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Sturgeon's House

Are We Alone In The Universe?


LostCosmonaut

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For discussion of topics related to life originating elsewhere than Earth. Sample topics include findings of organic molecules on various moons and planets, places which could potentially harbor life, and the like.

 

I'm going to relink to this paper, since it is one of the best pieces of evidence for non-Earth based life I've yet seen.

 

 

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Aliens exist. They(intelligent life) are probably so far away and so different than us that it doesn't really matter if we even meet them or not. Single cell life and whatever other small scale life that can arise in a variety of places might be pretty common. 

 

If life is found on Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, or even a comet I wouldn't be too surprised. It would be more surprising if life could be found in Venus's atmosphere or something like that. 

 

ALH84001 is my favorite piece of evidence for aliens even if the jury is still out where the structures are biological or not. 

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  • 1 month later...

Enceladus does indeed have an ocean. That is interesting to have 3 bodies in the solar system to have liquid oceans that can theoretically support life. 

 

Viruses are still not aliens though. 

 

I want to say that our solar system seems to be an aberration. We don't just have three bodioes with liquid water, but at least one if not two that could support cyrobiology. Mars and Venus are both habitable with technological assistance, both may have or still harbor life. There are abundant sources of easily extractable minerals and water. I'd say our system was/is predisposed in comparative terms to being life sustainable, while 90% of discovered exosystems seem to be hellish.

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Speaking of Fermi's paradox, what are people's thoughts?

 

My favourite theory is that it will turn out to be easier/less energetic to crack open a portal to another dimension than to travel to other solar systems. So the trajectory for alien civilizations is to colonise their local system and then disappear into the infinity of worlds located right in their backyard.

 

My least favourite theory is the Exterminomachy hypothesis: sensitive detectors + relativistic weapons + suitably paranoid mindset  = everyone hiding in their local system and launching relativistic bombs at any system dumb enough to produce an antimatter drive signal.

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I think the Fermi paradox makes a good deal of its own assumptions such as interstellar travel or just the chances of intelligent life being close enough to earth to be plainly visible.

I might be too hard on Fermi's paradox, but I don't think that we just don't know enough on the culture and technology of alien civilizations to make judgements as done in Fermi's paradox.

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I think the Fermi paradox makes a good deal of its own assumptions such as interstellar travel or just the chances of intelligent life being close enough to earth to be plainly visible.

I might be too hard on Fermi's paradox, but I don't think that we just don't know enough on the culture and technology of alien civilizations to make judgements as done in Fermi's paradox.

I think Fermi's paradox is good to think about, because simply asking "why haven't we spotted any positive proof yet?" leads to some interesting places.

 

For instance; the simple fact that our solar system is not littered with alien ruins, and our nearby neighbourhood shows no obvious signs of tampering or activity, seems to strongly indicate that interstellar travel is nearly impossible to pull off. Because if it wasn't, then the universe should be full of signs that star-crossing civilizations exist/ed.

 

It's like washing up on an island and trying to take stock by what you can see from the shore - you can't know a lot of things for certain, but you can very quickly infer a lot by what is or isn't in your direct field of view.

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I think interstellar travel is probably really impractical to do and alien civilizations probably won't move unless forced to do so if they can. I am also biased towards the rare earth hypothesis that states that conditions on earth and the solar system are relatively rare and that civilization is probably a lot more rare than the Drake equation states and thus we shouldn't really expect to see aliens/alien ruins all over the place. 

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Add here another layer - we simply don't know if our means of detecting alien activity are capable enough to find anything. It is like standing in the middle of a giant desert and declaring yourself as only live here, because you didn't saw anything else, while your body is surrounded by GPS and GLONASS signals and plains are flying over your head.

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Venus? Unless they are capable of surviving 900 F and 90 atm, you're probably not going to find stuff on the surface

 

Wasn't necessarily talking about the surface though, although life in a 90atm 900F atmosphere isn't impossible, just exotic by requirement. I'm fairly positive that sulfur can be used in lieu of oxygen for metabolic purposes for instance.

 

Seconded. The more sophisticated our techniques get, the more it looks like ours is a perfectly average solar system.

 

Which leave Fermi's paradox looming a bit, but whatever...

 

It feels odd to assume our solar system is perfectly average when it appears the norm graviates toward Red Dwarfs and tidally locked planets being bathed in high levels of radiation. What value of average are we trying to get here, because I'd say out system is rather placid and hospitable and on the high end of habitability. Venus, Mars, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus are all highly colonizable and our asteriod belt is an easily accessible resource rich area. Places like Neptune and Uranus are fuel rich, and Jupiter and Saturns cloud tops allow for floating mining colonies. The outer solar system is abundant with water and fuel sources, and I'd go further and say our system is extremely wet.

 

Further exoplanets studies will probably prove me wrong but we keep slashing NASA budget because reasons, because "a billion dollars" sounds scary when you don't put into the context of the US budget and it makes it easy to sound like one is tough on wasteful spending.

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How exactly you figured out that our system is average? It is not like we saw too many other star with planets systems.

One thing that make me feel strange about space exploration is idea of separation of the colonies from Earth, a cultural one. War for indepedance of Mars from Eartherners (?) is a first joke-ish thing that got into my mind, but what about people that would live futher?

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