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[Urist McDerp]

Having been somewhat impressed with the forum in a religious topic, I think the forum could handle this. It's a bit more advanced than the usual religious carp-fest.

And now for something completely different:

• Take the "classical" God, right out of any religious text word for word. Omnipotent. Omniscient. Benign. Perfect in every imaginable way. You should know what I'm talking about. The classical "GOD" that every irreligious person will argue is illogical.
• Now completely ignore him. We're not talking about him.
• Now try to define what is below "GOD". If "GOD" has power levels over 9000, we're talking about any being with power levels between 6 (As the human average was... 5?) and 8999.

Someone will always end up quoting this, so I'll just put it in the OP:
"Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God."
— Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law

Edit: Oh right, check out TVtropes for cultural sources on ideas or topics.

For a starter, my own musings:

• Consider the physical scale of the universe, in our own dimensions and others, and the timescale of the universe.
• Presume we spawned from a-biogenesis, and therefore it can happen on other planets as well. Or consider if we are a late-spawn of panspermia.
• Look back at the time-scale of the universe, and consider the rate of our own technological growth.

This leads me to think that it's plausible that cosmic Eldericht horrors of sorts probably exist, at the very far end of technological transcendence. There's at least been a singularity that's been achieved somewhere.

Here's another:

• How do you study panspermia?
• Given the distance between planets, remote observation is nigh impossible.
• How would you be able to run actual tests while merely observing?
• Travel would take a considerably long time, or if technologically advanced enough it would still take considerable resources.
• However, such expeditions on our own scales have been undertaken with very large time-frames.

Steven Hawking lately has stated the only logical reason Extraterrestrials would come is to wipe us out if they thought we would become a threat. I think they could come visit out of genuine scientific inquiry, silent, with a nearby observational post on a very long scientific mission. It would probably operate over a period of thousands of years if not more, but what would such timespans mean to them?

And another:

• All intelligence of biological origins will have subconscious programming that is vestigial.
• Using the only known models for this, of ourselves, project this onto an extraterrestrial civilization.
• Now consider how disproportionately a civilization's technology can advance compared to it's psychological maturity.

Something like the covenant from Halo seems possible to me.

Related:

• Any extraterrestrials more powerful than us would have reason to annihilate us if they felt threatened by us.
• (Steven Hawking's warning: expect a mass driver capable of 0.999C)
• Consider our own rate of technological advance compared to the maturation of our psychology on the global scale.

I think it's quite possible judgement may be passed on us, and we'll never see it coming. On the bright side, the above Covenant scenario is much less likely if the beings with a head start are picking off aggressors.

There's a lot of stuff to discuss. You don't have to use any of my own topics.

[Bohandas]

The thing is that even if there is a lot of extraterrestrial life out there, we'd be unlikely to ever locate it or encounter it except by chance, because trying to locate such life amid the vastness of the universe would be comparable to finding a specific needle in a haystack-sized pile of mass-produced needles.

[Bohandas]

Oh, and another thought, a sufficiently super-advanced alien race might also be inclined seek out other planets with life as a source of exotic pets and shrubs.

An even more advanced species might contact other life as they expand across the galaxy but not even take any notice of it, for good or for bad (although the consequences of that lack of notice/consideration might have positive or negative (probably the latter) effects on the planet's inhabitants) (basically as per lovecraft)

[alway]

While based on what we know thus far, it is seeming very likely that life throughout the universe -- or at least the bits of it we can see -- is quite common, there are still quite a few questions as to how likely any given life-bearing planet is to developing a species capable of technological progress. We haven't yet seen any alien spacecraft or alien species, which implies one of several things:
A: we are among the first technologically capable species to evolve
B: space travel is too hard
C: they are there, but we just don't know what to look for yet
Of these, A is the least likely; life on our planet got a relatively late start, with somewhere around 10 billion years in which there was no life on earth (and indeed much of that time there was no earth to speak of either).
B is also somewhat unlikely, a von Neumann probe would be able to reproduce to cover our entire galaxy in only a few million years using known physics when it comes to their propulsion. Thus if B were the case, it would also imply A.
C is probably the most likely of the three, as we not only have relatively weak sensors; we're lucky to detect asteroids the size of a spacecraft mere days before it enters the atmosphere, let alone something not interested in us far away. And that all assumes traditional spacecraft similar to those employed by humans in the first century of their exploration into space, not some sort of odd nanite-assembler tucked away inside an asteroid or highly advanced craft similar to that of A Color Out of Space.

