With the recent discovery of an earthlike planet not that far away (in space terms!), some would argue that interacting with intelligent extraterrestial life is a matter of time. I do not subscribe to this notion. We do not have the technologies to visit them and they are unlikely to have tech to visit us. ET will never meaningfully leave home. I hereby leave this post in the capable hands of my fellow scientists to ponder upon and debate.
We don't need to 'see' them on site in order to know they exist...once we are pretty sure they exist what's next? Talk back and forth in 50 or 1000 year intervals? Visit each other? Ignore each other? Gotta believe if they exist it's unlikely they share a common language with us...so we communicate every couple of decades with some math and science jargon? Regarding a visit, at least from our perspective, we can't even get ourselves to Mars! Seems to me the amount of money it would take to build a gigantic space ship, 1000-5000 times the size of the space station, plus the technology, and time, doesn't exist in the next 100 generations? One of these days when we do receive the unmistakable signal of extraterrestrial intelligent life...it will create 1000's more questions than answers. It won't free up the zillion$ needed for R&D and space exploration because all the world's nations combined simply don't have this much money. Not to forget to mention that we seem more hell bent on killing and destroying each other than embarking on a world mission to wherever! I think the chances of us meeting and greeting some ET's are about zero since we have better odds that we will annihilate ourselves in the near future...
They are humans (humanoids of earth) traveling into the past for study. That is obviously inevitable if humans survive long enough.
I expect most of the life we might encounter will not be much like us. We have to be something of a rare fluke among whatever life exists in the universe, because it took billions of years of fairly stable cosmic conditions for earth to produce us, and we only came about as the survivors of events on earth that could well have wiped us out completely. Not every life-friendly world out there is like earth - it will have a different history and different conditions, perhaps with a less hospital climate in the long-term, with more bombardment from space, or for that matter less bombardment (hence fewer upsets to the global ecosystem, leading to less radical evolutionary development over time), and of course different lifespans. A planet born a billion years after ours is probably not going to have intelligence on it yet, and one from a billion years earlier might have suffered catastrophic changes in its orbit or the characteristics of its host star. Even our sun is supposed to make life here impossible eventually due to heating up and, eventually, going red giant on us. This means that there is not only a specific set of circumstances that has led to our kind of life evolving, but there is a limited window in which it can happen at all before the cosmos wipes that slate clean, so to speak. Our challenge is going to be surviving the eventual 'death' of our planet. I'd wager that, of the life that forms at all, very little of it reaches a form that can recognise its cosmic situation and escape it successfully. Thus, no matter what other life has existed or may exist in the future, it has a very low chance of living in our proximity at the same time we are here. Cosmic times and distances are just too vast for the odds to be in our favor when it comes to finding alien life, especially intelligent life that might equal or surpass us. The next advanced civilisation might only be in another galaxy.
The human life span (as in the species) is far to small to seriously consider contact....then we can consider distances and quantity.
There's the NASA warp drive project. Who knows when they'll make the breakthrough??? The military is going to go visit the aliens up close, harvesting them like oysters. The dumb aliens that is, the smart ones will have weapons.
If you mean complex intelligent life which we can communicate with you are probably correct. If you mean simple microbial life we stand a good chance of finding it within our lifetime. It could be as close as Mars or Jupiter or Europa.
Who knows what kind of tech they'd have? What if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out and continued to evolve into intelligent life? They would have had a 60 million year head start on us. What about intelligent life that evolved around a star that is a billion years older than the Sun? There are just too many possibilities to rule anything in or out. Sputnik was launched in 1957... 59 years ago. The news reports of that event are travelling through space at the speed of light... as of right now they have covered 0.2% of the distance between the Earth and the Center of the Galaxy. By the year 2207, they will have covered about 1% of the distance. 59 years before 1957, the Wright Brothers were just starting to get interested in aircraft design. Think how unimaginable blasting a satellite into space would have been to them, let alone where we are today.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188479-astronauts-find-living-organisms-clinging-to-the-international-space-station-and-arent-sure-how-they-got-there Astronauts find living organisms clinging to the International Space Station, and arent sure how they got there I believe like the Alien, Aliens, etc. creatures, tardigrades incorporate handy genes from others . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade And don't forget the 's either!
We already basically know they exist. Confirmation has a reasonable chance of occurring within 60 years, e.g. finding bacteria in Europa or being able to tell that a distant planet must have life by something about it that doesn't fit with non-life processes (something like the Dyson sphere candidate that was detected, it is actually still unclear what that is, but more definitive)... but having a conversation with intelligent aliens is unlikely. I think that is somewhat likely to happen someday if humans exist for a million more years and continue to progress technologically, but probably not within our lifetimes.
