Alien life could thrive in ancient star clusters
nature.com
nature.com
They might not be useful today, but you've got to start somewhere.
As I said: It's certainly a good thing to think about these things, but... :)
EDIT: Assuming it generally agrees with observed facts, a good sign for any scientific theory is how much it constrains the explanation/solution space. (Paraphrased, obviously. For the life of me I cannot remember who said this. Perhaps David Deutsch?) I don't think the Drake Equation adequately constrains the solution/explanation space.
We have come to know the number of stars around pretty well - at least in our galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and other exoplanet hunters, we know know alot more about the number of planets. These findings are used to constrain the Drake equation.
The rest of the parameters we don't know much about, yet.
I would hold judgement till we explore Europa. Depending on what we find there life may or may not be common in the universe.
> Working with Alak Ray (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai), Di Stefano points out that we have found low-metallicity stars known to have planets elsewhere in the galaxy. And while we can couple the occurrence of Jupiter-class planets with stars that have higher metallicity, there seems to be no such correlation when we’re dealing with smaller, rocky worlds like the Earth. Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t dismiss planets in globular clusters.
If you compare that to low-metallicity stars in the galaxy proper, there are reasons why those might have planets that are not easily afforded to star systems located in globular clusters. Our galaxy is rich in dust and gas clouds that are also inhomogeneous. For example, a metal-poor star may be born out of a low-metal gas cloud and then attract a metal-rich dust disc later. These things are expected to happen a lot less often in globular clusters.
Our sun is not a particularly early third generation star. Given that it would take a civilization about a billion years to spread through the galaxy to all liveable planets ... some civilization should have done that up to 4-5 billion years ago.
If life can happen in 2nd generation stars as well, it should have happened 6-8 billion years ago.
Obviously this hasn't happened.
I only see 3 reasonable explanations:
1) Drake equation is too optimistic. By a huge factor (2-300 million times too optimistic)
2) It's not a problem, because civilizations kill themselves before doing interstellar travel and while we are on the way to doing that but not quite there yet.
3) There's something we don't know
But yeah "We are first, we are rare or we are screwed..." Pretty much sums it up if there are "great filters" to life we really don't understand them yet.
The biggest problem with the Drake equation is that we are using a sample of one, it also doesn't take into account great filters that will prevent the development of intelligent life, technological civilizations and interstellar ones. Our technology jumped from sticks and stones to interplanetary rockets in 10,000 or so years after sticking to those sticks and stones for about 200,000 - 250,000 years. We still have had people living in the Stone Age during ww2 and some still do today. We probably know less about how a civilization might develop into a technological one than we know about how life can evolve.
Cargo cults existed because that's how humans work, that's how humans learn. That's how the machinery that is our brain operates. We copy behavior. We do not discover, learn, think rationally, or any of that (though some of those are tricks we've learned at some point and now make sure to teach our children, but they're learned behaviors, very different from human brains, similar to how you can run logic circuits or multiplications on neural networks).
Here's a stupid assumption that page makes as well. It assumes that cargo cultism had no chance of success. That's just stupid. They built these planes. It would only take someone pushing them off a cliff and paying attention to their fall to discover lift. I don't mean explaining and calculating lift (we can't even do that (the problem "here's a wing shape, now calculate the lift equations" is still unsolved except for special cases, doubly so in supersonic situations, so their chances seem limited). Once they see lift they would only need to get propellers rotating, already a much, much simpler problem. It would certainly not be impossible to make a 10-15 minute human powered flight, or they could simply learn to ride the winds. Difficult, but given enough tries that would certainly work.
Therefore I'd like to offer a very much different explanation for cargo cultism : it's how humans learn. Had these tribes had 100 years or so to figure it out, we would have seen one land in a homemade bamboo airplane on Haiti.
Engine powered flight is much easier and done a century earlier. Yet it still required steel working and internal combustion engine technologies. Small Pacific islands are just not likely to provide access to the necessary iron ore and oil deposits.
But I don't fault them for trying.