You also speak of 'alien psychology.' Such musings about how an alien would 'think,' especially when put into human terms, is probably the wrong way to look at it. Even looking within the animal kingdom, with whom we share most of our traits, ants have entirely different forms of intelligence than humans. Individuals, especially in some species, are really really dumb. They don't communicate, there is no hierarchy, no work orders, no concept of or value for an individual, they don't even have a specific task they are aiming to do. Each ant is akin to a hidden markov model, with simple environmental stimuli (chemical trails, chemicals on other ants) which determine their probability of changing their current goal. And yet they build these massive structures which are often compared with cities. If such a hive organism were to begin creating technology, we wouldn't have the first clue as to how 'psychology' would work on that sort of super-organism. Talking to an individual of such a species would be akin to trying to talk to a single neuron in your brain. And that is an example from organisms of earth; for all we know, aliens may not even have a cellular biology. They are exactly that: alien. To try and project ourselves onto the denizens of the cosmos will give you little more than Star-Trek-like aliens who are all humans but for a small bump on their face; such should not, in any way, be assumed to be representative of reality.

Oh, and another thought, a sufficiently super-advanced alien race might also be inclined seek out other planets with life as a source of exotic pets and shrubs.

We want... an interstellar shrubbery!

[Bohandas]

How can you say that it is very likely? What do you base that on. We have a insufficient sample size of closely observable planets to be able to establish a statistically significant estimate of life occurring on a given planet.

[Pnx]

The estimated amount of stars in the universe is in the hundreds of sextillions. For reference a sextillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in numerals. So I'd say the odds of there being intelligent life in the universe is pretty strong _{yes that was phrased intentionally.}

As for life in our universe well... It's hard to get good estimates on the amount and kinds of stars out there, but he's some very rough ballpark stuff...

There are something between 200 billion to 400 billion stars in the galaxy by best estimates... Rounding to 300 billion that's 300,000,000,000 stars.

Something along the lines of one in a million stars are solar analogues. that gives us 300 million, but heck, we might as well just round to 100 million.

Out of those stars, something like one in a hundred has planets like ours (keeping in mind that's the roughest estimate of them all). Now that leaves us with a million stars in our galaxy with planets like those in our solar system... Now how many of those have planets that are actually in the goldilocks zone? When it comes to that we REALLY have no clue, but let's call that one in a thousand.

So our guesstimate here is 1,000 planets capable of holding life... How many of them actually hold life? How many hold intelligent life? Dozens, hundreds, thousands? This doesn't actually illuminate much... But I'd say there's probably hundreds of planets with life on them in our galaxy... maybe a couple dozen of them containing intelligent life... Interstellar travel(through "mystical means" rather than the hard way) might not even be possible... and we don't know what form life will now take when it gets there...

I'm not really sure... maybe after all that there's a bunch of one in a zillion aliens* who decided to come over here and take a look up our arseholes... but I'm kind of skeptical. Intelligent life keep evolving beyond where we're at, and frankly I don't think any of us are going to like where it ends up going. As counter to my nature as it is, I think deep down I might actually be a luddite. *sigh*

*I'm aware this is not a real number and that ignores the rest of the universe which seems sensible to ignore given the scale of things.

