The Astronomy Thread

C

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Aaron said:
Depends on how you define "rare". Just taking the size of the Universe that we know of now. A Google search says there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the Universe, and if each is, say, about 100 billion stars large, which seems to be the average... Well, even if you only have one advanced life form per galaxy, that's still 2 trillion advanced life forms. That's around 500 advanced life forms for every person on this planet.

We then have the issue with where can we find life. I remember just back in my High School biology classes in the mid 90s I was taught the conditions for which life could exist. Had to have sunlight, liquid water, a pressure range... Since then we've been constantly pushing back these limits. We're finding life, even relatively complex life that exists at great depths of the oceans and pressures, under glaciers frozen for tens of thousands of years, deep in dark cave systems, next to boiling underwater volcanic fissures and hot springs, in outer space (experiments on the ISS).

Then you have the Geo-centric view of what exactly life is - how you classify it. Take the numbers above. 2 trillion x 100 billion = a metric shit ton of possibilities for strange forms of life to evolve. I can't remember where I read it, but there was an interesting article recently about consciousness and how we still don't know how it forms and what it is. One new hypothesis is that it is tied to quantum fields, and therefore not just "locked" inside our brains. Now - I'm not going to argue here that it either is or isn't - who the fuck knows, but if it is something like that, it opens a whole new can of worms about what life exactly is. We could find microbes floating around the atmosphere of Jupiter and never know that they may be linked via quantum fields creating basically a planetary consciousness.

Personally I think that the likelihood of life elsewhere is growing. It seems to me that a couple of decades ago most astrophysicists and exobiologists were of the thought that we were probably the only outpost of life, but it would still be worth it to look - to new where the consensus seems to be that it's basically only a matter of time before we find some signs on Mars, Europa or Titan or someplace.

But that's just my two dukats.

Edit: C Cynical beat me to it... lol
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Big Phoenix

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Aaron said:
Depends on how you define "rare". Just taking the size of the Universe that we know of now. A Google search says there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the Universe, and if each is, say, about 100 billion stars large, which seems to be the average... Well, even if you only have one advanced life form per galaxy, that's still 2 trillion advanced life forms. That's around 500 advanced life forms for every person on this planet.
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Id imagine "life", your mold slimes, plankton etc. is pretty common in the cosmos.

But advanced life that is dependent on complex food webs and has multi decade life cycles? Im going with considerably rarer.
 
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Araysar

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I think basic microbial life is pretty common in the universe. I expect that it lived on Mars when it was wet, and there is good chance that there is some version of it right now in our own solar system outside of Earth whether it's Titan, Enceladus or Europa. Like Aaron Aaron said we keep discovering life in the most hostile places in the world and we know that some microbes can live for long periods in the vacuum of space as well.

Miller-Urey experiment proves that creation of amino acids out of basic elements is a pretty simple process so it can happen on a lot of worlds. I think that the process of evolution to a species that build societies requires a very lengthy streak of lucky dice rolls and I think that's where the bottleneck is.
 
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Aaron

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Yeah, and as I say, you need to define "rare". One advanced (multi cellular, not necessarily intelligent) form of life per galaxy = at least about 2 trillion planets with advanced life. Is that rare or common? And 2 trillion galaxies is only what we know of, we keep pushing the boundaries of the Universe further out thanks to the JWST.
 
Cybsled

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Big Phoenix said:
Id imagine "life", your mold slimes, plankton etc. is pretty common in the cosmos.

But advanced life that is dependent on complex food webs and has multi decade life cycles? Im going with considerably rarer.
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I don't think advanced life in the sense of animal or plant analogs is super rare in the universe, but I do agree there definitely is a sliding scale.

Assuming our universe is about as old as we think it is, I've seen decent arguments to the effect of the early universe (as we understand it) was pretty non-ideal for life. The relatively quiet period in the universe has only been around approximately half that time. If we use Earth as a model (since we have no others), life took hold on our planet we believe in less than a billion years after the planet formed. But multi-cellular advanced life took around 2.5 billion years after that to come around (to best of our knowledge). Advanced life on land less than half a billion years.

