20 ms·
Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests
- INTPenis 6y agoWhat's staggering to me is that with the new Voyager discoveries lately it feels like we're a bunch of stellar savages who just managed to release a buoy far enough into the ocean to feel the currents. Let alone recognize another savage on a different continent who might be doing the same experiment.
- buran77 6y agoIt may be even worse, that different continent is on a different planet. Space(time) is absolutely, mind-boggling massive. Everyone knows it's big but it hard to comprehend how big and why there could be many alien civilizations out there capable of broadcasting or detecting but never intersect in any way because the detection windows of any 2 civilizations don't line up. The Milky Way alone is ~150000-200000 light years across. Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, and capable of sending and receiving signals for a mere century. Imagine that even at the speed of light the entire history of civilized life on Earth might come and go many times before something reaches us, or before the probe comes back. There's no Earth-bound or common sense analogy that can convey this kind of vastness and emptiness.
- vmception 6y agoThe fermi paradox does convey this.
- bena 6y agoNot well. It makes the assumptions that all of the problems with space travel are logistically possible.
- deeeeplearning 6y agoGiven the age of the Milky Way, a civilization using even slow sub light travel with generation ships or autonomous probes could have colonized the entire galaxy many times over. Why has no one done that? Hence the paradox.
- eloff 6y agoI don't know why this got down-voted. The milky way is 100K light years across. It's 13.5 billion years old. It's entirely possible to blanket the whole galaxy with probes, without even getting into self replicating probes.
- e12e 6y agoYou have to make an assumption about speed - it certainly won't be more than a tiny fraction light speed. Eg voyager appear to travel now at less than 0.00006 c (16 km/s). Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 M year journey (no it doesn't its 1.8 bn years as mentioned in reply) . Still possible to cross 10.000 times - but that would be a straight line. I suspect the distances will grow somewhat fractally if you want to swing by any stars? (ed: so, not really very likely at all)
- Baeocystin 6y agoTo traverse 100k light-years at 16km/s would take approximately 1.8 billion years. FWIW.
- e12e 6y agoThanks, not sure how I got to just 150 mill years.
- mistersquid 6y ago> Than turns 100k light years into ballpark 150 year journey. Forgive my confusion. If 100K light years is 100K years at c, how can > 0.00006 c yield 0.00150K (150) years?
- vl 6y agoBasically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. It's just too far, too expensive and too uncomfortable. Humans evolved specifically to live on Earth, to live somewhere else, they need to be severely altered. Now you just seeded civilization of another species, that might turn out to be confrontational or outright hostile. Why would you do that? Too see how well this works out on the local scale see colonization of Americas.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago> Basically there is not need and motivation for humans to colonize anything outside the Earth. Our current gas emissions would disagree. Also, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, curiosity, sheer ambition, etc, etc. The thing is: we don't need to convince all of mankind to colonize another planet. All it takes is a few people. Crazy rich Mr. Musk is one example. He may not be able to achieve it, but maybe all we need is a few other Musks in the next generations and suddenly we'll be in other planets. The Fermi Paradox discussion is fascinating.
- AndyPa32 6y ago> Our current gas emissions would disagree. While at first it might seem that Mars or any other planet is the solution to our environmental problem, the easiest solution to the problem would be fixing this planet. Colonizing Mars would take up so many resources that fixing Earth might be more cost-effective.
- psychoslave 6y agoThis is not Earth that needs to be fixed, it's human behavior. Teraformation and space conquest are fassinating topics, but "fixing our behavior to avoid to fuck up the only accessible viable environment we have" is far from deserving only a mere "might be more cost-effective".
- dyingkneepad 6y agoBut way less fun :) Or we could, you know, just transfer our consciousness to machines that can easily survive Mars and other environments and start our colonization after declaring ourselves to be Homo-sapiens-machina.
- beamatronic 6y agoThat’s why the best thing any species can do for the other species is to leave signs that we were once here.
