Habitable exoplanets are bad news for humanity

Vinod2070 said:

I personally would go with the extraordinary confluence of factors needed to bring about "intelligent life".

While there may be billions of planets in the habitable zone (many even supporting liquid water), there is an almost impossible array of perfect conditions needed for supporting (let alone creating) living beings.

Of course most of us have read that if the values of some of the universal constants was off by a teeny tiny factor, there would be no universe as we know it.

There is much that still needs to be known about it all. I doubt humanity will survive long enough to figure out most of it.

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What.!!!! Seriously what "perfect conditions" are you talking about? There are forms of life on Earth that could easily survive in the most extreme conditions imaginable, and here we are talking about planets that are in habitable zone with water.

mithyaa said:

What.!!!! Seriously what "perfect conditions" are you talking about? There are forms of life on Earth that could easily survive in the most extreme conditions imaginable, and here we are talking about planets that are in habitable zone with water.

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OK, so why has no life been found on any other planet or the moon?

Even the "most extreme conditions imaginable" on Earth are probably more conducive to life than most places in the universe.

I am very very confident that alien life must exist. Here is my post on a sister thread where I have made some basic calculations about alien life. Our complete lack of knowledge of distant galaxies is no excuse to say that we know for sure alien life does not exist. Population of Known Alien Planets Nearly Doubles as NASA Discovers 715 New Worlds | Page 2

Vinod2070 said:

OK, so why has no life been found on any other planet or the moon?

Even the "most extreme conditions imaginable" on Earth are probably more conducive to life than most places in the universe.

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The most logical answer of that would be it requires an ambient condition for life to emerge out of the constituent compounds, and then it evolved to survive in hostile environments.

Vinod2070 said:

OK, so why has no life been found on any other planet or the moon?

Even the "most extreme conditions imaginable" on Earth are probably more conducive to life than most places in the universe.

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Moon? because it has no atmosphere. Other places? How many planets in habitable zone has human checked for life (not intelligent life but just any form of life). The answer to that is zero, because it is not possible with the current technology.

mithyaa said:

Moon? because it has no atmosphere. Other places? How many planets in habitable zone has human checked for life (not intelligent life but just any form of life). The answer to that is zero, because it is not possible with the current technology.

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Let's wait for the "check" to happen then.

I think that just being in the "habitable zone" may not necessarily mean that life will exist on the planet as it takes much more than liquid water for life to be created and supported.

I think it is much more than even having the right constituents in place for self replicating life to be created. There may be a very strong element of serendipity in intelligent life being created on the Earth.

LoveIcon said:

Jelly fish survived for millions of years without brain, same is the case with morons

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as per your theory Indians have best survival chances among all the existing human races

W.11 said:

as per your theory Indians have best survival chances among all the existing human races

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Former Indians, now just fake wannabes.

Pakistanis pose as Indians after NY bomb scare| Reuters

We have barely seen enough of the Universe, and who knows whether we are already in contact with aliens or not? In every religion god or angels came down on earth from the sky!!

thesolar65 said:

Esteemed scientists such as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk point to advances in biotechnology as being potentially catastrophic. Others, such as Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, and Stuart Russell, also with the Cambridge Centre, have expressed serious concern about the exotic but understudied possibility of machine superintelligence.

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I don't know what kind of threat biotechnology might pose for us in future, but I think Artificial Intelligence will pose a serious threat to us within a few hundred years maximum.

LoveIcon said:

If there is any life on other planet than they surely are dumb, as they haven't sent anything on Earth mission.

But on second thought what if the have already found us without our knowledge and planning to colonize us?



Jelly fish survived for millions of years without brain, same is the case with morons

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People frequently underestimate just how much more advanced spacefaringaliens might be. I would posit that there are races out there so much more advanced than us that we would be unable to recognize the evidence of their existence, and such evidence would instead appear to us as aspects of the nature of reality itself.

