Do You BELIEVE there is life outside Earth?

[Diche Bach]

The fact that humans dominate Earth does not mean we are "the only intelligent" species. We should not be so arrogant or myopic as to imagine that. It puts us in jeopardy in terms of stewarding the Earth and it diminishes our ability to think outside the box in terms of plausible evolutions of xenobiology.

That said, of course humans are completely unique and orders of magnitude more powerful than any other species known. Any 12 year old can see that, it doesn't really need to be belabored does it?

On 12/10/2017 at 1:04 PM, Earthlinger said:

GASP

Any friendship we might have had is now forfeit

~Earthlinger, AKA Random Stranger

I agree with Green Baron.

I do NOT _believe_ in xeno-biology, nor (and more so) intelligent xeno-biology. I've spent too many years striving to be a scientist to "believe" in anything for which I am not presented with good evidence.

I suspect that eventually we will find xeno-biology. It might even be fairly common. We might even be a mere few decades or years from having the remote sensing capacity to detect signals that would provide sufficient evidence to shift a few notches from "suspect" (or else "open to the possibility") toward "accept the evidence as prima facie valid." But even there, "belief" is still quite a few notches away.

ADDIT: Hell! I've been studying evolutionary theory since 1986 and I know it well enough to know it is one of the most powerful, compelling and well-supported theories in the natural sciences. I taught evolutionary psychology and have written papers in evolutionary behavior journals.

Even so, I'm hesitant to say I "believe" in evolution. I conclude that the evidence in favor of the model is so overwhelmingly supportive it is simply not possible to reject any of the core constituent hypotheses that serve the theory, nor the theory as a whole. It works to explain the reality we see, and while the model itself is merely a human representation of reality, and thus likely deficient in being imprecise, inaccurate, or incomplete, it is nonetheless one of the best human representations of reality ever conceived . . . at least in terms of scientific standards of "best."

Edited December 12, 2017 by Diche Bach
axiomization

[PB666]

9 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

I do NOT _believe_ in xeno-biology, nor (and more so) intelligent xeno-biology. I've spent too many years striving to be a scientist to "believe" in anything for which I am not presented with good evidence.

I suspect that eventually we will find xeno-biology. It might even be fairly common. We might even be a mere few decades or years from having the remote sensing capacity to detect signals that would provide sufficient evidence to shift a few notches from "suspect" (or else "open to the possibility") toward "accept the evidence as prima facie valid." But even there, "belief" is still quite a few notches away.

The same, but I needed to point out to everyonee WHAT we are looking for when we look for _X_, we are not looking for octopi in some deep vent or a cute little xenopuppy.

Whole the reasons of what humans are in terms of the ulitimate exploitative generalist are the same reasons there is the idea of a prime directive. If they are capable of understanding what you are . . .and they are not at the tech level of what you are . . .but might be capable . . . .then you have probably made a mistake that you will regret by contacting them. From a scientific point of view it does not matter the level of intelligence, life is a study of the variation not the 'what is it'. From a social-political point of view it makes a big difference. Thus you only need to know enough about intelligent life to give yourself a wide lee-way when interacting with new worlds.

 

[magnemoe]

56 minutes ago, PB666 said:

You mean like the whale intelligence in Star Trek series. You have the metric wrong.

To be intelligent of a level meaningful in a xenobiotic context you left out one very important point that most of these other examples lack in magnitudes. Humans are one of the most manipulative, environmentally exploitative, resource-heavy dependencies of any species that has ever lived on the planet. We leverage our intelligence with machines, beasts of burden, irrigation systems, roads, shipping. The most social ant in the world cannot skype another ant on the otherside of the world asking for advice on how to deal with anteaters. Other animals manage to leverage their cognitive facilities in a few directions. Crows are of advanced EQ and they can take clams and bust them on rocks, find clever ways out of cages, octopus are great at getting into things and escape and mimicry artist. Dolphins are able to sense prey blind and feed as if they had x-ray vision. Wolves work together in packs to take down prey several time their composite size. All these measures of skill and learning are not to be discounted. But the day the first human sat down and crafted an adze, hollowed out a canoe and went beyond the line of site to a new land, where he and his mate(s) learned to exploit new resources human-kind would see the power of serial problem solving that is magnitudes above the manipulative ability, at its peak in societies, compared to other animals. This is why we are here talking about these things and crows are not. There have been many crow level species since the dawn of the Earth, there has only been one space-race.