- buran77 6y agoWe still need to leave a heck of a collection. On a living, evolving planet if all civilizations are gone the signs get wiped out pretty fast in geological time (geology, weather), and in space the signs are usually traveling in the emptiness with little chances of being spotted. The best probes will eventually fail and will just add to the countless objects floating never to encounter anything. I know it sounds depressing but I keep getting reminded of this [0] when thinking of loneliness in the universe. It's the most apt description I came across in recent memory. [0] https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle
- njarboe 6y agoOn the other hand, large objects made by us on the Moon could last for 100's of millions of years. Especially if the object was designed to last that long.
- beamatronic 6y agoI like the comic. It's almost like all intelligent life in the universe was put into escape-proof cages. We need to rage against this! Do it for all the others who can't.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoI remember reading somewhere that due to the differing pace of evolution and technology advancements, any intelligent living aliens we meet are almost certainly going to be gods or cavemen. I can't find the reference.
- krapp 6y agoIt's from Arthur C. Clarke: "If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is we will find apes or angels, but not humans." [0]http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/alientech.php
- kfarr 6y agoI like that quote but lately feeling like advanced tech doesn't necessarily mean angelic
- krapp 6y agoAngelic doesn't imply good, just being sufficiently advanced enough to seem like magic (to use another Clarke quote.) Demons are technically angels after all.
- zabardasth 6y ago> And she took on another heart—no longer minded toward earthly things—but ecstatically in the angelic dialect, sending up a hymn to God in accord with the style of the angels. And as she spoke ecstatically, she allowed “The Spirit” to be on her garment. It seems that speaking to one would be quite a terrifying experience, especially if one were speaking in tongues.
- krapp 6y agoWhen angels are described in the Bible, it's often in strange and abstract terms, beings with multiple faces, legs made of burning bronze, eyes where eyes shouldn't be, etc. As if the writer was having difficulty comprehending what they were seeing,much less finding language for it. And the first thing angels do when they encounter humans is tell them not to be afraid, because of course the logical and proper reaction to skyscraper-sized interlocking, burning, eye-covered wheels with multi-faced, multi-winged beings in the middle is bowel evacuating terror. And of course, many of Lovecraft's eldritch horrors were simply aliens that were so alien that the mere sight of them broke human minds, and that were no more concerned for humanity than humanity is for a particular anthill. That's probably what an actual encounter with an alien is going to be like for us. We'll try to understand why a living infinite-dimensional hypersphere made of flesh made of time whose eyes are our eyes all at once just showed up and "unfolded" our sun into a non-Euclidean shape we can't even describe mathematically without being driven slowly to madness, while it won't even know we were there.
- anonAndOn 6y agoWhile interstellar travel would be impossible using conventional thrust in a straight line, could you overcome the distance by bending space time?[0] [0]https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/gravstat.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/gravstat....
- ben_w 6y agoGoing fast in a straight line with conventional rockets is achievable, just not very timely. Bending spacetime enough to make a difference — even just to the time taken between here and Alpha Centauri — is beyond any known mechanism humans could build, even in principle, using the total resources of our entire solar system. (Using unknown mechanisms: perhaps, but they’re unknown)
- skissane 6y ago> Going fast in a straight line with conventional rockets is achievable, just not very timely. A constant-acceleration spacecraft could reach the opposite side of the galaxy in 24 years ship time. (That'd be over 100,000 years of Earth time, however.) Conventional chemical propulsion don't have high enough impulse to do that. Possibly some kind of nuclear or matter-antimatter propulsion could?
