colonize most of the galaxy.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I think the scuttlebutt is the sun gets increasingly brighter and strips off all the earths hydrogen in about a billion years.
- zaphirplane 7y ago
  Oh no my 401k retirement fund isn’t going to last that long
behnamoh 7y ago
Here's what I think: 1. ET life formed and vanished so quickly that they didn't even get to the stage where they generate electromagnetic signals. 2. ET life formed and got to generate EM waves, but: - they're either too far from us that we haven't detected those waves yet; - they only recently got to this stage and the signals they produce have not reached us yet; - or both. 3. ET life formed way sooner than we did; figured out how to generate EM waves, and then vanished entirely. So, any signals of their civilization they must have sent out there have already reached earth, but before we began listening for such signals. 4. Then again, since there are practically infinite number of planets with habitable conditions for ET life, statistically speaking, we must have already received a signal from at least one of them. Which leads me to this: 5. ET life doesn't exist, because the universe as we know it is most probably a simulation inside a computer and the computational resources can only render so many different objects at a time. (This is serious stuff, researchers have already proposed methods for verifying this: https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation-uw-researchers-say-idea-can-be-tested/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-c...).
- monocasa 7y ago
  Earth level EM waves are indistinguishable from background noise pretty quickly thanks to the inverse square law. And we've been reducing emissions, not increasing them, as we shift to cell networks rather than one to many broadcast networks of old.

xvector 7y ago

I wonder if Type 3 civilizations might engulf their star in a Dyson Sphere to block out light and make it harder to find. A dark forest where the life-bearing trees aren’t even visible.

Hextinium 7y ago
The thing about that is all the energy from a star is still being radiated, just in infared. So if this was true a IR telescope should see a star like object with no visible light but a large amount of infared emitted.
- CryptoPunk 7y ago
  Apparently Dyson spheres can be undetectable with IR telescopes: https://www.tillett.info/2016/08/03/carnot-efficient-dyson-spheres-are-undetectable-by-infrared-surveys/ https://www.tillett.info/2016/08/03/carnot-efficient-dyson-s...
- cgriswald 7y ago
  People have looked. There are some candidates that have not been ruled out, but are not particularly promising. Do a Google Scholar Search for "IRAS dyson spheres" and you'll get oodles of papers describing attempts, new places we might look (I recall one suggesting they might all be surrounding the galaxy's central blackhole), current theoretical limits of our ability to search, new methods we might use to find them, etc.

fsloth 7y ago

The biological plausible explanation is that there simply has not been enough time for other civilizations to form up. It took us 4 billion years to reach civilization from primordial goo. Apparently not many planets remain habitable that long. It does not matter if you have a trillion planets if they don't remain stable long enough.

philwelch 7y ago
In all the vastness of the universe, “we were the first” is a stupendously implausible hypothesis compared to “we were the only”.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  If "we were the only" is true so is "we were the first" ... However, there exists or has existed one planet with the first civilization ever.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    And the odds that it’s us are astronomically even longer than the odds that I’m going to win the next Powerball, and I’m probably not even buying a ticket.
  - keithnoizu 7y ago
    it's not even entirely a given that we are the first, as it's unlikely any evidence of a small tribe of sentient dino villagers for example would persist to the present day.
    - stOneskull 7y ago
      Like a petal on the flower, or an apple on the tree, it's likely that planets fruit at about the same time.
      - dkersten 7y ago

pstuart 7y ago

> they will freak out knowing that we are all doomed, including all our offspring Um, sorry to break it to you but the horse has left the barn in regards to future prospects.

catalogia 7y ago
Things may get pretty shitty for them, but if I could wager on such a thing, I'd wager on the species surviving.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  who would you collect from if you wagered against, and how would you take it with you?
  - pyrale 7y ago
    One could say we are already collecting from our offspring.
  - alexanderdmitri 7y ago
    Basically Pascal's wager: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    The wager is problematic for both sides. There's no end-point in which someone who was wagering for could collect.

archgoon 7y ago

It seems quite implausible that JPL would have sufficient confidence that things would play out as you say (everyone freaks out because everyone is convinced by this line of reasoning) to deny themselves a rather good opportunity to get people excited about space exploration.

ianai 7y ago

We already know we’re all doomed. The sun bakes us in somewhere around 5 billion years.

mongol 7y ago
Earth will become inhabitable faster than that. The timeline at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future is thought provoking.
pavelrub 7y ago
That’s more than enough time to colonize most of the galaxy.
Gibbon1 7y ago
I think the scuttlebutt is the sun gets increasingly brighter and strips off all the earths hydrogen in about a billion years.
zaphirplane 7y ago
Oh no my 401k retirement fund isn’t going to last that long

behnamoh 7y ago

Here's what I think: 1. ET life formed and vanished so quickly that they didn't even get to the stage where they generate electromagnetic signals. 2. ET life formed and got to generate EM waves, but: - they're either too far from us that we haven't detected those waves yet; - they only recently got to this stage and the signals they produce have not reached us yet; - or both. 3. ET life formed way sooner than we did; figured out how to generate EM waves, and then vanished entirely. So, any signals of their civilization they must have sent out there have already reached earth, but before we began listening for such signals. 4. Then again, since there are practically infinite number of planets with habitable conditions for ET life, statistically speaking, we must have already received a signal from at least one of them. Which leads me to this: 5. ET life doesn't exist, because the universe as we know it is most probably a simulation inside a computer and the computational resources can only render so many different objects at a time. (This is serious stuff, researchers have already proposed methods for verifying this: https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-computer-simulation-uw-researchers-say-idea-can-be-tested/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2012/12/10/do-we-live-in-a-c...).

monocasa 7y ago
Earth level EM waves are indistinguishable from background noise pretty quickly thanks to the inverse square law. And we've been reducing emissions, not increasing them, as we shift to cell networks rather than one to many broadcast networks of old.