[alway]

Based on:
A: the most common elements in the universe (with the exception of helium) can be used to create life (H, O, C)
B: our star type is smack in the middle of 'average'
C: other star types could still have life, but would have a different radius as their habitable zone
D: based purely on the Kepler results thus far*, it is safe to say the average number of planets per system is at least 1 per star, if not well above it.
E: based also on the Kepler findings, small planets such as earth-likes appear to be much more common than super-jupiters**

Based on this information, earth-like planets could be expected to be extremely common, with potentially millions of them in the habitable zone and with the necessary materials and such for life to form. As the materials capable or forming life are also the most common in the universe, it is likely most earth-like planets would have them.

*1200 or so discovered from around 220k target stars using a detection method which requires near-perfect orbital alignment with the viewer; even a fraction of a degree off and they wouldn't see it. In addition, the data thus far can only capture planets with orbits around or less than 1 year (with this past year's data being the round which will allow up to earth's 1 year orbit). Since they use a triple pass technique for self-verification, it takes 3 orbits to get a planet verified, and the mission has been going on for about 3 years now. If Kepler had been aimed at an exact copy of our solar system, assuming the orbital plane aligned perfectly with the telescope, they would have likely spotted 2 planets thus far (mercury may or may not be too small to see, but venus and earth would likely be spotted). { On a side note, the verification procedure they use is 1 pass denotes something potentially interesting, 2 is a pattern, and if 3 occurs when the pattern for 2 predicts it should, they consider that a planet candidate; there were 1200 total from Kepler as of the last data release, iirc there is still more data to be released, although I could be wrong }

**previously, no small planets were detected, as kepler is the first really able to see lots of small planets; and thus the sample was extremely biased since they literally couldn't detect the small ones; with kepler's data set, the distribution increases the smaller the planet size.

[Bohandas]

We have no baseline for how long, on average, it would take for life to form on uch a planet however, because we have a sample size of one; and that's VERY statistically insignificant.

[breadbocks]

Well, my science teacher, batshit crazy as she is, has informed us that there were some experiments with attempting to make Primordial Soup. She said they got to the point where the stuff in it seemed suitable for life creation. :shrug:

[Pnx]

Some counterpoints.

A: the most common elements in the universe (with the exception of helium) can be used to create life (H, O, C)

Yes, but how often do these appear in the exact amounts and configurations required for life? You frequently hear comments about how pervasive life is, but that's only on our planet, and only because of very discrete evolution. It's like scattering a hundreds of dice and hoping for a very specific outcome. Even on a planetary scale I doubt that outcome isn't very likely... and that's not even getting into the fact that a planet also needs a very specific composition of atmosphere and surface in order to keep organisms from getting cooked by radiation or starved of nutrients (ok, that's technically the wrong way of saying it, but point stands).

B: our star type is smack in the middle of 'average'

Average maybe, but not the mean, our particular star type is one of the rarest (the yellow subgiant), and not every yellow subgiant can support life.

C: other star types could still have life, but would have a different radius as their habitable zone

I'm not exactly sure what to say about this one, except that it's a really tricky question. You need the right levels of radiation and photons to keep the planet life from "cooking". If the heat drops below the threshold before the radiation does then the star can't support life. Maybe there are other stars that can support life, maybe there aren't, I can't really say.

[alway]

On Earth, the oldest known fossilized life form is from less than 1 billion years after Earth's formation, and given the difficulty of finding any fossilized life forms before multicellular life, it likely formed long before then. Based on Earth's timeline, abiogenesis actually took much less time than the move to multicellular organisms. While you are correct as far as the statistics go, when given the appropriate conditions, life appears very likely to form within several hundred million years. The cosmos are quite likely rife with microbiology, simply due to the chemicals involved. Any planet with an earth-like chemistry would have all the ingredients for life scattered all over the place. The big question, though, is the likelihood of lifeforms which would be capable of moving towards an intelligent state. The transition from microbiology to macrobiology capable of intelligence in some form or another is a much larger change than a bunch of pre-existing chemicals forming a feedback loop to create more of themselves. Since evolution has no intended end state, if any step along the way to intelligence has a negative cost-benefit, it may make intelligent life much less likely.