Assuming the star isn't super volatile or the cosmic or local planetary neighborhood isn't a shitshow, then it is reasonable to assume it takes around 4 billion years or so for advanced forms of life to appear on a planet. Obviously our sample size of one doesn't give us much data to go by - for all we know, our planet might be above or below average in terms of formation to life to advanced life.

That being said, finding intelligent and technologically advanced life is going to be hard just because of time. Any species that advanced, while able to save themselves from catastrophe, can also cause their own catastrophe.

However, if a species was advanced enough to make megastructures in space like stellar engines or what have you, then I think the probability of self-destruction due to infighting is much reduced. It would either be a rival and peer species, or unintentional destruction through accident.
 
C

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Aaron said:
we keep pushing the boundaries of the Universe further out thanks to the JWST.
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And that's just the observable universe. The "whole universe" could quite possibly be infinite (not that it practically matters, since we'll never be able to see or interact with anything outside our horizon).
 
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Ukerric

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It's just back to the old Fermi Paradox which says that, if the numbers in Drake's equation align with what we think, our solar system should have been colonized before the dinosaur even went extinct, if not earlier. So AT LEAST one of the factors in there isn't correct.

That usually leaves two possibilities: one, advanced technological species don't last. A few thousand years of advanced technology, and you end up dead/thrown backward so deep you can't redevelop advanced technology anymore.

Or two, advanced technological species are rare, which subdivides into three possibles:

  • Technically oriented sapients are highly unlikely to evolve (we basically self-selected to be better at social stuff with primate bands, and the mechanics were sufficiently flexible that we leveraged this into technology).
  • Advanced life forms are rare. This might be the case - eucaryotes seem to have evolved exactly once in our history, while many equivalent types of biology have concurrently evolved (think carcinisation, or the fact that trees evolved in several completely unrelated branches of plants). Eucaryotic-type biology seem a requirement to complex life, non-eucaryotes can't sustain the energy and DNA complexity necessary.
  • Life itself is rare. That's possible, although the fact that it started "extremely fast" (in geological terms, basically less than a billion year after the planet formed) seems to hint that basic life shouldn't be too difficult.


Some russians (I think) did calculations a decade ago, and they concluded that the 50% chance cut-off was at around 6 civilizations in the Milky Way at any given time. More, and we'd have more than a 50% chance to have detected them.
 
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Tuco

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My favorite solution to the Fermi Paradox:

Life occurring naturally is extremely rare. Intelligent life exceedingly so. The true factors to Drake's equation are absolutely dismal and you can't find numbers small enough to represent fl and fi. All the articles we layman see about life being feasible in shit-tier conditions have as much basis in reality as scientists creating fusion, the cures for cancer or the true age of the universe.

We are already past the great filters. The science and tech to explore the cosmos is within our means. We'll explore other stars in 1,000 years, other galaxies in 2,000 years and within 10,000 humans will be a plague on the entire observable universe.
 
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C

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Ukerric said:
It's just back to the old Fermi Paradox which says that, if the numbers in Drake's equation align with what we think, our solar system should have been colonized before the dinosaur even went extinct, if not earlier. So AT LEAST one of the factors in there isn't correct.

That usually leaves two possibilities: one, advanced technological species don't last. A few thousand years of advanced technology, and you end up dead/thrown backward so deep you can't redevelop advanced technology anymore.

Or two, advanced technological species are rare, which subdivides into three possibles:

  • Technically oriented sapients are highly unlikely to evolve (we basically self-selected to be better at social stuff with primate bands, and the mechanics were sufficiently flexible that we leveraged this into technology).
  • Advanced life forms are rare. This might be the case - eucaryotes seem to have evolved exactly once in our history, while many equivalent types of biology have concurrently evolved (think carcinisation, or the fact that trees evolved in several completely unrelated branches of plants). Eucaryotic-type biology seem a requirement to complex life, non-eucaryotes can't sustain the energy and DNA complexity necessary.
  • Life itself is rare. That's possible, although the fact that it started "extremely fast" (in geological terms, basically less than a billion year after the planet formed) seems to hint that basic life shouldn't be too difficult.