Aviation is like Greek science : for a millenium it was stuck in a local optimum. They had seen a working wing design (bird wings) and imitated them, and kept imitating them, failure after failure after failure after failure after failure after failure, for close to a thousand years, or ore if you believe that Daedalus and/or Archytas actually tried it. And while Daedalus sounds a bit incredible, Archytas is just barely on the side of what is achievable. It took someone touring Europe demonstrating a circus trick (lifting a man) with a kite imported from China to make them realize their mistake, or at least make them try something even slightly different. Then, having seen the kites lift people, people tried other wing designs it suddenly took off : less than 50 years until we had stable gliders (God help whoever tries to use a kite for flying, something I learned as a 7 year old. Umbrellas work better, at least stability wise, until they break), another 70 years until we had stable powered flight. Another 15 years and we had commercial airlines and weaponized airplanes.
You are assuming an advanced civilization that spread through the universe would either announce itself or we'd be able to detect it.
The scenario that nobody mentions is that they're already here.
That is the central point of the argument in the article, yet somehow it's never really mentioned.
Also, we're not actually within the outer rim of the galaxy: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/gallery/gala...
On the other hand you are of course right - in a galaxy that is still undergoing intense star formation it is still dangerous to live in a dense region where a nearby young cluster can still render your home planet sterile through a GRB. However, our own Galaxy doesn't seem to be forming stars that actively anymore, and the chance of a new GRB pointing directly at a given star cluster is negligible.
It's comparatively inefficient to radiate heat into a narrow cone, and there is little advantage to radiating it into a black hole. On the contrary, matter falling into the black hole will form an accretion disk that radiates heat back to you. In order to maximize dissipation, they would simply radiate it away into all directions uniformly.
However, there might be other considerations to take into account here besides physics. It might be important to such an isolated civilization to avoid detection. In that case they would gladly take the hit on efficiency and radiate their heat in narrow cones into the gaps where no nearby stars are located.
> An advanced alien civilization will probably have very low radiation signature. To afford the maximum amount of computation
Maybe. We can't say what the goals are of any advanced civilization. The reason why we like to talk about this specific type of civilization is that they are the type that we can actually look for right now.
But as I said above, if you're an isolationist population of computer brains, it makes sense to go through the effort of avoiding other people showing up on your doorstep. Such a culture might deem it acceptable to invest most of their energy budget into avoiding detection, as opposed to computation only.
Technically the black hole doesn't offer anything beyond what a sun of comparable output would offer.
> and other species might avoid the neighborhood in general given that it's not a safe or nice place to be
True, but the reasons for avoiding close contact with it are also the reasons why building a habitat there is potentially risky. All things being equal, a Mercury-like planet would make a better base for a civilization having those goals: it offers a lot of solar energy, affords some protection from detection by being too close to the star to resolve it as a non-natural heat source, and as opposed to the black hole it's also in a stable environment.
Low temperature (lower than cosmic background).
Doesn't the accretion disk shit pretty violent radiation?
I'll bring my towel.
I'm a believer in the cellphone hypothesis - claims of UFOs sightings have dropped once everyone had a small high-quality video camera in their pocket, and no good excuse for not putting their visitation up on Vine.
That said, I don't see the same thing in Bigfoot land, so I think the omnipresence of camera phones has likely killed that idea. There are not as many funny unknown bipedal animals as there are funny lights in the sky.
Well the flying objects can absolutely be unidentified to the photographers in question. There's just no reason to assume that any given flying lights aren't simply a hobbyist quadcopter or distant passenger plane.
One, that some UFO sightings are due to the activities of extraterrestrial intelligences. This seems very unlikely at this point.
Second, that the Fermi Paradox exists at least partly due to aliens avoiding us specifically, what is commonly referred to as the "zoo hypothesis". As far as speculative explanations go, it's not an unreasonable contender. However, it is not among the most likely or the most simple hypotheses out there.
The zoo hypothesis pre-supposes the ready availability of FTL technology, which itself implies that such technology is even possible in general. It also hinges on a specific combination of psychological factors and random happenstance, namely the desire to isolate an entire star system (which is not a trivial feat), and the fact that they even discovered our existence in the first place (which is also quite the coincidence, even for a culture that can travel faster than the speed of light).
These reasons don't rule out the zoo hypothesis. However, if I were to bet on one scenario, it would be the practical consequences of the fact that expected distances between civilizations are enormous in both time and space, plus the weakly-shining light cone of our technologically advanced existence doesn't reach very far and isn't easy to detect - and those same factors would be preventing us from seeing an advanced civilization as well, even if they happened to be relatively close by.
