Extraterrestrials, how much can we know about them?

[zinfamous]

It was all read at the completion of the human genome project. There is still a large amount of it that we don't actually know how works or interacts.

Indeed. I also mentioned that. Most important thing I wanted to address, though, is that very little of our DNA is actually junk. That thinking is now older than the sequencing of genomes (now more than 2 decades of progress).

 

[zinfamous]

My understanding is that life arose on earth in its first billion years, but multicellular, complex life forms only arose about 500 million years ago.

Yes, probably so, as I think oldest know dinos go back some 200-300 million years?

Hey, it's only a matter of degree.

I think in my mind it was 500mil years without life, but I misremembered as only the last 500 years with life.

 

[Muse]

...such questions about life being elsewhere...the fact that a human can even ask that question--as insignificant as a silent fart as humans are in the awesomness of the universe--is kinda silly.

Not sure about the perspective [universe awesome, humans insignificant], but yes, I'll concede that such ruminations might in the not too far distant future be deemed "silly." By EVERYBODY! I think that you can have that attitude today, and maybe you're on solid ground. However a lot of scientists are making this their work, many millions of dollars back them up.

I Got Them Ole Cosmic Blues Again, Mama.

Of course, you are right, the facts we have and simple logic/reasoning/deduction leaves one to conclude that life exists elsewhere in the universe, plenty of it, in many places. That's not really open to debate, IMO. My questions concern our ability to identify more about it than we can conclude just by analyzing what we can on this planet. The answer may be nothing, and it's silly to try. I think that some scientists are hopeful that this is not the case. Time will tell. As Blake said, "what is now proved was once only imagined."

 

[sandorski]

Shortly after hacking their Internet, one discovers the 7 Arousals of the 5 Tentacles. One then understands the perils of seeking discovery of such things.....

 

[Muse]

Shortly after hacking their Internet, one discovers the 7 Arousals of the 5 Tentacles. One then understands the perils of seeking discovery of such things.....

Well, your post illustrates the perils of posting about such things.

 

[feralkid]

Earth is the ghetto of the solar system. The international travel guide does not recommend a visit to this planet due to the amount of violence among the natives who live there.

 

[Shlong]

Of all the earth like planets that will ever exist in the universe, I believe earth is in the first 5-7%. So there might not have been enough time elapsed for other sentient beings to reach advanced civilization status.

 

[Muse]

I'm sure we'll know more about extraterrestrials in the future, but it all may be due to hypothetical considerations and advancement based on what we know about life by virtue of learning more from what we have here on earth.

The idea that life may have appeared on earth by virtue of seeding by meteorites is an interesting notion. However, it appears that it may well have evolved here without seeding.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I'm sure we'll know more about extraterrestrials in the future, but it all may be due to hypothetical considerations and advancement based on what we know about life by virtue of learning more from we have here on earth.

The idea that life may have appeared on earth by virtue of seeding by meteorites is an interesting notion. However, it appears that it may well have evolved here without seeding.

A third option is that both situations happened. Original evolving of life on Earth and seeded as well. I think that that is the most likely option.

 

[master_shake_]

natives as in the people who live on earth is what he was saying.

 

[z1ggy]

bait thread almost.

consider that we've been in this stage of evolution for less than 20k years. and, without going too abstract, we will probably change to a not fully biological lifeform in .. hmm, maybe another 20k. evolution is essentially exponential, once the process starts, it's explosive. we are unlikely to find another race in our same state just because of the numbers.

to be honest, i think a singularity (i hate this term) is just around the corner; as soon as we develop a functioning brain-computer interface, we'll have an evolutionary leap.

i don't see computers as tools, i see them as a part of our species, like an external brain - part of our consciousness. imho we're looking at major developments within 50 years, but there might be unknown obstacles in the way.

being very conservative, i think the human race will be unrecognizable in 20k years, possibly entirely synthetic.

therefore, it's very, very unlikely that any other tool-based race will be in a state that we can recognize, say, breathing air and expelling carbon dioxide; or using heat to warm themselves. or even cultivating food. they too would have taken millions of years to get to the "intelligent" stage, only to leap to the synthetic stage not much later, basically a short window of time. we are stupidly assume that aliens will have glass cities and flying cars, but they will probably be underground (temperatures are easier to stabilize) and will not have a organic chemical signature.