The universe is old enough that aliens might have a multi-billion year head start

The universe is 14 billion years old. There is debate about how recently enough heavy elements were fused to permit the formation of rocky planets harboring the elements required for life as we know it. Some believe that rocky planets with the ingredients for life could have formed as early as 12 billion years ago [1], but let's take a conservative figure of 8 billion years ago.

So planets capable of supporting life existed in the universe 8 billion years ago. Our planet formed 4.6 billion years ago. It took another billion years for the surface to cool and for conditions supporting life to arise. Almost immediately upon the conditions becoming suitable, life arose on our planet 3.6 billion years ago.

Assuming things work roughly the same way on other planets as they have here on Earth, we can reasonably conclude that there are life-harboring planets out there with a 3.4 billion year head start. This means there are planets out there with a head start almost equal to (and perhaps greater than) the entire time life has existed on Earth.

In billions of years, life has evolved such that primitive life forms are incapable of comprehending the more advanced ones

Now consider how different humans are from the first life forms to arise on our planet. Assuming the rate of evolutionary change remains constant, the life forms on a planet with a 3.4 billion year head start would be about as different from our level of complexity as we are from the simplest bacteria.

Bacteria are entirely incapable of comprehending us. In fact, they are not capable of being aware of us at all. They inhabit the same space we do, even living inside our bodies as symbionts, but they are entirely incapable of being aware of us. Consider ants, which are far more complex than bacteria and are separated from us by only 500 million years of evolutionary development. They too inhabit the same space. They can be affected by our actions. They can see us, eat the food we drop on the ground, crawl all over our picnic tables, but they aren't really aware of us. They are entirely incapable of understanding any message we might try to send to them. We have come to understand the chemical signals ants use to communicate with each other, and we can lay down trails for them to follow etc., so basically we humans are able to speak an ant's language, but still we cannot convey to them any concept of what we are because ants lack the brains to comprehend what we are.

So, assuming the pace of evolutionary development is roughly constant, aliensout there would likely be so much more advanced that we would be incapable of comprehending them even if we were living right in front of them on their picnic table. They could even learn to speak our language, as we have with ants, and it wouldn't do much good. That in itself could explain why it seems that no alien intelligences have contacted is. But really, the difference is even more extreme than the rate biological evolutionary development would suggest.

With the advent of technology, the rate of development has increased enormously, such that the complexity gap will be even bigger over the coming few billion years

About 40,000 years ago, humans began to develop technology. Unlike evolutionary development, which advances by a process of random mutation, technological development advances through directed and systematic procedures. As a result, the pace of development has accelerated enormously.

Most people are probably familiar with cargo cults. For those who are not: cargo cults exist on some remote islands in the pacific. During WW2, the American and Japanese militaries established bases on some remote islands that had little to no previous contact with developed civilizations. When the war ended, the bases were abandoned. The natives on the islands had seen technologies that they did not understand. The lights and flying machines appeared to them as magic. Now, some of the people on these islands have adopted rituals that mimic the movements of air traffic controllers and radio operators, hoping that they can call down cargo from the sky.

These people are separated from us by only 8,000 years of development (the time it took from the establishment of the first agricultural civilizations until the present day) and yet they couldn't understand what they saw, and they worship our technology in a religious manner.

8,000 years is far less than an eye-blink on the billions-of-years timescale of the head start that some planets had on ours. It took 8,000 years for us to appear as gods to other humans--how much longer would it take before we would recede from their ability to understand altogether? Maybe 10x that amount of time? But consider also that the rate at which technology is developing is increasing exponentially. Most of the developments that separate us from hunter-gatherers were made in the last 200 years.

So, with technological development beginning 3.4 billion years ahead of ours, the gap between us an alien race would not be just the gap between bacteria and us, but conceivably exponentially greater.

TL;DR Now consider again the ants. They can't conceive of what we are. All they know are that there are lots of crumbs that tend to show up in a certain area near their anthill. For the ants, this is just a fact of life--"there are lots of crumbs over there usually" is just part of the nature of reality as they perceive it. Similarly, the evidence of alien life is probably all around us, but they are so much more advanced than we are, that the evidence of their existence appears to simply be woven into the nature of reality as we perceive it.