This, animal and human intelligence is way different. however we was just as intelligent 50K years ago. way before civilization, yes at that time we was also the only predator hunting adult mammoth but hardly something you would detect from orbit. 
We have detected no dyson swarms so I guess my old joke render is an better first contact scenario than most https://i.imgur.com/QNnA8iM.png
In short we can detect life by detecting oxygen, intelligent life we can either detect if as easy as oxygen or it require us to land. The time-span between this options is 10K years +-5K

[GoSlash27]

Diche Bach,

True as all of that may be, that's not the sort of "intelligence" we're talking about here. Dogs, chimps, honeybees, etc. do not qualify as "intelligent" in the context of this discussion. They're not going to build civilizations and construct spaceships. They don't exhibit the kind of intelligence with which we can communicate, share knowledge, establish trade, negotiate, etc.

 In *that* context, the history of evolution on this planet supports the notion that "intelligence" isn't something that evolution naturally selects for in life forms that don't already have it. Thus, life (and even advanced life) may be common on all habitable planets... but "intelligent" life may be extremely rare or even nonexistent.

Best,
-Slashy

[kerbiloid]

Probably we can detect no really hi-tech civ by its radiation and so just because they would cover their planet with some kind of stealth dome.

[PB666]

I don't believe in neobiogenesis, per say, but in terms of evolution, particularly molecular evolution, there is no doubt that evolution is occurring (look at STRs between fathers and sons in humans), that evolution has been occurring (just look at the recombination of HLA types as humans have spread around the world), and that it has been occurring for a long period of time (look at the mitochondrial tree, which a 5th grader could create a phylogenetic tree going back at least 200 million years).

WHen I say I don't believe in neobiogenesis that is to say I don't know if it occurred here on earth to create current diversity, whether life was drop here, reached here. But I do believe that neobiogenesis occurred at least once in our galaxy and probably at least once in our solar system and likely several times on Earth, which is to say I don't know whether current life on Earth descended from an event or from a trans-planetary event. From that perspective you are correct, but saying that evolution does not exist, that is pretty far out on a limb.

 

 

[Green Baron]

3 hours ago, PB666 said:

... but saying that evolution does not exist, that is pretty far out on a limb.

What ? Who said that ?

Grabs saw for the limb ...

[GoSlash27]

3 hours ago, Green Baron said:

What ? Who said that ?

I'm wondering the same thing. Perhaps PB666 misunderstood Diche Bach?

Best,
-Slashy

[Green Baron]

Well, i would consider it balancing on a pretty brittle limb to say that life was dropped from outside ...

Edited December 13, 2017 by Green Baron

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Well, i would consider it balancing on a pretty brittle limb to say that life was dropped from outside ...

I didn't say it was probable, it one the extreme edge of possibility, as per what Diche was saying. 

[Matuchkin]

Yes. I am a firm believer that there is life outside earth. I believe that the probability of there being life outside Earth exceeds 99.99%. However, I have two answers to the Fermi paradox that I can dig the most:

1. Great Filter - something that prevents civilisations from evolving past a certain point.

There are multiple candidates in our world that I can perceive to be a great filter:

a) The Chicxulub asteroid impact. An instant event that wiped out most of the species on Earth. The reason why we are not royally screwed (or at least incapacitated) is that it happened at the wrong time.

b) The Bubonic Plague. I'd say this was a crazy near-miss. If the outbreak that wiped out half of Europe would have happened in, say, the 1800s or 1700s, it would have been spread across the globe and inflicted even more havoc. The only difference is that it happened right before that, just 400 or so years.

c) MOST PROBABLE FILTER: Nuclear weaponry. Logically, the nuclear weapon is the first step any civilisation can take to develop something with which it can commit suicide. For the latter half of the 20th century, our nuclear forces were fastened in place by crappy systems: old computers and unreliable satellites, as well as politicians who didn't manage to extrapolate by a few decades to determine the future capabilities of these weapons. Glitches actually happened, and there were tens of events that could have led to the whole Northern Hemisphere being ignited less than 24 hours later. Yet, there was always this one thing that happened, this one event of sheer luck: people who didn't push the button, voices over the radio that shouted to cancel the order mere split-seconds before the switch on a submarine was flicked, et al. We rolled sixes every time, and we're still not done with nukes. I believe that I may be witnessing a great filter event, or that we have just been incredibly lucky to pass one. The former is more likely.

 

2. Physical limitations - perhaps there are limits to how fast we can travel? Maybe, the space outside the Oort cloud is a hellscape of debris, space rocks, and radiation from Sagittarius A*?

Edited December 13, 2017 by Matuchkin

[PB666]

12 minutes ago, Matuchkin said:

b) The Bubonic Plague. I'd say this was a crazy near-miss. If the outbreak that wiped out half of Europe would have happened in, say, the 1800s or 1700s, it would have been spread across the globe and inflicted even more havoc. The only difference is that it happened right before that, just 400 or so years.

Remedy domesticated felines, the real cause of the population dropping phenomena was two fold. The onset of the mini-ice age (people brought their farm animals indoors), a corrupt church. Aside from that the human kind has survived such disasters several time along its history.

The spansih flu outbreak of 1916-1920 killed more people and was less predictable.

