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GABA ghoul
Oct 29, 2011

Dross posted:

The thing about low probabilities is that given enough iterations they become nearly certain. There’s something like a quintillion stars in the observable universe, and it’s starting to look like planets are the norm rather than the exception. Life, in a very basic sense, is probably not vanishingly rare.

We have no idea how probable abiogenesis is though. If you plug in the numbers it could turn out that you would only expect to observe the occurrence of life one or two times per 10 billion years in the whole universe. Like, yeah, the number of planets in the universe has a pretty huge exponent, but so do things in organic chemistry, just with the opposite sign.

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Dross
Sep 26, 2006

Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

GABA ghoul posted:

We have no idea how probable abiogenesis is though. If you plug in the numbers it could turn out that you would only expect to observe the occurrence of life one or two times per 10 billion years in the whole universe. Like, yeah, the number of planets in the universe has a pretty huge exponent, but so do things in organic chemistry, just with the opposite sign.

Sure, but until a few decades ago we also had no idea how probable planetary formation was, and it turns out the answer is “very.” It’s estimated that about 20-25% of Sun-like stars have an Earth sized planet in the habitable zone. And that’s with narrowing the definition of “life” to that which is similar to Earth’s.

As of now, we know of one planet that has been proven to harbor life and a few which do not appear to with our currently limited observation capability. I know there’s a frame of reference issue there, but that’s the data we have.

Mooey Cow
Jan 27, 2018

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Pillbug
All this baseless speculation just because some nerd couldn't fathom why space aliens hadn't talked to him personally.

Asterite34
May 19, 2009



Mooey Cow posted:

All this baseless speculation just because some nerd couldn't fathom why space aliens hadn't talked to him personally.

Aliens are the hot cheerleaders of the universe, and alien skeptics are incels

Remulak
Jun 8, 2001
I can't count to four.
Yams Fan
Anything off earth that has a toothless hole is my alien waifu. This includes rocks and astronauts.

ashpanash
Apr 9, 2008

I can see when you are lying.

Bula Vinaka posted:

"Spooky action at a distance" or quantum entanglement is real however, and is instantaneous from the perspective of anything living in the universe. If you could somehow gain control of just enough particles in a distant part of the universe, maybe you could get them to form a self replicating molecule, then get those molecules to become more complex.

Maybe that's what RNA/DNA is?

You cannot communicate information via quantum entanglement. You cannot influence the outcome of events outside of your light cone.

That's just how the universe works. Don't blame the messenger.

Mooey Cow
Jan 27, 2018

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Pillbug
You can easily influence events outside your future lightcone via quantum entanglement though there is no known way to use that for communication

Honky Dong Country
Feb 11, 2015

I'm gonna find an alien and gently caress its rear end. Then the naysayers will believe.

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

hail cgatan


i want to be the first person to eat an alien

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

PokeJoe posted:

i want to be the first person to eat an alien

Pretty sure Jeffrey Dahmer beat you to it.

ashpanash
Apr 9, 2008

I can see when you are lying.

Mooey Cow posted:

You can easily influence events outside your future lightcone via quantum entanglement though there is no known way to use that for communication

The requirement that the universe, from your perspective, remains consistent is not precisely equivalent to the requirement that influence can extend outside your lightcone.

Just sayin'.

I admit the distinction is perhaps more subtle than I previously implied.

ashpanash fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Feb 24, 2021

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Asterite34 posted:

People convinced aliens don't exist because they haven't contacted us is like being convinced humans don't exist because dogs can't answer cellphones.
Look, it's simply impossible for there to be intelligent alien life that can't have long periods of organized, culturally-mediated estivation in order to allow the natural replenishment of food organisms. These sacheads in the space program claim they can engage in some kind of organized "cultivation" of plants and even prey animals in a controlled environment, but big whoop, guys: you figured out, for billions of quatloos, what a dumb-rear end nutpacker does with literally only one brain.

ashpanash
Apr 9, 2008

I can see when you are lying.

Asterite34 posted:

People convinced aliens don't exist because they haven't contacted us is like being convinced humans don't exist because dogs can't answer cellphones.

I am not at all convinced aliens don't exist.

I am pretty effectively convinced that intelligent life that is or was either actively seeking intra-species contact/communication or building megastructures is exceptionally rare.

