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A team of scientists is investigating ways of detecting exo-civilizations aside from just radio signals as with SETI: JUNE 19, 2020 Does intelligent life exist on other planets? Technosignatures may hold new clues. by University of Rochester https://phys.org/news/2020-06-intelligent-life-planets-technosignatures-clues.html Two methods of detection mentioned in the article are detection from reflected light from solar panels or detection or pollution such as CFCs. However, even on our planet the number of solar panels would not be such that they would add appreciably to the Earth light. And CFCs presence might be short lived as it has been on our planet, having been banned. Could we instead detect the light on the night side coming from all the artificial lighting that would be used in a civilization? Some of the photos seen from space of the cities alit at night on Earth have been quite striking: Aug. 14, 2014 Space Station Sharper Images of Earth at Night Crowdsourced For Science https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/crowdsourcing_night_images How big would a space scope need to be able to see this in the Alpha Centauri system, for example? Robert Clark

As the title suggests, I would like to see some ideas of your perspective of extraterrestrial life, from floating cloud like creatures to little fish. @ProtoJeb21 @Spaceception @NickRoss120 @cratercracker @Adstriduum

Heya guys! It's me! Well, so you may or may not know I am keen on stuff like exobiology, biology and aerospace technology. Due to starting my first Chili season next year, I thought why not conduct some biology experiments to simulate planets and or space environments. The Plan is as follows: First, I will get a medium sized fishtank to be my lab module, I will equip it with a simple pressure based aeroponics system assembled from those plastic egg boxes. I already have some Lamps to simulate light conditions for different environments. For my first experiment, which focuses on artificial light to gather some basic practical understanding, I will cover everything with black cardboard and solely use my Red and Blue LED Grow Lamp, similar to what they use on the ISS. I will use simple sterilized dirt for ease of experimenting. My second experiment is an advancement on the first, which will involve semi-artificial dirt, made from oven sterilized dirt and sand, and finely ground rust powder. This shall simulate the conditions on mars. Sadly, I can't simulate artificial atmosphere made from augmented marsian atmosphere, because I cannot get my hands on a cheap high pressure gas depressurizer to make a mostly CO2 based atmosphere. However, I can actually simulate Titan conditions, because Methane Bottles with low pressure are easy to acquire in Austria. I won't do animal tests tho. If you want any simpler experiments done, send me name, length, and procedure on what to do(please as detailed as possible, missing key information results in reject), and I will rate on if I will do it or not, for whatever reason(which I may or may not give) Also, I can't do long term experiments that take years. If you want to speed up research, help me buy better equipment, or simply up the priority of your experiment, donate me any amount of money( but not ridiculously small amounts like a single penny): paypal.me/ShikaGaffal Donators will be displayed in a special hall of fame list, along with the amount of money(in euros) they donated. Thank you for reading my wall of text. EDIT: Later on I will also buy me a light microscope that operates down into the size of cells to analyze them

