12 ms·

At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the

• qrendel 11y ago
  I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.
  • ginko 11y ago
    It could also be that there was a technologically advanced civilization which destroyed itself.
    • ratsimihah 11y ago
      Maybe we are them. We used to live there, and conditions reached a point when we had to leave, and we came to present Earth. Haha.
      • lberger 11y ago
        Good sci-fi material here.
      • logicfiction 11y ago
        Plausible, but what would be explanations for sending ourselves back to the stone age instead of carry advanced knowledge along?
        • evilduck 11y ago
          Maybe they tried and failed? Maybe they arrived on a sterile Earth 3.6 billion years ago with supplies and huge tomes of knowledge, promptly died off within a couple hundred years of arrival, tectonic movement subsumed their landing ship and all other physical records of their existence here and we're all just descendants of their gut flora?
          • krapp 11y ago
            All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
            • mod 11y ago
              Can you explain that? I wouldn't have expected every possible situation to have occurred given the finite history of the universe. But I really have no idea what I'm talking about, so my request is serious.
              • krapp 11y ago
                It's a reference to the plot of the recent Battlestar Galactica remake.
    • evilduck 11y ago
      It could also just be their resources were insufficient and they plateaued or fizzled out before escaping their own planet was possible. Or that the distances and difficulty of transporting anything very large or complex between star systems turns out to be just too great of an engineering problem for any life form. The energy required to move a life-sustaining amount of mass between stars is mind-boggling huge and beyond our own technological capabilities for the foreseeable future ( we only anticipate interstellar life is a possibility by assuming our technological growth curve will continue unimpeded and then guessing there's life out there further along tha us, which may not be accurate or possible). Or that they are indeed spreading but doing it in a way undetectable to our technologies we're looking with and we just didn't come up lucky enough to be directly contacted by them in their spread (yet?). Or maybe they developed a Matrix-like utopia, a self-maintaining and long lasting support system and stopped outward appearing progress? Or going in another direction, perhaps we really are inside a simulation and $life_bearing_planet is set to 1. The hypotheticals are nearly endless and not necessarily due to overtly negative outcomes.
  • DuskStar 11y ago
    Apparently it has a diameter 60% larger than that of the Earth, and so if we assume it has the same density as the Earth it would have about 16m/s^2 gravity on the surface, and an orbital velocity of around 12km/s @ ~1000km (in comparison to the Earth, where a 1000km circular orbit is closer to 7km/s). This means that merely achieving orbit would be approximately as difficult as launching a probe on a Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars is. (Except that such a launch vehicle would need nearly twice the thrust/weight, cutting down the mass ratio even further.) It is not unreasonable to think that a species on such a planet would have never seriously developed space travel.
    • qrendel 11y ago
      To colonize or seed life you don't need to launch huge space vehicles with enough life support to maintain a breeding population, though. You can just launch some kind of self-replicating microbes capable of directing themselves into the forms of life you want to encourage over time. The precise ability to do this would depend on your current state of technology, but we're pretty close to developing full blown synthetic biology and genetic engineering ourselves, so it's hard to imagine they'd need to be more than a few hundred years more advanced than us at most. Microbes can be engineered to be immune to most dangers from space travel as well, similar to tardigrades. To head off the common rebuttal of "maybe they wouldn't have any interest in it," with more advanced technology smaller and smaller groups of individuals would be capable of instituting such a project, to the point where any high school kid with a synthetic biology kit and some toy rocketry kits could colonize the entire universe (owing to relativistic effects). You'd have to assume their society underwent some kind of massive convergence of social norms away from any individuality such that no few members of their species ever had both the capability and desire. The entire plan is mostly laid out by: http://www.tedxvienna.at/watch/why-aim-for-the-stars-when-the-galaxies-are-just-as-easy-stuart-armstrong-tedxvienna/ http://www.tedxvienna.at/watch/why-aim-for-the-stars-when-th...
      • Retric 11y ago
        This might work on a baron world, but any place with a developed ecosystem would likely see these things out competed very quickly do to the massive overhead of needing to survive in space for a long time.
  • phantarch 11y ago
    As a counter point, it's always possible that a civilization that developed past where we are now would have been masterful at space travel, but not advanced enough to completely figure out a 1400 light year long journey. We're still having hard times figuring how to get squishy meat sacks to Mars without being irradiated to death or creating a launch vehicle made of lead. Besides the engineering problems there's the social cost of a venture like that. Unless their societies would be structured in a wholly different way (which is likely) then there is significant political and social momentum that would need to go behind a project like a mission where the minimum acknowledgement time of success is 2800 years away. There's plenty of time to go extinct or make yourself die off.