Some russians (I think) did calculations a decade ago, and they concluded that the 50% chance cut-off was at around 6 civilizations in the Milky Way at any given time. More, and we'd have more than a 50% chance to have detected them.
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Or:

Physical space travel is hard enough that technological life ends up not bothering and instead uploads themselves into a version of the Matrix with a low physical footprint. Sure, von Neuman probes, but that tech could be harder than we think plus it doesn't involve a lot of payoff for the population sending them out.

Or:

Technological life "quickly" learns some feature of physics that currently escapes us and is living happily via mechanisms that we don't understand and aren't yet looking for. Our own exploration of deep physics is less than 200 years old. There could be any amount of learning to be made in the bridge to quantum gravity.
 
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Tholan

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Rajaah said:
They have no fucking idea how old the universe is.
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They have.
This is just journalism + sciensationalism. They haven't performed spectrometry on them, so they can't say their ages precisely. They are just very unlikely, based on their size and mass and our empirical scale that doesn't factor the background radiation, who can arguably not be just ignored so early after the big bang.
 
Tuco

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Code: 
https://twitter.com/spacex/status/1688294107721121792?s=46
Static fire test with the deluge system active. Looks cool. I haven't seen any aftermath shots.
 
Aaron

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Ukerric said:
It's just back to the old Fermi Paradox which says that, if the numbers in Drake's equation align with what we think, our solar system should have been colonized before the dinosaur even went extinct, if not earlier. So AT LEAST one of the factors in there isn't correct.

That usually leaves two possibilities: one, advanced technological species don't last. A few thousand years of advanced technology, and you end up dead/thrown backward so deep you can't redevelop advanced technology anymore.

Or two, advanced technological species are rare, which subdivides into three possibles:

  • Technically oriented sapients are highly unlikely to evolve (we basically self-selected to be better at social stuff with primate bands, and the mechanics were sufficiently flexible that we leveraged this into technology).
  • Advanced life forms are rare. This might be the case - eucaryotes seem to have evolved exactly once in our history, while many equivalent types of biology have concurrently evolved (think carcinisation, or the fact that trees evolved in several completely unrelated branches of plants). Eucaryotic-type biology seem a requirement to complex life, non-eucaryotes can't sustain the energy and DNA complexity necessary.
  • Life itself is rare. That's possible, although the fact that it started "extremely fast" (in geological terms, basically less than a billion year after the planet formed) seems to hint that basic life shouldn't be too difficult.


Some russians (I think) did calculations a decade ago, and they concluded that the 50% chance cut-off was at around 6 civilizations in the Milky Way at any given time. More, and we'd have more than a 50% chance to have detected them.
Click to expand...
There is also the theory that we are simply not looking in the right places, or we ignore it. While I have never tried hallucinogens, I have both known people who have dabbled in them - and met "creatures" as well as read a lot about it (my profile pic is of Terence McKenna). So in this circle you have a lot of people who vehemently claim that there are lots of intelligences out there, you just need to "change your frequency". Now, are they true or are these beings simply figments of their drug addled brain? Who knows? But the consequences of them being right are tremendous.

Same is true for the UFO crowed (though I personally prefer the inter-dimensional hypothesis for these too).
 
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Big Phoenix

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Aaron said:
my profile pic is of Terence McKenna)
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bruh one of my roommates while in the Marines would never shut up about McKenna and the wonders of DMT and how it opens your mind to everything in the universe.

Guy ended up getting kicked out for drug use and self destructed his life with hookers and blow after getting a big paycheck from the VA.
 
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sleevedraw

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Aaron said:
There is also the theory that we are simply not looking in the right places, or we ignore it. While I have never tried hallucinogens, I have both known people who have dabbled in them - and met "creatures" as well as read a lot about it (my profile pic is of Terence McKenna). So in this circle you have a lot of people who vehemently claim that there are lots of intelligences out there, you just need to "change your frequency". Now, are they true or are these beings simply figments of their drug addled brain? Who knows? But the consequences of them being right are tremendous.

Same is true for the UFO crowed (though I personally prefer the inter-dimensional hypothesis for these too).
Click to expand...