So doing alot of reading about space-time lately and ran across this very appropriate quote yesterday. http://www.householdgigs.com/2016/05/05/fermi-paradox/ So the above is just coincidentally in my reddit stream this AM and I was reading down the list wondering why it was new science and I am reminded of the Ravolli quote, and I though if this is not an example of guessing then I don't know what is. How would I solve the problem. Before I got a few paragraphs down I realized that it was a dirty laundry list of guesses, many of them rather uninformed. So here is it, we have 1 example of sentient life. And we have been looking all over the cosmos and not seeing any other examples of life, and have not even found examples comparable to earth after studying 2400 exoplanets. So we have a data set of 1 and a possibility of less than 1:2400 or more. So lets look and see what the density might be. So if life on planets is X below the probability of observing 1 in 2400 is y (remembering that our observation of ourselves has an acute observers bias) The problem is there are no statistical tests that allow this. While most qualitative testing does not allow me to do this (to do it accurately I really need a >>32 bit computer), I can trick the fisher exact test into doing it by setting ratios like the actual is say billion over a million is roughly equal to 1000:1 odds. So lets see were this takes us. lets start by saying there are for every 1000 planets we have 999 with sentient life and 1 without. and we will step this ratio down by 10 each time. SL:Not 999 :1 P = 0 to the calculation limit of a 32 bit computer. 99:1 P = 0 " " 9:1 P = 0 1:1 P = 0 1:9 P < 1E-107 1:99 P < 1E-9 1:999 P < 0.4 1:9999 P < 0.3 1:99999 P < 1E-3 1:999999 P < 1E-5 Note: the estimates below are not really accurate because they test the computational limits of the computer, I could reduce these, but . . . . . . 1:9999999 P < 1E-7 1:9999999 P < 1E-9 1:9999999 P < 1E-11 As we can see the probabilities drop more slowly into the microscopic ranges on the low estimates relative to the high estimates of extraterrestrial life. What this means that if we have to entertaine a broad confidence interval, its going to stretch more quickly into the very low estimates of sentiency. Do we have to entertain such estimates? A historical analysis of the science suggests yes,the curve has been shifting down. First we examined ourselves and concluded it was 100%, then we discovered our 9 planets and it dropped to 1:9, then 100s of planets, now thousands of planets and the probability is falling each time, the reason it is falling is because of our bias. Where does observers bias come from and what is it? Our observations suffer from both observation and confirmation bias. The problem is only living sentients can be/create the observers can count sentient life, and there always has to be 1 observer an any observation of sentient life. In very crude sampling (such as 2400 planets out of galaxy that has a trillion planets), very low estimates can never exist because there would be no observer to observe a region that is devoid of life or sentient life. So lets say our observation limit is 100,000 light years, and the field of view has a 10,000,000 stars with transects and we pick up 3 planets with stars. If we do not see signs of life in 1:30,000,000 planets can never allow a statistic say 1000 times lower, even if that is the life's (or sentient life's) rate in the entire galaxy So the base assumption of science is that a potential something is nothing until something. We can flip that to the opposite if we observe a strict pattern, such as all flying birds have wings, if want to test a new set of flying birds then the null hypothesis is that they should have wings. Having one earth and no observations of planets, we assume that all planets should have life. Moving to the next higher level of observation, having studied the moon and many planets, we have yet to observe life elsewhere (though predict that one or two have life). In observing the planets and all the moons of our solar system we do not see evidence of sentient life. The mistakes that are made here in the argument is that we assume the current knowledge suffices to create the appropriate argument, and the revelation of new technique reveals that it is not. Its historic ignorance, the question is whether we are above historic ignorance on not in our answers. From this perspective we should argue that the naive state of a planet is not to have life or sentient life, that is our null hypothesis that needs to be disproven. Some may argue the point but if they do we then have all kinds of subjective qualifiers. Do we count moons, do we count large asteroids, what should be counted in the assessment of life. So lets say we only count planets that have atmospheres. How many planets have we observed that have atmospheres, . . .very few. What is the probability that life exists outside of earth, in this argument we can exclude earth, lets say we believe to be transplanted here by beings from another galaxy, an omniscient creature about intergalactic sentients and we know we are the only species in this galaxy from the next galaxy, we ask the question how many planets have evolved life in this galaxy. To improve information of the low estimate statistics, there is another statistical method which is to remove 1 and then re-analyze, this is often done with data presents with a few outliers. Lets suppose we remove the earth from the analysis, because the observer creates the bias, what happens. Assuming no evidence of life or sentient life on 2400 worlds how can we estimate? 1:9 P < 1E-109 1:99 P < 1E-10 1:999 P < 0.2 1:9999 P < 1.00 1:99999 P < 1.00 since now earth is one of 2400, the lost estimates can of very rare life can never go below 1:2400 (0.0042) which means that our probability slow on the low estimate side and essentially stops at 0.0042 This is because although the probability is high at the low end, of the 2400 observations we have a 1:2400 chance of removing the one earth, removing any of the other planets does not matter much, they are pretty much the same statistic. So this then gets into a qualitative sphere, how far could we observe life on other worlds if we could observer sentient life on other planets. Or to ask the basic question, do some of the observed planets have life and we simply cannot observe it, do some have sentient life and we are missing it? If another world has life did it evolve or did it commute? Asking these questions we can then ask how biased is the observations? Planet hunters are looking for earth like planets, not at all planets, what about moons around gas giants, don't they qualify, should not the total number of planets be more? And we cannot see all planets, only those that transect our Earth - star sight, many go unobserved. There is a size bias to the observation, certain stars cannot be observed because of solar flares during the observation window, etc. What have I done, I have improvised a confidence range containing 99.7 percent of estimate where there was none it runs from about 1:20 satellites (1:300 for sentients) to 1:1E23 for the observable universe. The number is sufficiently small to not require adjustment for the entire universe. There is some hideousness to the argument, because space-time obviates any considerations beyond about 2 billion light years. And in fact the observations constraint is limited to a pool about 1000 galaxies in our vicinity. This statistical observation therefore epitomizes the problem that the data used to describe the Fermi paradox is a guess, it has a huge confidence range that is created by an observation bias and no other positive observations. The argument exists but the quantification does not. Some here might argue, why have such a wide and useless confidence range. A nice reason is that the Fermi paradox has bred a plethora of guesses that have each a very low probability of being correct. The confidence range therefore contains data for all of them and does not interfere greatly with the likelihood that any given one is wrong or right. So for example how could you know if there are species wiping out upstart civilizations if, in fact, that sentients are so rare, such species would only have a space-time SOI of a few 100 million light years and you are outside of that range, they might exist, but you could never detect them. The correct answer to the Fermi paradox is that it (the argument) exists. This may seem like a denigration of the paradox, its not meant to be, its meant to be a denigration of the solutions. Whenever we have an object where it can be inserted into an 'it exists' class, but the supporting data is minimal, we have to be wary of the answers/solutions. Who told us this? About 1000 years of theological philosophy went unresolved until Occam's razor. The simplest answer here is that life is rare and sentient life is even rarer, but we do not know what degree or why because our sampling is too poor. The sampling maybe poor because there is roughly nothing to sample......only statistics, however poor, are permissible at this point, nothing else has relevance.