    • danielweber 11y ago
      You don't have to figure out a 1400-ly trip to be here. You just ("just") need to be able to move from one star system to the next. If they took 100 years to get to the next star system 5-ly away and then 500 years to populate that system enough to start a new colonization, that's just ("just") 168,000 years to be here. Given a 2 billion year head start, that's easy.
      • phantarch 11y ago
        Even if it only took them 100 years to get to a star system 5 ly away, I would be amazed and impressed by a society that would be okay with investing in and working on at minimum a 105 year mission. Perhaps they live much much longer than we do :)
        • jessaustin 11y ago
          If they lived much longer, comparisons on earth would lead one to expect they'd be much slower to get anything done. Small burrowing rodents that live a couple of years hit the ground running, build extensive dens, and reproduce before they're a year old. OTOH giant tortoises never actually do anything except walk around slowly.
        • corford 11y ago
  • meatysnapper 11y ago
    Perhaps they were wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from an unexpectedly dirty telephone?
  • thaumaturgy 11y ago
    It's fun to think about all of the things that could prevent a far more advanced civilization relatively nearby in the cosmos from making contact; it gives us a better perspective on how lucky or fragile our own development is and where we might be focusing on the wrong things. Perhaps no civilization of any sort has ever developed there. Maybe conditions on the planet are inhospitable, perhaps evolution simply never went that way. I think people tend to assume that evolution naturally leads towards more intelligent creatures, but that's not true. Humans are a very very recent development on our planet, in geologic time scales, and our early existence was pretty improbable. Perhaps civilizations have existed there, but never achieved technological advancement. There are still tribal civilizations on Earth that are using 50kya technology; there's no guarantee that a civilization must develop science and technology. Perhaps it has had civilizations with similar technological advancements to our own, but they have been destroyed or set back by any of a number of things: extinction-level impact events (could easily happen to us), disease, warfare, or resource shortages. Maybe, for some reason, they never developed easy access to a high density fuel; imagine if humanity had tried to go directly from steam engines to nuclear or solar power because oil didn't exist or wasn't easy enough to find or its significance was never understood. Perhaps they reached a level of technological advancement far, far superior to our own, but they never made an effort to explore the cosmos. The vast majority of people on Earth right now don't see any point to even exploring other worlds in our own solar system; that mindset could easily dominate for the rest of mankind's existence. Maybe we assume that there is some kind of shortcut around the speed of light and there isn't and, no matter advanced a civilization gets, there simply aren't enough volunteers for a 10,000-year journey to another tiny little planet that may or may not harbor life. Perhaps all of these are wrong, but they simply visited Earth a million years ago and found it to be entirely uninteresting and haven't been back since. Maybe their civilization has even ceased to exist, and our civilizations will never ever cross paths because we missed eachother by a few minutes in geologic time. I'm generally optimistic about the chances of advanced civilizations elsewhere in our galaxy, even relatively close by, and entirely pessimistic about our odds of ever being able to interact with those civilizations in any meaningful way.
    • rybosome 11y ago
      Here's another scenario: they could have colonized other worlds, but had no interest in setting foot on every last planet. Perhaps their culture is insular, and they are either apathetic to (or forbidden from) contacting us. It's not hard to imagine that we would be unable to detect them, either.
  • wmeredith 11y ago
    Maybe they are here and it IS us?
    • rvlouie 11y ago
      http://giphy.com/gifs/tim-and-eric-mind-blown-EldfH1VJdbrwY http://giphy.com/gifs/tim-and-eric-mind-blown-EldfH1VJdbrwY
    • personlurking 11y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8hEwMMDtFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8hEwMMDtFY
    • aswanson 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4843540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4843540
  • lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    But they did seed the planet, but the stargate got buried and we forgot all about them, until just a few years ago when ... Oh wait, sorry !
    • yellowapple 11y ago
      cue aliens impersonating Egyptian gods and enslaving the human race until being killed off by Kurt Russell and James Spader
      • lifeisstillgood 11y ago
        Nah, it was Amanda Tapping and MacGyver that did all the hard work.