- ben_w 6y agoEverything would run out of fuel over that distance if you were constantly accelerating ahead [0], but you don’t need to constantly accelerate in space. [0] spinning is accelerating, and you can do that forever, but it won’t help you get anywhere
- avhon1 6y agoAtomic Rockets has some good info on this. > When it comes to [high thrust, high specific impulse] propulsion systems we might actually be able to build in the near future, the list includes Orion drives, Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket, and maybe Medusa. There have been many studied variations of Orion. Atomic Rockets cites hypothetical Isp between 3,000 and 12,000 seconds. Vehicles with delta-V of up to 100,000 m/s have been proposed. These could definitely be built, and would definitely work, but would require constructing, co-locating, launching, and detonating thousands of 5- to 15-kiloton nuclear explosives. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#boomboom http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php... Medusa is basically Orion crossed with the image of a sailor blowing into their own sails. A huge parachute is deployed in front of the spaceship, and the nuclear explosives are detonated between it and the bow of the spaceship. The parachute can capture more of the explosive output than Orion's pusher plate can, it weighs less (because all of its members are in tension), and it can use its rigging's elastic properties to dampen the intermittent thrust, as opposed to Orion's (heavier) hydraulic dampers. The proposal study for Medusa (which assumed thirty 25-kg explosives) came up with an Isp of 106,220 seconds, and a delta-V of 4775 m/s. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#medusa http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php... The Nuclear Salt Water Rocket assumes plausible (but completely untested, so maybe impossible) continuous nuclear fission in a stream of uranium-salt-y water being sprayed into the combustion chamber. Assuming that this can be made to not blow itself up, 20%-enriched salt nets a theoretical Isp of ~7,000 seconds, and 90%-(weapons-grade) enriched fuel, with somewhat more optimistic efficiency assumptions, has a theoretical Isp of ~400,000 seconds and a delta-V of 10,000,000 m/s. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#nswr http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php... There are also lots of other currently-less-plausible proposals for high-power high-efficiency rockets. (Many of them assume things like efficient proton-proton fusion, which might be possible, but we have no idea how to do it.) Atomic Rockets is a great website for reading about these. My takeaway is that it's almost certainly possible to build spaceships that can travel at >0.01c, but it would take a great deal of resources organized by a society that is more trusting and responsible than we are now. After all, any vehicle with that kind of power is also an equally powerful weapon.
- dylan604 6y ago> Humans have been civilized for only some tens of thousands of years, That's giving humans a lot of credit. Civility has been regressing. I would be embarrassed for another civilization to find us now. Sure, we may have more technology and scientific understanding, but how we treat one another needs another world than civil.
- sbelskie 6y agoI don’t think civility has a lot to with civilization in the anthropological sense of the word.
- dylan604 6y ago"...first use in English is attributed to Adam Ferguson, who in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society wrote, "Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation".[14] The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the active pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment." [0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization
- sbelskie 6y ago“... in the anthropological sense of the word.” -me, just recently. If you are wondering where we might find a definition matching that sense, try the first sentence of the article you linked: “A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, a form of government and symbolic systems of communication such as writing.”
- koheripbal 6y agoGiven the relative age of planets and stars, other alien "civilizations" would be hundreds of millions or Billions of years older than us. The notion that we'd all be roughly at the same level of advancement is statistically impossible pop-sci-fi fantasy. In my opinion, it's unlikely that they are even organic individuals anymore. Even the separate alien "entities" might have a process of merging once they achieve a certain advancement. We are like fungus to them.
- grawprog 6y ago>We are like fungus to them. Maybe the fungi think that about us? They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet.
- Supermancho 6y ago> They've been around longer than we have and take up more of the planet. It looks like that to us, because our influence is visible over 80+% of the ground, but there's fungus IN us and covering more surface area than you can see. Imagine anywhere there's water (including from the air and including the oceans), there's fungus over a % of the land and organisms that you can see with a microscope. Fungus influence covers far more of the surface.
- grawprog 6y agoYup, life as we know it wouldn't even exist without their decomposition abilities. Dead stuff would pile up, nutrients wouldn't be recyled, beer wouldn't exist. A world without beer just wouldn't be worth living in. Fungi are very much overlooked, their role in forests alone is amazing let alone everything else they do. If someday, some scientists discovered some kind of conscious fungal intelligence, i would not be surprised.
- Balgair 6y agoIn some ways, then, we are 'alone'. Sure, there may be intelligent life out there, but the vast differences in biology combined with the likely vast differences in technology will render us 'alone' all the same. Just like a goldfish in your apartment. To you, you are alone, goldfish don't count as company. And to the goldfish, it is alone, as humans don't count as whatever a goldfish thinks a friend is.
- johnchristopher 6y ago“Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.”
- deeeeplearning 6y agoUsing some rough numbers like the distance between NYC and London vs the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri the equivalent would be saying that Voyager 1 is about 1.8 Miles into a 3470 mile journey (from NYC to London).
- neuronic 6y agoMaybe also mentioned that it managed those 1.8 miles travelling since the 70s...
