Manasseh Q

It seems to me that "I Don't Know" is the only rational answer to this question at present.

Sure, it seems likely, that there is other life. It even seems likely that there is a lot of that life, and that a lot of it is intelligent. However, without evidence of such a thing, it's a faith issue to make any statements either way.

Hoorah for reserving judgement.

auto-da-fe

I think after reading countless books, and wathcing countless programs on the subject, I tend to fall in the line of;

With the number of stars (and hence the number of planets) in the universe, it is inevitable that we will find some other type of organic life (or at least, that it does exist, maybe not that we will find it). However, as far as this other type of life being intelligent, space traveling beings, this is far, far less likely.

Still, when you factor in the amount of possible planets out there, even far, far unlikely has a pretty good chance of happening a couple of times (with Earth being one).

There are some intriguing designs being developed as far as space propulsion goes. Some may get us near half the speed of lght. Consider these 2 facts:

1) We have only being flying for about 100 years (and only in space for half that time).

2) There are planets thousands (if not millions) of years older than earth, where a civilization may be thousands (if not millions) of years more advanced than us.

When you think along those terms, it is not real hard to imagine a civilization that may have acheived the speed of light travel (or, despite Einstein, have surpassed the speed of light). From there it is only a matter of time before they do something, in some way, to make themselves detectable to us.

There was an article about Fermi's I was reading some time ago. In it, they discussed how long it would take us to inhabit 1/10 of the known universe (can't remember why they were discussing this, only that they were). They were assuming that we could travel only as fast as the speed of light. By leapfroging from one planetary system to another, staying in one place only long enogh to establish a colony that was sustainable indefinitly. The figure they were supposing is something like 100,000 years. This seems like a fairly long time to us meager humans, but when you are discussing the cosmos, this is less than a blink of an eye.

Wyz_sub10

Yes, this is true. An endoresment of SETI is not similar to Pascal's Wager re: god because one isn't resting on "what ifs" as an end point.

Majestyk

Yes, the "what ifs" = Risk vs. Reward are missing. I don't recall SETI claiming that the E.T.'s are threating an eternity of torment if, we don't accept their existence.

Mageth

I find it a bit disheartening that when you combine the light speed barrier with the vast distances of space, it seems (so far) highly unlikely that intelligent species will ever cross eachother.

A bit of conjecture here:

I think that may depend on the probability of intelligent life developing. If the probability of intelligent life developing on planets is relatively high, and planets orbiting stars are as common as they seem to be, then, given the vast number of stars and vast amount of time, it would seem probable to me that somewhere in the universe two intelligent species have been, are, or will be in close enough proximity to stumble across each other.

Stated another way, with that many stars, if intelligent life evolves on even one in one billion planets (or maybe even fewer), there's a good probability that somewhere in the universe two of those planets will be in close enough proximity for two intelligent species to discover each other.

Of course, that does not mean we'll be one of the species.

Note also that it is possible that two or more intelligent species could evolve on the same planet.

Gawdawful

I didn't state that it, SETI, was exactly like Pascal's Wager, only that it sounded a great deal like it, as in both requiring an action to counteract the possibility of being wrong. You don't build a huge infrastructure, such as antennas (or churches), without an expectation (or belief) that there is something out there to listen to (or talk to), whether by calculating the odds, which I don't believe really can be done either until we find one other lifeform from somewhere else in the universe besides Earth, or by faith. I think that if life is found on Mars or Europa, then odds are really, really high that there is life all over the universe, maybe even intelligent life. But, what are the consequences if we continue to not know?

Regarding the possibly rabid racoon analog, there is a known percentage of, wild and domestic dogs, cats, prairie dogs, skunks, racoons, opossums, etc. that carry rabies, verifiable by scientific study. So, getting the shots is just playing the odds to be on the safe side, but I think the odds of getting rabies if you don't get the shots, even if small, are a lot greater than the consequences from not knowing there was a chance of missing an intelligent alien radio commercial if there was one, I'd rather play the Powerball Lotto, the payoff is a lot better. Even if there is intelligent life out there, so what? Are we going to hold a constructive conversation with someone when it takes years, even eons, for radio waves to make the transit each way? I don't think so, human attention span is too short. So, what are we going to do with it if we find out there is? What is the benefit?

Rhaedas wrote:
"I can't remember who, but I read once that until we do find other life, complex or otherwise, it's best to act as if there is no other life, and we are indeed alone, and try our best to preserve the only self-awareness we know of in the universe."

My thoughts exactly.

Warren in OK

Majestyk

I still see this as a flawed analogy else, any experiment done to prove a hypothesis is akin to Pascal’s Wager. The wager seeks to come to a logical conclusion sans empirical evidence. SETI is the act of gathering empirical evidence upon which to base a conclusion. The difference is substantial.

Sagan’s quote holds true to the “scientific method” which states that all conclusions are subject to revision on the face of new evidence. And evidence is what is needed for any conclusion.