Gravitee
Nov 20, 2003

I just put money in the Magic Fingers!
The truth is out there

MarcusSA
Sep 23, 2007

Is this the ufo thread? Cause wtf yo

https://apple.news/AYHhtuw2ZQt2t-v0SnnJ83g

Big Beef City
Aug 15, 2013

Aliens are extremely real and VERY eager to eat my whole rear end

Budzilla
Oct 14, 2007

We can all learn from our past mistakes.

GABA ghoul posted:

We have no idea how probable abiogenesis is though. If you plug in the numbers it could turn out that you would only expect to observe the occurrence of life one or two times per 10 billion years in the whole universe.
Also Earth had single celled life for billions of years before multicellular life evolved. Given that sort of time and the fact that the universe isn't that old and wouldn't have been an ideal place for life to evolve we could be among the first planets with life; if life is supposed to be abundant.

Pentecoastal Elites
Feb 27, 2007

there are almost definitely sentient, civilization-building aliens out there because we exist and seem to have been created by natural processes. Even if the conditions for complex, multicellular, thinking life to arise are vanishingly small we're still talking about something like 7 septillion stars in the observable universe. There are probably trillions or quadrillions of aliens that at least get to something that could communicate with us. It's more unlikely that we're the first out of however many bazillion instances of thinking life, or that our solar system is the only one perfect enough to host life, than civilizations are just a thing that happens sometimes (however rare it actually is)

Unfortunately we'll probably never actually get to meet any aliens because not only are the distances involved way too vast to do anything about, but any two species are probably only capable of mutual communication on a tiny time slice. They're either not at our level yet (animals) or so far beyond us that we might as well be animals and it's entirely possible that aliens like that are out there doing whatever and we can't even perceive them.

On the plus side if we ever do go looking it's pretty likely we'd at least get to find some cool alien ruins and derelicts.

Dross
Sep 26, 2006

Every night he puts his hot dogs in the trees so the pigeons can't get them.

If I were an intelligent alien species I would not contact us.

What’s always been really bizarre to me is that there seems to be only one higher thinking species on Earth.

Stanley Tucheetos
May 15, 2012

Dross posted:

If I were an intelligent alien species I would not contact us.

What’s always been really bizarre to me is that there seems to be only one higher thinking species on Earth.

It's because we killed off the other one.

AndyElusive
Jan 7, 2007

MarcusSA posted:

Is this the ufo thread? Cause wtf yo

https://apple.news/AYHhtuw2ZQt2t-v0SnnJ83g

"I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing moving really fast. It went right over the top of us."

How are we still living in a time where pilots won't and can't report weird and concerning poo poo they see in the skies without fear of ridicule?

Dude might have seen a loving missle shaped object fly past his plane and his major concern is how stupid he sounds saying it. gently caress sakes.

Android Apocalypse
Apr 28, 2009

The future is
AUTOMATED
and you are
OBSOLETE

Illegal Hen
To play devil's advocate, that plane was flying in New Mexico & likely near enough to the US Air Force's testing facilities. The US military is incredibly secretive on what tech they have as to not tip their hand on what force capabilities they have to possible adversaries (China, Russia, et al). I wouldn't be surprised at all if that UFO was a new cruise missile the government is testing out.

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

there are almost definitely sentient, civilization-building aliens out there because we exist and seem to have been created by natural processes. Even if the conditions for complex, multicellular, thinking life to arise are vanishingly small we're still talking about something like 7 septillion stars in the observable universe. There are probably trillions or quadrillions of aliens that at least get to something that could communicate with us. It's more unlikely that we're the first out of however many bazillion instances of thinking life, or that our solar system is the only one perfect enough to host life, than civilizations are just a thing that happens sometimes (however rare it actually is)

Unfortunately we'll probably never actually get to meet any aliens because not only are the distances involved way too vast to do anything about, but any two species are probably only capable of mutual communication on a tiny time slice. They're either not at our level yet (animals) or so far beyond us that we might as well be animals and it's entirely possible that aliens like that are out there doing whatever and we can't even perceive them.

On the plus side if we ever do go looking it's pretty likely we'd at least get to find some cool alien ruins and derelicts.