- zimpenfish 6y agoTravelling 8x faster than the fastest vehicle we've made, too (the X-15 managed 2km/s; the Voyagers are doing around 16km/s)
- cblum 6y ago> with the new Voyager discoveries lately What new discoveries, specifically?
- deeeeplearning 6y agoI think it came out recently that it actually detected an increase in the particle density of the interstellar medium as it leaves the solar system.
- fmitchell0 6y agoThe dark forest theory lives!
- sudhirj 6y agoUnfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume they’re doing the same. An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.
- Pulcinella 6y agoI have a far more charitable theory. The vast majority of human and alien life would want to be friends (or at least just leave their neighbors alone). It’s the elites who desire to destroy each other. I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P
- prox 6y agoIt’s also about how you define intelligence: >“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- me_me_me 6y agoAre we though? Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?
- 6y ago
- briga 6y agoSeems like the only way for us to prove that they can see us is for us to see them first.
- projektfu 6y agoAnd, it’s likely we will never see their planets from earth while they can see ours.
- skinney6 6y ago#spaceforce
- onion2k 6y agoIt's safe to assume that any aliens who travel to our solar system will be so much more advanced than us that there's literally nothing we could do to repel them if they were aggressors. We can only hope they're friendly.
- me_me_me 6y agoAnts are preparing to stop a potential highway construction. They even organized an #antforce Jokes aside, I would say we would be lucky if we were consider as a factor in decision making when a nearby alien fleet needed say 'some' water. Collectively 'we' are laughing at the conservationists when they try to protect a beetle habitat when a new road/housing project is being built. Who cares about beetles, I want to get from A to B quicker! Lets hope aliens have slightly stronger conservationist lobby that might lobby to preserve us when a this new proverbial alien road goes through our planet.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoWe really need to accelerate our Spartan program.
- jb1991 6y ago> the zone where Earth's transit is visible gets smaller as you get closer to our solar system I’m trying to imagine why that is but cannot.
- fr2null 6y agoI am by no means anything close to a physicist, but I would imagine it is because of the same principle as the inverse quare law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
- macintux 6y agoI struggled with that too. Here's my mental model, which may or may not be relevant. Imagine you're holding a penny directly in front of your eyes, between you and the sun. It can do a pretty good job of blocking the sun for you, because it's so close, but no one else is impacted. Now move that penny a few hundred feet up. Now it's almost imperceptible, but far more people (technology permitting) are capable of spotting it.
- projektfu 6y agoLet’s say that you need to be within, say, 1 degree of the ecliptic. The height of that ring is much greater at 100 ly than at 1 ly, meaning more space for stars.
- koheripbal 6y agoThe article is just poorly written. Even the first line is messed up... > Those 1,004 star systems are in a direct line of sight to our planet... It's SPACE. Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI was translating 'direct line of sight' as 'parallel enough to our ecliptic plane to see the Earth occluding the Sun'. > Every star within 1000 light years is in a direct line of sight to every other star. There could be space crap in between. - Of course I just realized something obvious. Along our PotE lies most of our solar system debris. Shouldn't that be obstructing alien views? Excepting highly tilted orbits or unusually clean solar systems, how are we seeing exoplanets at all? Is there a sweet spot, just a bit above the plane, where observable solar occlusion still occurs?
- Razengan 6y agoCan WE detect life on Earth from far away?
- minitoar 6y agoDepends on how far and exactly where we are in relation to the earth sun system.
- wolfram74 6y agoThis very instant? I suspect not well. But conceptually? Yes. If we made a space based telescope that could do IR-visible-UV spectroscopy with decent resolution/sensitivity we would be able to get some information about the chemical make up of the gasses on planets transiting their stars. Much like the kerfluffle about phosphine on Venus, there are some compounds you just wouldn't expect from strictly geologic processes. Molecular oxygen comes to mind, but also some complicated shortish life time compounds would imply industry maybe. If we had /really/ good sensors we might even be able to spot the isotopic differences, it's been awhile since I've looked into the capacity for spectroscopy, but since the masses are different, the vibrational modes should be different, resulting in different spectra. We could conceivably spot if weird isotope distributions were in their environment, if it differed wildly enough from their suns make up you might be able to make the case that weird non-geologic nuclear reactions were taking place. The reason the astronomy community is excited about the James Web Space Telescope is that it can do a few of these investigations.