@ breadbocks: she is correct; simple cell-membrane base materials are known to form on their own; get enough of together and they form lipid bilayers. These can then form into protocell vesicles capable of letting RNA base pairs pass through, while preventing the longer chains of RNA strands from entering/exiting. On the RNA side of things, the basic ingredients spontaneously form. Thus far, we have found 3 of the 4 RNA base pairs will also then spontaneously form when these ingredients and sunlight meet. Last I remember, the mechanism for creating the fourth using readily available processes on earth is still under investigation. And there you have it. A protocell which is able to gather and contain RNA, absorb more base materials for the protocell vesicle. With relatively widespread formation of these, all that is then required is replication. I can't quite recall the mechanisms for how the early protocells would replicate; aside from a general notion of vesicle division caused by physical conditions in the environment after getting too large and there being some sort of RNA process which will replicate RNA given more base materials.

@pnx: The Sun is classified as G V, a main sequence yellow dwarf, not a subgiant. G class stars, of which our Sun is one, make up 1 in 13 of the stars in the galaxy. They are the third most common, after K and M class stars. Although based on the wiki page for subgiants, both G V (main sequence) and G IV (subgiants) would be capable of hosting habitable worlds

300 billion stars in the galaxy, 23 billion G class, most of which are main sequence (90% of all stars are main sequence), so probably around 10 billion habitation-friendly stars (assuming a good chunk are oddballs which for whatever reason can't support life). If the planet:star ratio is about 1:1 (probably an underestimate of the number of planets), that's 10 billion planets around habitation-friendly stars. Based on Kepler's results (54/1200 planets are in habitable zone), 1 in 22 is in the habitable zone, or 454 million in habitable zones of friendly stars. Since smaller planets are most likely based on the Kepler results, the chance of having a gravity suitable for life is certainly at least 1 in 20 (again, likely a large underestimate), putting it at about 225 million earth-like planets in the habitable zone of a life-friendly star. Even assuming a life-friendly chemical composition is very rare, 1%, a conservative estimate would still put the number of planets upon which life could arise as a million in our galaxy alone. Given there are estimated to be something like 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, that's hundreds of trillions of planets upon which life could arise.

[Pnx]

@pnx: The Sun is classified as G V, a main sequence yellow dwarf, not a subgiant. G class stars, of which our Sun is one, make up 1 in 13 of the stars in the galaxy. They are the third most common, after K and M class stars. Although based on the wiki page for subgiants, both G V (main sequence) and G IV (subgiants) would be capable of hosting habitable worlds

I really shouldn't try to make persuasive statements based off of half remembered facts. I'd like to blame my current state of mind, but I'm honestly not sick enough to be anything more than a bit moody. So I suppose it's just that I enjoy sounding smarter than I actually am. Hats off to you sir and your superior knowledge. I think I'll shut up now before I shove my foot any further up my mouth.

[Virex]

Well, my science teacher, batshit crazy as she is, has informed us that there were some experiments with attempting to make Primordial Soup. She said they got to the point where the stuff in it seemed suitable for life creation. :shrug:

They replicated that experiment at our university. Turns out you need pretty specific conditions to get amino-acids from the present gases and electrical discharges and it's far from a given that the primordial atmosphere resembled those circumstances. They're running longer-term tests to see what happens if you leave such an experiment running for a few years but as of now, they found out you get a far wider diversity of amino acids than the 22 that are used by nature right now.

[DJ]

Of these, A is the least likely; life on our planet got a relatively late start, with somewhere around 10 billion years in which there was no life on earth (and indeed much of that time there was no earth to speak of either).

For much of those 10 billion years there wasn't much elements other than hydrogen and helium. And you can't really build complex molecules with just those two.

[Levi]

The thing is that even if there is a lot of extraterrestrial life out there, we'd be unlikely to ever locate it or encounter it except by chance, because trying to locate such life amid the vastness of the universe would be comparable to finding a specific needle in a haystack-sized pile of mass-produced needles.

This is pretty much my exact view of aliens.  Sure they probably exist, but we'll likely never find them and they will never find us.