This is a very good and interesting point of you consider SI and how automation is slowly creeping into mainstream society. Long story short.... once AI implanted into machines becomes robust enough, there's really no reason for humans to exist any longer, except at the very bottom rung of society.

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[thesmokingman]

^^Robot overlords?

 

[Greenman]

What the hell did I just read

My thoughts exactly. This is what comes of reading to much science fiction.

To the op, the easy answer is that it almost doesn't matter if anyone else is out there. We can't chat or follow them on alien twitter, we can't stop by for a visit, we can't even figure what kind of porn they watch. No one alive today will get an answer to those questions.
While it would be cool just knowing someone else is out there looking at the stars and wondering if they're alone, the distances involved make any meaningful communication impossible.

 

[z1ggy]

^^Robot overlords?

Yeah basically. That's why Ppl like Steven hawking and Elon musk are very tentative when it comes to that.

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[purbeast0]

I personally don't believe there are any, but I'm still open to the idea that they very could exist. Either in the form of very basic life, to more advance life.

Also we always tend to concentrate on whether or not a planet can hold life, but how do we know some form of life does not have different requirements for life? For all we know there could be some form of bacteria that live in the core of the sun, they could be mostly helium based or something. They would probably talk very funny too.

i agree with your 2nd paragraph.

life form on other planets could be living off of some kind of gas or air that we don't even know exists at this point. there is just too much unknowns out there to assume that they need what we need to survive on any of the billions of planets out there in the billions of miles of space out there.

 

[Muse]

^^Robot overlords?

I don't tend to be concerned, but I'll admit that with my first computer around 22 years ago, I installed a chess playing app freebie I got somewhere. I played a few games on it and quickly developed a fear/antipathy for the machine. I had conceived of my new desktop as a friend, an ally in my aspirations to develop a career based on my new found facility with computers. This was simply trashed when I played the computer at chess and it won, I think every time! I immediately uninstalled the program and have had no such problems since. Now, I get angry at mythical programers, the unseen vermin who created the software that's messing up my day. But I don't blame some digital genie. I still feel that man(kind) is in control ultimately.

 

[thesmokingman]

What's that movie about the guy who spilled champagne/drink on his keyboard and it trolled him the rest of the movie... hmm electric dreams?

 

[JulesMaximus]

I personally don't believe there are any, but I'm still open to the idea that they very could exist. Either in the form of very basic life, to more advance life.

Also we always tend to concentrate on whether or not a planet can hold life, but how do we know some form of life does not have different requirements for life? For all we know there could be some form of bacteria that live in the core of the sun, they could be mostly helium based or something. They would probably talk very funny too.

We may have alien life in our own solar system. There is strong evidence that Europa could and possibly does support aquatic life in the vast and deep oceans under its icy surface.

 

[Greenman]

We may have alien life in our own solar system. There is strong evidence that Europa could and possibly does support aquatic life in the vast and deep oceans under its icy surface.

That would be an EPIC fishing trip.

 

[sandorski]

A third option is that both situations happened. Original evolving of life on Earth and seeded as well. I think that that is the most likely option.

Or it's possible that certain proteins formed in Space on asteroids that contributed to Life forming on Earth. Although it's also possible that Proteins form quite readily within the Universe, I suppose.

 

[dr150]

That would be an EPIC fishing trip.

Quick!

Get that River Monsters motherfucker suited up and roll tape!

 

[William Gaatjes]

Or it's possible that certain proteins formed in Space on asteroids that contributed to Life forming on Earth. Although it's also possible that Proteins form quite readily within the Universe, I suppose.

Very possible.
I found this interesting news item :

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/comet-67p-carries-two-ingredients-life-glycine-phosphorus?tgt=nr

Two more of the ingredients for life as we know it have turned up in space, this time from a comet orbiting the sun. While hints of both have been seen in comets before, this is the clearest evidence to date.

Glycine, the smallest of the 20 amino acids that build proteins, is floating in the tenuous atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, researchers report online May 27 in Science Advances. Comet 67P’s atmosphere also holds phosphorus, which is essential to DNA and RNA. Both detections support the idea that comets are at least partly responsible for seeding early Earth with material needed for life.

The phosphorus, glycine and a handful of other organic molecules were detected by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, which has been in orbit around 67P since August 2014 (SN: 9/6/14, p. 8). Kathrin Altwegg, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, led the study.