- avian 6y agoMy hypothesis is that, if given a (simulated) spectroscopical observation of Earth's atmosphere from a distance, astrophysicists would come up with plausible non-biological, non-industrial explanations for it.
- marshray 6y agoWould be interesting to find an explanation for the surge (and decline) in atmospheric Freon, and its replacement with other refrigerants.
- hexo 6y agoIs this worth disabling adblocker, pretty please? :(
- kgwxd 6y agoNothing is. But I have uBlock Origin, I'm not getting stopped.
- smileybarry 6y agoDisabling JavaScript works and doesn't break anything.
- vmception 6y agoNo, it is pretty horrible of a browsing experience with adblock turned off, a video pops up in the lower right, a gigantic banner pops up - for me it was Oculus Quest 2 purchasable at Best Buy - there was no question presented to me about Cookies as I am in California so that was strange, and now the data brokers have my whole profile yet again.
- BitwiseFool 6y agohttps://archive.is/8SzmV https://archive.is/8SzmV
- hexo 6y agothanks a lot!
- Jaruzel 6y agoActual source paper: https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/499/1/L111/5931805 https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/499/1/L111/5931805
- ouid 6y agoThat ad block hostility though.
- nix23 6y ago>Thank you for visiting this site. Unfortunately we have detected that you might be running custom adblocking scripts or installations that might interfere with the running of the site Yeah leave the "might" be my problem https://web.archive.org/web/20201023131014/https://www.livescience.com/aliens-spot-earth-exoplanets.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201023131014/https://www.lives...
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI'm not getting may anti-adblock behavior with Ffx 82 & uBO. What browser are you running?
- nix23 6y agoFirefox 82 and uBlock...soo
- coldcode 6y agoI always wondered if they could see us, would they recognize us as something to care about? I see ants on my porch, but they don't really matter much to me.
- Madmallard 6y agoIf you didn't know what ants were already they probably would be interesting
- koheripbal 6y agoSure, but if you were a billion years old and had seen ants before, it's unlikely that you'd take interest in any specific ant hill you walk by.
- marcosdumay 6y agoUnless you are one of those people with the habit of studying ants, and cataloging the multiple ways that they can be different. Or if you are one of those people that want to grow a crop on that plot of land, so the ants are a problem.
- godelski 6y agoIdk, there are still people that study ants. Both professionally and as a hobby. Just because you don't care doesn't mean someone doesn't. I don't know why the same wouldn't be true for aliens. Unless those aliens are ant like (hive mind...ish)
- purplecats 6y agoand those ants don't know they are being studied/farmed
- godelski 6y agoI'm not sure I like this line of reasoning because it implies that the ants aren't aware of us. Certainly they are in some cases. Ants are able to physically perceive us. So if aliens aren't using some means of passive remote sensing to study us then I don't see why we wouldn't also notice them (though they may have good reason to not use active means). Sure, the ants aren't aware of what why we're hanging out around them, but they are aware of us.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoI always thought maybe the reason we don't see life in the surface of other planets is because of security/defense reasons. Why wouldn't they be cloaked? Isn't it a bad defensive position to just live out in the open like we do?
- ben_w 6y agoHiding would be good if you could do it, but: (a) to the best of everyone’s knowledge it is impossible to hide your heat signature in space, let alone hide the shadow of a planet blocking the light of its star (metamaterial cloaks are far too frequency-specific) (b) the biosignatures we’re looking for right now are anything out of chemical equilibrium, so a planet-dwelling civilisation would only hide from us if they wiped out their surface and ocean ecosystems at the very least
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoI'm recently (as in last night) starting to question the likelihood of life forming at all. I'm wondering how well we've nailed-down just what life is and how well we grok it's origination process. Cursory reading suggests we're still working from educated theory.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/8SzmV https://archive.is/8SzmV
- tsimionescu 6y agoGiven that life only appeared once on earth in 3.5 billion years on Earth, the Milky Way is around 14 billion years old, we don't really have a good reason to believe there were more than a handful of abiogenesis events in the history of the galaxy. Of course, its possible this is completely wrong, perhaps the Earth was completely unlucky, or perhaps there have been many abiogenesis events and they have just failed for whatever reasons.