The only thing that gives a little hope is the near-infinite quantity of potential planets along with the fact that we evolved from cosmic muck so lots of weird things might be happening across the Universe...when we add in time and distances our odds of a meet and greet are considerably lowered...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/water-bear-protein-shields-human-dna-x-rays-154658720.html Some tardigrade species -- there are about 1,000 in all -- can handle crushing pressure at least six times greater than found at the 11-kilometre (seven-mile) deep Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. - X-ray shield - Even the ravages of outer space don't seem to faze them. In 2007, thousands of water bears, attached to a satellite, were exposed directly to potentially-deadly space radiation in vacuum conditions and then brought back to Earth. Not only did many survive, some females later laid eggs which yielded healthy offspring. That study had found that nearly a fifth of the species' DNA had been obtained from other plants and animals, a new record in the animal kingdom for so-called horizontal gene transfer between species. View attachment 45869 Horizontal gene transfer. Y'know what that means, don'tchya? Think less like West Virginia and more like Moi r > g Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic, regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.
Primordial muck oozing with the origins of life, in a wide spectrum of environments, including those we have not yet imagined, located anywhere in the Universe, have the potential to evolve. We managed to accomplish this on Earth so why not billions of other places? Since I believe strongly in this scenario, it will be no surprise whatsoever to me when we hear some type of ET life forms have been discovered. ET's viewing Earth and detecting signs of intelligence will be sorely disappointed when they finally get to meet us to find we're not very intelligent...
Well Jesus said straight out "I'm not from this world", and the ancient scriptures tell of many more visitations and close encounters with offworld beings..
Imagine a beach a mile long. Imagine it has a trillion grains of sand you can see. Imagine ten grains are painted neon orange. Imagine trying to find one in one hour. This very simply defines the planets in our galaxy...IF you also seperate the sand grains by a mile for each one. Now imagine each of the painted sand grains only exist for ten seconds and the beach extends another mile into the ocean....do you think you will find one of the painted grains?
I don't think this is something that could be analyzed any further beyond mere hope. It's not as if there are some set hurdles we must overcome and then we'll find life. There might be for all we know, but we certainly don't know what they are. Increasing our technological capabilities would certainly increase the chances of us noticing an alien civilization, but being better able to detect them doesn't help us find where to look in the vast universe or even what to look for. We have no reference point. We've only looked out FROM Earth, the only planet we know that has life. We've never peeked into the solar system from the perspective of another star system light years away to see what our civilization might look like from that far out, or what type of detections we might be able to make and make sense of(for example, we might pick up radio transmissions and not realize they are artificial). So my answer to the thread topic is, who knows. We don't know if there are any to find or what we'll need to do or where we'll need to look to find them. And if they possess advanced technologies, we don't even know that we could find them even if looking in the right place with the right technology, as they may be set up to conceal themselves from prying eyes. But I can say this. Any advanced civilization that has not made contact with anyone else yet will be asking themselves this very same question.
Pretty sure that some guy crunched the numbers and found that we won't ever find an intelligent group outside of earth because of extinctions. Granted, humans are technologically advanced so we don't really know how long we'll be around. But the issue is that, by the time a species gets advanced enough to send ships out and search space, something or the other statistically causes their extinction. It could be an asteroid destroying life on the planet, or famine, or even running out of an energy source, something that we as humans are doing to ourselves right now. So what this guy did was calculate the statistical chance that a life form evolved just as humans did and could possibly meet us, and the chances are very slim. Because of the vastness of space, the more planets we consider, the more impossible it gets. Let's just keep on keeping on and not worry about ET anytime soon.
If the light speed barrier really is unbreakable, it means we and aliens can never visit each other in the physical sense because it'd take years to cover the distances. But wait, I feel a speculation coming on!- What about telepathic communication? Perhaps aliens are projecting the telepathic message "Is there anybody out there?" Assuming telepathy travels instantaneously we receive the message without any delay. Perhaps only some humans can receive such messages, but instead of it coming through loud and clear, it triggers hallucinations and the person imagines he's had some kind of alien close encounter experience.
And arguably we are an early Alpha Species as in the universe has a long way to mature so life might boom in say half a trillion years with out species one of the oldest when that happens if we survive so odds are we never met other aliens because there are few species that are intelligent and advanced in the cosmos. But in this scenario the odds are the first alien species we will find are simple organisms in waters say on one of Jupiter's moons etc.
Just a little over al century ago mankind had never flown. just about 70 years later we put a man on the moon. In 100 years at the most we will regularly journey to the planets and may even know how to get to the stars. My own feeling is that spacefaring civilisations don't overtly communicate with those that aren't spacefaring. We make real efforts to limit interaction with primitive peoples that still exist in the Amazon and Borneo, et al. How much more would spacefaring civs leave us alone. Once we are really spacefaring, OTOH, I am quite confident they will contact us at the first opportunity
I expect to see extraterrestrials in my lifetime. That is if the space program isn't covered up by the government. Well, I've already seen them from my alien contacts when I was a teenager. They said, ones who claim to see the future, that I will still be alive when my people become like their people. I was 12 at the time, now I'm 33. We're not there yet but I still have many years left in me. Anyone else feel like they might live to see the truth???
If we develop technology to scan your area in nanoseconds with filters to detect 'neon orange' we have a chance. It's the excitement of this slim chance that forces our curiosity and search...