I would replace b) with Cell phones, twitter and face-book accounts (unrestricted access to media) as the likely reason.

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, Matuchkin said:

a) The Chicxulub asteroid impact. An instant event that wiped out most of the species on Earth. The reason why we are not royally screwed (or at least incapacitated) is that it happened at the wrong time.

 

And if Wikipedia says it a thousand times, the Chicxulub alone was not enough for the K/Pg extinction event, though it had immediate continental effects and was probably the drop it needed to fill the cask of a highly stressed environment and lowered global temps from a large igneous province, the deccan trapp basalts.

The extinction wiped out approx 30% of marine spp. It did not wipe out the Dinosaurs, at least Hadrosaurs survived. Most of the land living plants were reduced and thus the base of the food pyramid for large land living animals taken away.

[Diche Bach]

I have profound confidence in the scientific merits of evolutionary theory, particularly when it is considered in its "fully accessorized" post-New Synthesis, post- Stephen J. Gould, post sociobiology, post-Richard Dawkins, etc., contemporary form. I own a Dachshund after all, so how I could be so blind as to fail to see how well it explains the variety of life we see on Earth.

That word "believe" is not one I like to use in discussions of scientific topics. It carries too much baggage with it. Maybe I'm being silly to make such a distinction, but that's me.

On the topic of "Are we alone?" Fun "article" about Omuamua

Strange tumbling motion of cigar-shaped interstellar 'comet' Oumuamua suggests it’s an alien probe with BROKEN engines, says leading astronomer

As a scientist, I think any hypothesis (even the most absurd) are worth assessing: what are the assumptions (do they need to be assessed) what are the predictions?, can they be tested? how do we test them? Okay. So, now test them and share your findings.

It is unfortunate that we as a species have yet to extend this ritual thought process to more of the viewing audience, because often one has to track down the primary sources of articles like the above to even have a clue whether the "expert" being referenced is proposing a scientific question or is a crank/troll/hack, or has been very badly misquoted/taken out of context by journalists with quite limited scientific training.

If the professor is intrigued by the hypothesis that Omuamua is not in fact a natural object, but a spacecraft, then frankly he should have nothing to say about it, UNLESS he has an well-formed hypothesis and can propose how it could be tested. Intuition, hunches even fetishes and "beliefs" may play a crucial role in keeping a scientist from boring him or herself to death but they really have no place in the language a scientist uses to communicate with others.

Edited December 13, 2017 by Diche Bach
fix again

[Green Baron]

Had to press ctrl-+ a few times because reading glasses ...

... exactly. A hypothesis that cannot be tested is worth nothing. That is critical rationalism, correct ?

[PB666]

5 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Had to press ctrl-+ a few times because reading glasses ...

... exactly. A hypothesis that cannot be tested is worth nothing. That is critical rationalism, correct ?

Quantum gravity.

[Green Baron]

Got me. But people are aware and working on it ! I mean the whole thing is in the status "postulated", right ?

Here's another one: String (M-) theory

Edited December 13, 2017 by Green Baron

[Diche Bach]

You guys are saying that "Quantum gravity" and/or "String theory" are hypotheses that are not falsifiable?

Don't know enough about the topics to know if I dislike that or not.

[Green Baron]

I am not a physicist !

Afaik those two are proposals to bring quantum mechanics and general relativity together in a theory of quantum gravity or "theory of everything". They are highly theoretic and afaik atm there is no way to test the one or the other edit or even to formulate something concrete. And the whole thing can be regarded as an open item. A big open item :-)

Any physicist around ? @sevenperforce maybe ? Sorry if i disturbed you :-)

Edited December 13, 2017 by Green Baron

[sevenperforce]

5 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

I am not a physicist !

Afaik those two are proposals to bring quantum mechanics and general relativity together in a theory of quantum gravity or "theory of everything". They are highly theoretic and afaik atm there is no way to test the one or the other.

Any physicist around ? @sevenperforce maybe ? Sorry if i disturbed you :-)

Huh what?

**starts reading thread**

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Diche Bach said:

You guys are saying that "Quantum gravity" and/or "String theory" are hypotheses that are not falsifiable?

Don't know enough about the topics to know if I dislike that or not.

Tell you what we can do, we can parse "keeping up with the Kardashians" and "Jersey Shores" into the simplist picture format, beam them in the direction of every known exoplanet (adjusting for space-time, projected motion, blah, blah, blah) over a large number of frequencies so that they will not be accidentally missed. Keep this going in a continuous loop do this for about 100 years, and then listen for 100 years. If no intra galactic police force does not appear in that time, or messages at the same frequency being sent back "please stop" or "the pain of it all" imagery and the occasional "you got any more like this", then its probable that there is no higher level sentient life around us and we can go out an mess up planets if we like. Of course they could just be planning to wipe us out, so you might have to turn on the high power interstellar ship detector and wait a few hundred years longer. 