- saas_sam 6y agoIs "life only appeared once on earth" an accepted fact at this point? There was clearly at least one occurrence that led to a subsequent successful reproductive pattern from which we evolved, but prior to that, or alongside that, it strikes me as pretty unlikely that we would be able to discover other fleeting abiogenesis events. We just discovered new salivary glands in human heads. Organs. Not microscopic ones. They are in our actual heads that we are walking around with and we just found out about it like a week ago. So, forgive me if I am a little skeptical of our ability to find hard-to-find things. Some stuff is... hard to find.
- Baeocystin 6y agoNo. We have a Last Universal Common Ancestor, but that says nothing about whether or not there were other independently-formed branches that were competing at the time. My personal opinion is that life under early Earthlike conditions was/is almost a guarantee. There is compelling evidence that life already existed in and survived the Late Heavy Bombardment- that's very early in our planet's history. If it was truly a rare event that sparked things off, I would expect it to have occurred much later in the planet's history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment#Geological_consequences_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment#Geologi...
- tsimionescu 6y ago> My personal opinion is that life under early Earthlike conditions was/is almost a guarantee. There is compelling evidence that life already existed in and survived the Late Heavy Bombardment- that's very early in our planet's history. If it was truly a rare event that sparked things off, I would expect it to have occurred much later in the planet's history. That is valid of course, but in the absence of evidence of its existence, the default assumption should be its unlikely.
- mcqueenjordan 6y agoAh, reversing it and asking the question “who could use the same star dimming trick to see us?” is an excellent insight. We should point our receivers at all of these locations and listen for signal.
- apacehead51 6y agoIf the planet is in the habitual zone for a given star with H2O then there is a biological chance some form of life exists. The evolutionary cycle for advances species development on the planet is the question. The human race did not evolve in a few million years. If there is a living advances species they could be very primitive compared to humans or much more advanced. There are so many variables that even science has not fully developed to come up with a plausible answer.
- dylan604 6y ago> If the planet is in the habitual zone This makes it sound like the planet is hanging out on skid row with a belt wrapped around its arm getting ready to shoot up. I prefer planets in the habitable zone. Less crime in that part of the solar system.
- cletus 6y agoI'm pretty convinced at this point that it's incredibly unlikely that there's anyone around us to hear us. A lot of people have put a lot of thought into this. I'd suggest starting here [1] for an overview. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh...
- causality0 6y agoIndeed. It seems incredibly unlikely that another civilization would arise so closely in time to our own that it hasn't either collapsed or expanded to fill the galaxy well before our own development.
- snarkypixel 6y agoYeah.. call me grumpy but I'm not a fan of sending big objects in space easily detectable by aliens.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y agoThere's gotta be a sci-fi book about this but what are the chances that another civilization already went through the singularity? Is that even possible? How would that change things?
- ineedasername 6y agoThat headline should probably be "at" 1k stars. Being "on" the star would make for a much more interesting story though.
- dghughes 6y agoCould Life Evolve Inside Stars? Cosmic strings and magnetic monopoles coming together as the "DNA" of this theorized exotic life form. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNK5oahmw3I&ab_channel=PBSSpaceTime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNK5oahmw3I&ab_channel=PBSSp...
- greggman3 6y agoAccording to a talk I went to we don't have the tech to pick up our own signals. In other words, we started putting out singnals ~100 years ago with radio and then TV. If we were even at Alpha Centuri, our current equipment could not pick up those radio/tv signals.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoThis is a fun story for a Friday evening. If we peg the beginnings of intentional electromagnetic emission from our planet at 1900, then by 2226 all of these stars will be able to "receive" or potentially detect, non-random emissions from the planet which will scale exponentially both in power and in frequency. Those stars that are currently between 50 and 70 light years away will be experiencing our "golden age of television" about now. Perhaps it would be useful to have a SETI project that focused on EM emissions to see if any of them have started transmitting. It would be hilarious if the first reception from an alien civilization was "Who shot JR?"
- birdyrooster 6y ago"on nearby stars" okay