The distance problem combined with the speed of light means we’re basically stuck looking at the Milky Way, as even if another galaxy were entirely colonized in a way that we could detect, we wouldn’t be able to see it for a long time. Even if there’s a species with a ten million-year golden age, if they’re a hundred thousand light years away, we’re probably not lasting long enough to see them get started.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

The distance problem combined with the speed of light means we’re basically stuck looking at the Milky Way, as even if another galaxy were entirely colonized in a way that we could detect, we wouldn’t be able to see it for a long time. Even if there’s a species with a ten million-year golden age, if they’re a hundred thousand light years away, we’re probably not lasting long enough to see them get started.

The trouble with this is exponential growth.

Let's say that there's a single species that wants to discover other species, and is sufficiently advanced to build Von Neumann probes. These probes are dispatched with solar sails or electric propulsion systems to seek out civilizations at other stars, and if none are found, to use the raw material in those systems to build copies of themselves and repeat the process. Every star in the galaxy could be visited and explored in a time frame that is very short compared to the age of the galaxy itself, even at non-relativistic speeds.

It's possible that:

1. Von Neumann probes are physically impossible
2. No civilization advanced enough to do this actually wants to

but neither of those seem very likely. That there isn't and hasn't been a a civlization advanced enough to do so seems much more likely.

Pentecoastal Elites
Feb 27, 2007

How would we know they aren't here already?

In the interests of either environmentalism and/or leaving something interesting or useful behind I wouldn't program my von neumanns to use ALL of the mass of a solar system to make more of themselves. It's entirely possible (maybe even likely!) that if we ever get around to exploring the oort we might very well find a handful of probes watching the inner system and sending messages about us home. They might still even be launching probes into other systems. There's zero way we'd be able to detect this right now.

e: if they/their propulsion systems are quiet enough (seems likely) they might even be in the asteroid belt. But that's assuming they'd ever want or need to be that close, which is a big assumption one way or another.

Pentecoastal Elites fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Feb 24, 2021

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

Dross posted:

sentience
*sapience
*sapient

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through

Splicer posted:

*sapience



*sapient

they're used pretty interchangeably these days, and many include some degree of consciousness as part of the underlying phenomenon of sentience. they're certainly more similar than they are different.

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

hail cgatan


the true sign of intelligent life is drawing your genitals. we sent sketches of our dicks and slits to the aliens, they need to send some back before I will acknowledge their intelligence

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
We need a golden record with Dickbutt.

Biplane
Jul 18, 2005

What kind of alien would you all like to gently caress? Personally, I would gently caress any alien.

Owlbear Camus
Jan 3, 2013

Maybe this guy that flies is just sort of passing through, you know?



Honky Dong Country posted:

I think there's aliens and we'll prolly never meet one another because space is loving huge

this, and also time is long

AndyElusive
Jan 7, 2007

Biplane posted:

What kind of alien would you all like to gently caress? Personally, I would gently caress any alien.

Nordic. Either gender.

Biplane
Jul 18, 2005

AndyElusive posted:

Nordic. Either gender.

PM me :wmwink:

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸
I've heard good things about Arcturians

Fiddler on the Reef
Apr 29, 2011


we’re probably under observation by one of the bazillion genrational ships roaming our galaxy sent out by older civilizations to decentralize their species. it’s only a matter of time before they make first contact. hopefully soon. I’m bored.

yaffle
Sep 15, 2002

Flapdoodle

Biplane posted:

What kind of alien would you all like to gently caress? Personally, I would gently caress any alien.

ahem, I would only perform rishathra with an alien who consented.

Stanley Tucheetos
May 15, 2012

Fiddler on the Reef posted:

we’re probably under observation by one of the bazillion genrational ships roaming our galaxy sent out by older civilizations to decentralize their species. it’s only a matter of time before they make first contact. hopefully soon. I’m bored.

They won't. They have intercepted our radio waves and have determined that we would be a danger to all life in the universe if uplifted. In response the aliens have quarantined our system and prey we don't develop interstellar travel before we wipe ourselves out.

Biplane
Jul 18, 2005

yaffle posted:

ahem, I would only perform rishathra with an alien who consented.

I thought that went without saying, obviously. I respect the bodily autonomy of all aaliens.

Fluoride Jones
Aug 24, 2009

toot toot

Biplane posted:

What kind of alien would you all like to gently caress? Personally, I would gently caress any alien.

It's v possible that you have hosed a disguised reptoid op

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tacoor gafruf
Sep 23, 2007

JUST SOME SCRUB
Imagine if the first aliens we meet, Turned out to be just other humans. No special traits or anything, just normal humans.

This would depress me

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