One problem I have with your assertion about the ready availability of FTL technology is that I think that assumption relies on the assumption that ETs have similar lifespans as us, which is probably a faulty assumption. A race advanced enough for interstellar travel could very well have totally different biology that doesn't age, or they might have technologically defeated aging, which is something we're already working on ourselves even though we've only sent a handful of people beyond our Van Allen belts. A species that doesn't age, or has lifespans of millennia, might not think it's that big a deal to send a ship to a nearby star system on a journey that'll take a dozen or so years (in ship-time due to relativistic dilation; centuries in planet-time). By the time they get back, their friends might be a bit older, but it'd be like us taking a trip and coming back 5 years later. And don't forget the possibility of "suspended animation". With sufficiently powerful engines able to achieve a sufficiently high fraction of c, a trip of a dozen or so light-years won't take that long in ship-time. It'll even be something we'll want to do with our lifespans.
Discovering our existence shouldn't be that hard. There's hundreds of stars within a few dozen lightyears or so, so an advanced civilization should be able to build a powerful robotic ship to tour them all and gather data. A few millennia or so later, it'll return and they can analyze it, and our existence will be pretty obvious just by scanning the EM range (assuming they came within the last century), or by detecting atmospheric oxygen and photosynthesis. Of course this assumes they're looking for that kind of life, just like we're doing now with our exoplanet searches.
Honestly, it shouldn't be that hard to detect other civilizations from a reasonable distance; we're already detecting various exoplanets, and as I said, we don't even have any serious spaceflight capability; we're doing it all with ground-based and some orbital telescopes. We're having problems seeing planets the size of our own, but better technology should change that eventually. If we had the ability to send a ship to tour the nearby stars and send data back, advanced civilizations should be fairly obvious to a ship inside their system, just by orbiting the likely-looking planets (inside the "habitable zone") and taking pictures, scanning EM frequencies, etc. It would take a while to get data back though since the ship would take decades or centuries to get there.
I agree, and I didn't mean to come down on either side of the opinion spectrum on FTL. Personally, I consider it a strong possibility that several methods of FTL travel might exist in practice.
> I think that assumption relies on the assumption that ETs have similar lifespans as us, which is probably a faulty assumption.
No, you misunderstood me there. My basic assumption is that ET lifespans (if they are individual beings at all) are for all intents and purposes infinite, as you would expect from any technologically advanced civilization. Instead, my conclusion is mostly shaped by the young age of our own civilization, the meagerness of RF signals emanating from our system, and the vastness of the distances involved.
> There's hundreds of stars within a few dozen lightyears or so, so an advanced civilization should be able to build a powerful robotic ship to tour them all and gather data.
I agree that a swarm of robotic probes meets the criteria for blanket early detection of civilizations. I assert that you would need to cover more than a few dozen light years though, but that's not really relevant. It comes down to the willingness of deploying these probes and the speed at which probe data can be relayed back to someone willing to act on it.
> Honestly, it shouldn't be that hard to detect other civilizations from a reasonable distance; we're already detecting various exoplanets
Planets: yes. Civilizations: it depends. I'm personally doubtful we could detect our own civilization today if we had a clone of humanity orbiting Alpha Centauri, and that's still well within our RF light cone.
Why would we not be able to detect a clone of our civilization around Alpha Centauri? They're only 4 light-years away, so we should pretty easily be able to detect their TV broadcasts and other RF emissions at that distance. The main problem with SETI's approach I think is that it assumes RF emissions are strong enough to detect from huge distances (AC is the closest system to ours, everything else is farther), and that the ETs are at a similar level technologically and use strong RF transmitters rather than short-range spread-spectrum stuff, so that's a pretty short time window technologically, combined with the distance (it takes decades or centuries for signals to travel here from other star systems). But for a hypothetical humanity clone in the AC system, these problems don't hold, and we really should be able to detect them I think. The problem is, in all likelihood, any real civilizations are likely to be at a different developmental stage, and also to be much, much farther away than our closest neighbor.
This interests me. Could we launch a sufficiently weak sensor(I'd suggest my first-gen Moto G) into far solar orbit and try and perform the same kind of analysis we perform on extra-solar objects? Wouldn't it be useful to have a platform where we can perform control experiments?
Why is isolating an entire star system particularly difficult? How about "here be dragons" on a map? It's not like a fence is required; the area simply has to be avoided.
While I appreciate that this requires ensuring everyone uses the same map, is it unreasonable to suppose there is only one map? A self-propagating peer-to-peer map, something akin to DNS perhaps. By the time you're near a danger zone, your map is updated with all relevant information. Similarly, you update the local map nodes with information about the region you've traveled through. A pan-galactic openstreetmap.