Is this the kind of test for intelligence you were thinking about?

[sevenperforce]

String theory and quantum gravity are not currently robustly falsifiable, but it is an open problem in physics. There are people working on it. There are mechanisms whereby they could be partially falsifiable, or where certain versions could be falsified. For example, the existence and potential detection of magnetic monopoles is a prediction of several versions of string theory. Attempts at detecting monopoles have thus far been unsuccessful, which falsifies certain versions of string theory which predict a high density of detectable monopoles. However, there are other versions which predict lower densities, which are not falsified.

There are certain versions of quantum gravity which predict asymmetry in particle energies under certain circumstances. These predictions were not immediately testable or falsifiable at the time they were made, but now there are ongoing experiments at the Pierre Auger observatory and elsewhere which could falsify these predictions.

Asking whether a theory itself is falsifiable is a little bit tricky. What can be shown to be falsifiable (or not) are the predictions made by a theory. A theory which makes no falsifiable predictions is probably not a good theory; a theory which makes concrete, agreed-upon falsifiable predictions is a much more useful theory. 

Wildly speculating that an asteroid's tumble pattern means it might be an alien probe is so far from producing testable/falsifiable predictions as to be laughable.

 

[Diche Bach]

39 minutes ago, PB666 said:

Tell you what we can do, we can parse "keeping up with the Kardashians" and "Jersey Shores" into the simplist picture format, beam them in the direction of every known exoplanet (adjusting for space-time, projected motion, blah, blah, blah) over a large number of frequencies so that they will not be accidentally missed. Keep this going in a continuous loop do this for about 100 years, and then listen for 100 years. If no intra galactic police force does not appear in that time, or messages at the same frequency being sent back "please stop" or "the pain of it all" imagery and the occasional "you got any more like this", then its probable that there is no higher level sentient life around us and we can go out an mess up planets if we like. Of course they could just be planning to wipe us out, so you might have to turn on the high power interstellar ship detector and wait a few hundred years longer. 

Is this the kind of test for intelligence you were thinking about?

That actually has promise . . .

[PB666]

47 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

String theory and quantum gravity are not currently robustly falsifiable, but it is an open problem in physics. There are people working on it. There are mechanisms whereby they could be partially falsifiable, or where certain versions could be falsified. For example, the existence and potential detection of magnetic monopoles is a prediction of several versions of string theory. Attempts at detecting monopoles have thus far been unsuccessful, which falsifies certain versions of string theory which predict a high density of detectable monopoles. However, there are other versions which predict lower densities, which are not falsified.

There are certain versions of quantum gravity which predict asymmetry in particle energies under certain circumstances. These predictions were not immediately testable or falsifiable at the time they were made, but now there are ongoing experiments at the Pierre Auger observatory and elsewhere which could falsify these predictions.

Asking whether a theory itself is falsifiable is a little bit tricky. What can be shown to be falsifiable (or not) are the predictions made by a theory. A theory which makes no falsifiable predictions is probably not a good theory; a theory which makes concrete, agreed-upon falsifiable predictions is a much more useful theory. 

Wildly speculating that an asteroid's tumble pattern means it might be an alien probe is so far from producing testable/falsifiable predictions as to be laughable.

 

Just to let you know, you could say the same thing about Neobiogenesis, we have disproven Adam-Eve and like stories, we have shown that you can create morphological-based phylogenies that vaguely resemble the cladograms from mitochondrial DNA. Some have claimed they can cipher relationships up to 3.3 billion years in structure of proteins and/or genes. If quantum gravity is a major or primary  source of information in the universe, its similar to the first cell that gives rise to all other cells. . . .once you get to that cell you can't really do much more phylogenetics, even protein and DNA phylogenetics would begin to loose power and eventually you cannot reconstitute life any farther back in time despite the fact you know it exists. This is called the coalescence wall. This was faced in human male lineages for a time because coalesces times in males were much more recent than in females; however it turned out, luckily, to be a sampling problem. The problem with things that coalesce to a single entity is that for example a single cell or a small set of proteins in that cell, is that you cannot see concurrent parallels. For example a line of dinosaurs that goes extinct is black to the molecular record, but the simplist microbes aren't megafauna and don't leave DNA lying around either (that we know of).

I would argue that with regard to string theory, there is not one string theory but many, so if one string theory is correct, the others are incorrect and vis-a-vis the grecan god argument why are not all of them incorrect. So from that point of view, apply Occam's razor and wait for some evidence to guide the selection. Quantum gravity could be a unsolvable problem of universal proportions.

Edited December 13, 2017 by PB666

[GoSlash27]

34 minutes ago, Diche Bach said:

That actually has promise . . .

Well... That's definitely one way to convince them that there's no intelligent life here, anyway...

-Slashy