  • narrator 11y ago
    Or the "zoo hypothesis"[1] is true and we're quarantined off on our little planet out here. I figure we're like the people on North Sentinel Island[2]. We haven't even invented fire, and we kill anyone who tries to shows up on our island. We're so remote that the local authority in the area has declared our Island a protected zone, just as India has with North Sentinel Island. We occasionally see helicopter and try and shoot arrows at them. 1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis 2.http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/north-sentinel-island-the-worlds-hardest-place-to-visit-2.html http://www.odditycentral.com/travel/north-sentinel-island-th...
• lucozade 11y ago
  The engineer in me says that it's overwhelmingly likely that there's nothing alive there. The little boy in me so wants me to be wrong.
  • sgt101 11y ago
    I don't understand your reasoning! There is good evidence that life apeared on earth more or less as soon as it cooled down, so there is just as much reason to think that this new place may have life as not. However, by the same reasoning it seems to me that the life may be bacteria like!
  • D_Alex 11y ago
    > The engineer in me says that it's overwhelmingly likely that there's nothing alive there. Our planet has life in all kinds of niches. Why would an Earth-like planet not be overwhelmingly likely to have life on it? (I am an engineer also...)
    • lucozade 11y ago
      True but all of our planet has an atmosphere conducive to supporting life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Earth-like planets generally won't support life. I have no idea how many will. It just seems unlikely that the first one found happens to tick all the relevant boxes. Having said that, the fact that they've found one so quickly, relatively speaking, seems like a good indicator that there are an awful lot of good candidates for life-supporting planets. The more there are, one would assume, the more chance that some will have everything in place. But then again, we could just get lucky and hit it first time. Which would be stellar (sorry).
      • sampo 11y ago
        > True but all of our planet has an atmosphere conducive to supporting life. The composition of Earth's atmosphere was pretty similar to Venus and Mars, before photosynthesis changed it to the current composition.
• eastbayjake 11y ago
  It's jarring to think that if intelligent life were on Kepler 452-b and observing Earth, we're so far away that they would be seeing our "civilizations" in 615 AD: shrinking global population as the old Roman and Byzantine empires are overrun by barbarian hordes and Arab conquest, with some pockets of human progress in China. They would have no way of knowing that the descendants of those squabbling warlords just cooperated to fling a space probe at 36000 MPH past a tiny ball of rock at the edge of our solar system.
  • staunch 11y ago
    I hope they were recording the whole time and upload the videos to YouTube. I can't wait to watch Hannibal on the Pyrenees From Space.mp4
    • Falcon9 11y ago
      My favorite thought is that they've sent probes millions of years ago and we could send a request to watch some HD surveillance of dinosaurs roaming the Earth. It'll just take ~3k years to receive the requested footage.
      • anon4 11y ago
        Not if you board a spaceship and travel to them at close to light speed! Then you, personally, would just wait a few hours.
        • 33W 11y ago
          Once again, it will be easier to bring people to the data, than data to people.
        • raphaelj 11y ago
          You're right about the idea, but a few hours is way too short, because of how the Human body tolerance to strong accelerations. Assuming an acceleration of 10 m/s^2 (similar to Earth's gravity), it will takes roughly one year to accelerate to a speed close to the speed of light were relativistic effects occurs, and you will need one more year to decelerate.
• maaku 11y ago
  If there was an intelligent life form, like humans, it would have expanded into the cosmos and colonized the entire galaxy within only a million years of developing technology. Since we don't see traces of them everywhere, we must presume they don't exist.
  • tjr 11y ago
    Perhaps government funding for their space exploration programs dried up, industry regulations interfered with commercial space exploration programs, and they all just gave up and shifted technology resources to making games for their mobile phones.
  • lukasm 11y ago
    If there is a intelligent live form millions years ahead of us it's most likely AI that doesn't want to make the contact.
    • maaku 11y ago
      And also doesn't want to use any resources, or perform any heat-generating computation?
      • Udo 11y ago
        Your big unstated assumption is that any intelligence will always consume the maximum resources it can and cause the maximally possible transformation of any habitat. Normally, when physicists look for these kinds of large-structure signs, the implicit assumption is that it's sufficient for one civilization to behave this way, but you seem to assert they all must be like that. Any of the hypotheses we discuss in this thread (whether they are over-confidently stated as facts or marked as speculative) are inevitably deficient due to data derived from a sample size of one.
  • vectorjohn 11y ago
    That's an unfounded presumption. It's like, nobody has considered that advanced life might not even feel a need to live on planets at all. It's expensive to get resources from, and there's a near limitless supply of easy to get smaller debris. Additionally, the difference a 2 billion year head start could make is hard to imagine. One thing that's not hard to imagine is that they don't live in meat bodies for most of that time. They could easily be machines or virtual, and then would look and act nothing like anything we're looking for.