Beyond human capability, sure, but we are talking about interstellar aliens.
And FTL travel? How about near light speed instead?
That might not be enough. It depends on your criteria for isolation. At the very least you need to prevent us from passively detecting you. How hard that is can be anyone's guess, but most people would agree it gets harder with increasing energy output and proximity. When I say that cloaking outside EM sources might no be enough, I'm talking about what to do with probes exiting the solar system, and the consequences of dealing with them. To be effective, they would also need to take precautions of blocking technologies they are not sure we possess in the first place. It's a tricky endeavor for them.
I would say there is a very practical difference between just avoiding us and keeping us contained.
> And FTL travel? How about near light speed instead?
There is a risk of repetition, I refer you to the discussion betwen Grishnak and myself below.
even we, Earthicans, can learn from Columbus visiting America and the following fate of civilizations there. Any higher developed civilization definitely has "zoo"/Prime Directive principle in place.
A technological civilization stage between start of building machines (Industrial Revolution in our case) and FTL (and thus also leaving EM related tech behind) is pretty short, thousands, may be tens of thousands of years - absolutely not enough to have overlaps between tech civilizations to listen/watch radio/TV of each other.
>The zoo hypothesis pre-supposes the ready availability of FTL technology, which itself implies that such technology is even possible in general.
well, far galaxies run away from us at speeds higher than FTL, so it is possible. Space expansion is different machinery and not subject to "c" limit (that limit is only valid against static space)
From what we know, that is a reasonable assumption.
> Space expansion is different machinery and not subject to "c" limit (that limit is only valid against static space)
The expansion of the universe and rapidly-increasing distance to far galaxies is not a good example, but yes, the "limit" of c is only applicable to static space. And you are right in the sense that the Hubble flow is an example of objects changing their relative positions without momentum being the primary component.
As I like to frame it: in day-to-day life we are used to define "travel" as accelerating matter to a certain velocity until we reach a destination point. However, acceleration is not the goal of travel: being at the destination point itself is the goal. For example, travel through an artificially shortened corridor of spacetime would still be a valid form of FTL even though acceleration itself never reached relativistically relevant levels.
Its like, Fermi's Paradox is almost completely irrelevant if you come from the position that any sufficiently advanced civilization is aware of the possible non-local properties of consciousness.
I cannot emphasize enough, what you encounter in the DMT or Aya state can be totally alien and extradimensional, and the themes you find within seem to be consistent across highly disparate cultures as well as time.
DMT is weird fun and all, but I am pretty sure this isn't science. Working "as if" true and working backwards is bias.
(See creationism and intelligent design)
Which is literally saying don't use science. Because that is what any scientists would use as the null hypothesis in these scenarios because it is the most likely explanation.
> Collect the data first, find the commonalities between each participant, and then begin discussing the possibilities that emerge from the open minded exploration of a phenomena that has been studied far less than it should.
That's called religion. Science requires evidence, and personal experiences while on drugs are evidence of nothing more than psychological phenomena. There is no reason at all to think they're anything more than that.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the...
That's a claim that can't be substantiated; there is in fact nothing but doubt since there's no evidence to lead to the conclusion that hallucinations in your mind have any connection to the outside world.
> accepting the accounts from those participating "as if" true and then working backwards systematically towards a theory or direction.
No, that isn't how science works; that's religion. Science doesn't accept claims as if they're true without evidence they are.
> I cannot emphasize enough, what you encounter in the DMT or Aya state can be totally alien and extradimensional, and the themes you find within seem to be consistent across highly disparate cultures as well as time.
Because it's a drug that affects humans the same way and gives you hallucinations and ego death; not because it in any way connects to extra dimensional reality.
On a more serious note, I have no idea how you'd actually test this. How would you prove or disprove that someone experimenting with hallucinogens is actually communicating with something else?
The only thing I can think of is having two people under the influence being able to communicate with each other, with absolutely no other way of doing so. Subjects A and B have never met, and don't have any way of passing messages during their experience. Subject A is told to pass some randomly generated string to subject B, either directly or via some alien intermediary. If Subject B can guess Subject A's string, then that might be evidence of something interesting and objectively external happening.
That's what some people call mumbo jumbo. Either you really contact some aliens while high or not. If you do, you can pass some message/knowledge that only they could know to prove it.