If, there is an analogy to be made in reference to Pascal’s Wager, it ends with the probability equations. If, the conclusion of Pascal’s Wager was to claim that we should continue to seek evidence of a deity then, I would not fault it. However, its claim that acceptance without evidence is the logical conclusion, is the antithesis of the scientific method.

The vast majority of “huge” structures were constructed for use as radio astronomy observatories. Equating the structures with churches and theory with belief is specious. Both structures and the theories have function as tools of legitimate scientific research, which precludes the deluded fantasies of religion.

That’s the neat thing about science; you can calculate such things with the information we’ve already obtained on the mechanics of life on our own little mud ball. It probably isn’t accurate. We accept that fact and refine or discard the calculations as we get new information.

The consequence will be that we will continue to not know. We can speculate on any number of possible scenarios where not knowing may lead. We can also make judgments on the value of those scenarios. In the end it comes down to; Why not know?

The benefit is increasing our knowledge of our existence. I think that has value but then it’s just my opinion.

No disagreement on this one.

Friar Bellows

I don't think it's possible to treat this as a serious topic. So here's my worthless, wild and nonsensical speculations on the subject (apologies in advance). Life in the universe is rare in relative terms, but plentiful in absolute terms. I expect it to be numerous in our Galaxy. Carbon-based lifeforms are in the minority, with other unimagined configurations of matter and energy being predominant. Intelligent life is rarer, but I suspect that it has also arisen many times in our Galaxy. The obvious question to then ask is how long do intelligent species last for? But perhaps we should ask: 1) Do intelligent species always produce something akin to science and technology (sci-tech) that grows with time? 2) Does the gradient of sci-tech stay positive, or do collapses occur, reverting the species back to a long, prehistoric existence (and how long do these growth spurts last for)? My answer for question 1 would be: sometimes, but not as common as you might think. Perhaps there are highly intelligent beings who have no curiosity about their world, and waste their massive intellects on producing poetry or music or some other form of mental masturbation. Maybe they are solipsistic and don't even communicate with each other. They might be so constrained by their physical makeup and/or environment that sci-tech is simply impossible or at least extremely unlikely. As for question 2, I'll leave that discussion for another thread.

So life may be numerous, intelligent life may be reasonably common, but they might not last long, they might not create sci-tech, or they might create it and then collapse back into an eternal dark age. Now if you think that's pessimistic, I'm not done yet. There is a fundamental limit to human intelligence, and who knows, maybe we're about as intelligent as life can get, or at least very close to the peak. There are going to be things which we won't be able to do. A "theory of everything" may simply be out of reach. Major technological challenges may be beyond us. One of these is interstellar travel, star to star. That leaves us stuck in our nursery. Same goes for the aliens. So the best we can hope for is communication by some means, like radio. But even here I'm extremely pessimistic, for two reasons: 1) The likelihood of us detecting signals from aliens is extremely small for the reasons I outlined above; 2) Even if we do detect them, given the fundamental limits of human intelligence, and given the fact that we are likely to be extremely different from these aliens, the probability of actually deciphering these signals will be zero (by the way, a good antidote to the childish but adorable optimism of Carl Sagan's "Contact", is Stanislaw Lem's "His Master's Voice": an exceedingly rare example of a "first contact" story which is pessimistic about the possibility of mutually intelligible communication between alien and human).

Preserve it, no. Improve it, yes. How to improve it? Not by politics, not by philosophy, not by religion. Not by anything that doesn't change the seemingly cruel design of the human mind and body: a design which appears to be best suited for suffering. The only hope is sci-tech. Probably a forlorn hope, but that's all we have, so we might as well play it out to the end.

Jesse

The argument here seems to be something like "7*10^22 is such a huge number, even if intelligent life is really improbable there's gotta be at least a few other planets where it exists." But human intuitions aren't very reliable when it comes to very large or very small numbers. Remember that there may be a bunch of separate conditions which contribute to the improbability of intelligent life (the chance of a star having a suitable planet, the chance that life arises on this planet, the chance that the climate avoids feedback effects leading to a permanent ice cover or a permanent greenhouse, the chance that multicellular life evolves, the chance that sex evolves, etc.), and that these probabilities multiply to determine the total probability. So if you have only eight improbable conditions with a chance of less than 1 in 1000 each, the total probability of intelligent life will be less than 1 in 10^24, so there probably won't be any other intelligent life forms in the entire visible universe. That doesn't seem so far-fetched to me.

nermal

It's not about appeasing potential contactees, it's about the possiblility of knowing intelligent life exists outside our solar system. The time is something we have in abundance, and the expense is trivial.
Think of it like a kid having an old shortwave radio on continuously in his room in the hopes of hearing a conversation between an astronaut and launch command. Sure, he's wasting power, but the sheer excitement of the possibility of tuning in to something so incredible is well worth the pennies wasted. Were my kid to do something like that, I'd encourage it. I wouldn't lecture him on Pascal's Wager.

Ed