Even plants and fungi are utterly alien when you really stop to think about them. Forests are entire networks of trees, mycorrhizal fungi, soil bacteria, amoebas, everything. A lot of types of trees (beeches, at least) seem to grow better and be more resilient to disease when they are with other trees of the same species. The mycorrhizae are like the Planternet, and trees "talk" to each other (and the fungus itself "talks" to the trees). There are turf battles where sometimes species try to manipulate the network so that more of their own species can grow. All of the drama of what we call "intelligent" life, just in incredibly slow motion.

Not to get all spiritual, but I really cannot even begin to comprehend how much of a miracle it is that we're here, irrespective of whether it's just dumb luck or some kind of creator. Probably why Catholics talk about timor Domini.

Big Phoenix said:
bruh one of my roommates while in the Marines would never shut up about McKenna and the wonders of DMT and how it opens your mind to everything in the universe.

Guy ended up getting kicked out for drug use and self destructed his life with hookers and blow after getting a big paycheck from the VA.
Click to expand...

Like anything else, I think the hallucinogens are tools that can be used either positively or negatively. I know a guy who grew up white trash in Appalachia whose life was going nowhere fast, and now he's a game developer in Japan with a wife (although he is still a degenerate with a girlfriend on the side with his wife's approval.) He credits that to a shroom trip that he took in his early 20s.

I like Western society for the most part. I'm happy in Western society for the most part. I've never been high or drunk. But it doesn't work for a large subset of people. Is that because they are innately broken, or is that because there is something innately broken with our society or our ways of knowing? Is it both? I honestly don't know.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

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Big Phoenix said:
bruh one of my roommates while in the Marines would never shut up about McKenna and the wonders of DMT and how it opens your mind to everything in the universe.

Guy ended up getting kicked out for drug use and self destructed his life with hookers and blow after getting a big paycheck from the VA.
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He got kicked out, and also got a big check from the VA?
 
Big Phoenix

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Sanrith Descartes said:
He got kicked out, and also got a big check from the VA?
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Yup, popped on a piss test.

Couple years afterwards he went to the VA saying his back was messed up due to lugging 155mm shells around and eventually they approved his claim. He said it was partially due to them basically kicking him out without properly reviewing his medical records and all that before being discharged. Resulted in 6-7 years of back disability pay which worked out to around 150k or so he said.

Guy bought a house with the money and promptly moved in a few hookers basically acting as a quasi pimp to them while drinking and getting high 24/7. All ended when his neighbors finally got tired of his hoodrat behavior.

Jesus I just looked this guy up and his life absolutely imploded. What a stroll down memory lane.
 
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Sanrith Descartes

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Big Phoenix said:
Yup, popped on a piss test.

Couple years afterwards he went to the VA saying his back was messed up due to lugging 155mm shells around and eventually they approved his claim. He said it was partially due to them basically kicking him out without properly reviewing his medical records and all that before being discharged. Resulted in 6-7 years of back disability pay which worked out to around 150k or so he said.

Guy bought a house with the money and promptly moved in a few hookers basically acting as a quasi pimp to them while drinking and getting high 24/7. All ended when his neighbors finally got tired of his hoodrat behavior.

Jesus I just looked this guy up and his life absolutely imploded. What a stroll down memory lane.
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Wowser.
 
Aaron

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This again comes down to definitions - how do we define "intelligent life" and how do we define contact with it? Most define it as technological aptitude - the ability to invent and build material things, such as atom bombs and space ships. And yes, this is one way. But is it the only way? McKenna argued that mushrooms were the perfect means of distributing a galactic wide "telephone network" via pan-spermia. The spores could probably last in space indefinitely, flying around until they end up in the gravity well of a planet and get sucked in. Their biology is such that they can grow almost anywhere. And then they don't "activate" when eaten unless your brain has the right ability to "connect".

You know, all this reminds me of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and a quote in it from when all the dolphins mysteriously disappeared. Mankind had always assumed that they were the most intelligent species on the planet since they had invented New York, atom bombs and other such things while the dolphins just swam around in the ocean and played with beach balls all day, while the dolphins maintained that they were the most intelligent species on the planet for exactly the same reasons.
 
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Warmuth

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The odds of life ever advancing to the point of reasonable intelligence needs two trillion galaxies with 100 billion stars to even happen. The earth still supporting life for however many hundreds of million years after it got started is absurd.
 
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