• ypcx 11y ago
  According to transhumanists, all we find there are running server farms.
• johnchristopher 11y ago
  There was an kind of on-topic post on imgur about that today: [The Fermi paradox: We're pretty much screwed...](http://imgur.com/gallery/Wtog9 http://imgur.com/gallery/Wtog9)
  • guimarin 11y ago
    I find myself thinking that the existance of Dark Energy/Dark Matter is the solution to the fermi paradox. there is some kind of energy creating system which creates dark matter. This matter is no good for normal matter so it is transported far away from stars/galaxies and dumped. This would probably be true if we could create a physics model that can explain like 1% of Dark Matter occurring naturaly. Then we just assume that other species have discovered how to create a ton of energy with Dark Matter as the by-product. We haven't been able to observe them for the same reasons our telescopes can't see the New Horizons spacecraft out by Pluto, just too small. And as far as observing communications. It's likely that all true interstellar communication on frequencies we could understand are sent with a targeted focus, like a laser, rather than a blast. Think of all our deep space equipment which has their uplink bits pointed toward earth.
    • MertsA 11y ago
      Or maybe there is no Dark Matter and we can't see a huge portion of stars because all of the light is being captured like a Dyson sphere. Unfortunately both of those hypotheses are rather improbable, we can observe very very distant galaxies and they all seem consistent with respect to Dark Matter AFAIK.
• SneakerXZ 11y ago
  I am surprised more people don't believe all this is just a trick because we base everything on our knowledge what if something out there is tricking us? We see the universe through a telescope and other sensors. But if something puts something in front of it, you will see different reality. It is like if you use binoculars and I put a fake image in front of you, you could start believing there is something else. It is also like magician. So we could be in ZOO experiment. Other civilizations want to see if we are capable of evolving and joining them so they make sure we are not disturbed by other life out there because if we discover intelligent life, we will freak out. We might start fighting for our survival and it could affect our evolution to higher species. We could also be a part of some computer simulation (with enough power you can create rules with particles and simulate the universe). Maybe somebody is trying to answer this question: If you create a big enough simulation, will be the simulation able to figure out it, it is being simulated? Or maybe everything that we see is true but it is just impossible to overcome some physical limitations. We assume there are no limits and everything is possible and one day we will master it. But what if communicating and traveling through universe is nearly impossible? Maybe there are limits that we don't know about yet. Maybe every civilization reaches point where they know the answer to everything and they don't see a reason to live anymore or they leave the universe and move somewhere else. My point is that we assume something that will eventually turn out false and everyone will be surprised by the truth.
  • codeshaman 11y ago
    Totally agree with you. There are so many possibilities of evolution besides building high tech spaceships and conquering planets and stuff. Imagine how much more wisdom (besides technological advancement) the average humans will posses in just 200 years (provided things evolve like they have been evolving during the last century minus the wars ). What wisdom and knowledge will we have in 1000, 2000, 50000 years (again, provided we are still alive) ? Maybe there is no need to physically travel through light years of space, maybe the 'truth' is much closer - right inside our own minds. In just a couple of decades we'll be able to build simulations which simulate all our senses and are just as real as our 'current' Universe - enter there and take a pill which makes you 'forget' about this reality and you can basically live another life without knowing about your current one. What if our current life is the result of such a 'game' which we entered and forgot about the 'outer' life. What if we're level 64 deep in such a simulation within simulation ? :) So many possibilities, but hopefully we'll somehow figure them out ..
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  If I were writing a science fiction story there would be primitive villages on higher inland areas, and partially submerged technologically advanced cities on the coastlines :-) But what I find most amusing is that when I was a kid "science" was saying "but we don't know if any other star even has a planet!" and to me as a kid it seemed preposterous that other stars wouldn't have planets. And now of course we know that pretty much ever star has at least some planets. The unusual case is no planets. Similarly with life, it seems ridiculous to think that somehow this planet at this time was the only place anywhere that sentience emerged. So it really makes me wonder, why the heck aren't we already talking with them? What is it that keeps intelligent life that originated on other planets from communicating with the intelligent life living on this planet? Why won't they talk to us?
• tbabb 11y ago
  With a larger planet, they may have been inescapably bound to the surface for their world for millions of years by the tyranny of the rocket equation.
  • Tossrock 11y ago
    Interesting thought, but then again, maybe they would just use external acceleration on such planets (ie catapult launch assist).