Previous searches for glycine in comets Hale-Bopp and C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake) turned up nothing. Glycine was seen in samples from the Stardust mission, which flew through the tail of comet Wild 2 in 2004 and brought comet dust back to Earth, but those measurements were complicated by lab contamination. Scientists have detected hints of phosphorus in comet Halley.

Life’s ingredients keep turning up in cosmic environments. Meteorites carry amino acids and simple sugars have been seen in interstellar clouds(SN: 10/9/04, p. 237). And several of the essential molecules for DNA and RNA, such as ribose, have been created in laboratory experiments that simulate ice grains exposed to ultraviolet radiation from young stars (SN: 4/30/16, p. 18).

 

[Muse]

Saw an article in the paper about 6 part PBS series, Steven Hawking on celestial conundrums, broadcast starting around 10 days ago. 2 episodes per evening on successive Wednesdays.

I watched about 1.5 hours of the first Wednesday 2 episode broadcast and had to stop watching. I knew all that stuff already, and to me it was really boring watching three handpicked laymen/laywomen high five each other for the 200th time after determining some scientific truism while they were conducting experiments designed for them by scientists. Steven Hawking is shown repeatedly, making his running commentaries.

They first determine that time travel is possible. They prove that you can't travel back in time (something I have never doubted for a second), they spent most of an hour finding that out. Then they determine and prove that you can travel forward in time, something I've known almost all my life. In fact, I wrote a short story about it many years ago, how these people left in a space ship and came back centuries later.

Then they got into the whole question of whether or not there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The tactic to start was to illustrate just how many stars there are out there and they showed that there were at least 300,000,000,000 stars in our own galaxy. I suppose they get into Goldilocks planets, but I was already super bored and stopped watching.

 

[DigDog]

you shouldn't think of our species as our bodies, but rather as the *collective intelligence of all life on our planet. the actual meat n bones doesn't enter into it.
algae produced oxygen which produced plants which produced insects which produced mammals.
all the organic matter on our planet is ONE specie - that's how an alien would see it. we, humans, will next produce artificial life, be it AI or synths (AI: software, Synth: mind-computer transplant).
It will be a next step in evolution exactly like the previous, exactly like a SSD is a HDD; it transcends some basic requirements (i.e. it doesn't have a platter anymore) but it's still the same thing. There is enough "information" leftover for it to continue existing as the same thing, just like the "fixing a hammer" paradox - fix a hammer, replace the head, then later replace the handle. Is it the same hammer?

re: neural interfaces .. we're working on it. we've developed nerve contact (artificial eyes which transmit directly into the optic nerve) already, the rest is not so far off.
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we are not going to create intelligence - the UNIVERSE creates intelligence. we are just a step into the path to synthetic life, and beyond.

 

[Muse]

I can accept the premise that intelligent life is a planetary product, not a single species thing. After all, there's discussion concerning the intelligence of other earthly species, e.g. dolphins.

However, I remain skeptical concerning the eventuality of AI. So far, AI on earth can only solve certain human specified problems, e.g. chess games, go games, design, mathematical problems. A computer or circuit can help inter-neural systems, but AFAIK basically nothing has been developed that will begin to approach the human nervous system and its capacity for intelligence and creative adaptation. I don't think that extra-corporeal systems will supplant the DNA basis of intelligence on this planet.

From Teaching McLuhan: Understanding Understanding Media (online discussion of McLuhan's Understanding Media):

" Media as Extensions of Ourselves

The core of McLuhan’s theory, and the key idea to start with in explaining him, is his definition of media as extensions of ourselves. McLuhan writes: “It is the persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed” (90) and, “Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. Some of the principle extensions, together with some of their psychic and social consequences, are studied in this book” (4). From the premise that media, or technologies (McLuhan’s approach makes “media” and “technology” more or less synonymous terms), are extensions of some physical, social, psychological, or intellectual function of humans, flows all of McLuhan’s subsequent ideas. Thus, the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media, in general, extend our central nervous system. "

The computer and etc. will extend our brain, but the brain itself is essential, will not be supplanted, nor will our feet, eyes and ears. Be good to them all!

Your singularity will prove as elusive as the 2nd coming and the predictions of myriad quacks over the years.