Else it's just some experience you have.
The effects of drug-induced illusions are scientifically interesting to a number of research fields, including biochemistry and neurobiology. It may also be valuable for self-discovery and personal actualization. However, if you claim to be able to discern cosmological facts from these experiences, we are now firmly in the realm of religion.
> and this is very easy to test should the completely anti-scientific legal mechanisms preventing such a study be overcome
There have been a lot of studies testing supernatural powers, with and without the influence of drugs, in the sixties and seventies. None of these have ever yielded anything. But if it's very easy to test, as you claim, then go ahead and test it. The James Randi foundation offers a sizable prize for you if you can show this works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_...
If you don't mind me asking, how is this not clear?
That is not correct. In the post above you said, literally, "you don't need to travel far to reach the outer limits of space or even have contact experiences [...] Its like, Fermi's Paradox is almost completely irrelevant if you come from the position that any sufficiently advanced civilization is aware of the possible non-local properties of consciousness". That's a claim.
I think it's fair to conclude you are not assigning an extremely low probability to there being "more to consciousness than it appears".
> studying the relationships between certain tryptamine compounds and the human psyche
This is a purely biological endeavor. The reason why I responded to your earlier post, and also the reason why this even shows up in a thread about planet formation, is that you claim to be able to explore the cosmos by ingesting mind-altering substances.
> All I can speak to are my own personal experiences.
For what it's worth, nobody is disputing you had these experiences. What is in dispute is the claim that these experiences yield scientific facts by virtue of remote viewing.
Formal and informal study participants have noted that when you ingest N,N-Dimethyltryptamine certain strange contact-like phenomena tend to occur within the biological-psychological interface known as Consciousness, and that these experiences -- which have an internal consistency -- seem to be inexplicably independent of culture, background or time. These contact experiences were so shocking that the lead investigator, Rick Strassman, discontinued his study. Meanwhile, nearly 20 years later, there are still legal barriers in place for the further study of these results due to the War on Drugs. My position is: the phenomena -- based upon my own personal experience -- is deeply strange, and in when put within the context of Fermi's Paradox, the Drake equation, etc, it might be time to approach the subject of consciousness from a different angle. Its so simple, its merely to investigate.
That's not in question.
> occur within the biological-psychological interface known as Consciousness
This sentence includes a little submarine-like assumption, namely that our brains are merely the interface to a larger paranormal consciousness, as opposed to being the hardware that actually generates "consciousness". At this point, there is no scientific reason to believe this assumption which you smuggled in there has any factual validity.
> These contact experiences were so shocking that the lead investigator, Rick Strassman, discontinued his study.
Scientific efforts don't get discontinued because they are "shocking". While an individual researcher might move on, for whatever reason, it's not correct to imply that certain outcomes are so disconcerting the scientific community would shy away from them. Otherwise, large swaths of physics and biology would have been abandoned a long time ago.
> My position is: the phenomena [...] is deeply strange, and [...] it might be time to approach the subject of consciousness from a different angle.
Yes, I think that position was understood from your first comment.
You've repeated this point in your other comments. Why would these experiences not simply be a result of the interactions between this chemical and typical human physiology? Alcohol has predictable effects when consumed -- I'm sure ancient Egyptians had equally impaired motor control as 21st century Australians. Why would DMT be any different?
> how is this not clear
We could continue searching for Russell's teapot too, but why would we?
I pointed it out because I was surprised to see it had been added to the post when we actually had an exchange in order to clarify why it's not clear. On a more general note, the honest answer is I challenged your comments since nobody else was doing it, so I didn't want to let those claims slide unopposed. There may be a cultural component, too, because I'm from a culture where supernatural claims are often openly questioned whereas, for example, in the US those beliefs are generally not publicly challenged. I also want to make it clear that it's not personal, it's only about the subject at hand.
> I really didn't expect this strict of a response to my words from the community
It's not the community, so please don't feel ganged up on. Opposition is mostly coming from me at this point.
> How should one approach highly speculative questions like this, scientifically?
Not presupposing a model of the world that significantly differs from observable reality would be a start. I'm not saying this to be a dick, it's just to address the fact that you are basing your whole argument on a stack of flawed assumptions.
> from your perspective, is it possible to even posit this possibility of a non-local consciousness
It is possible to posit anything, but if you want to make an acceptable factual claim, you're going to need some extraordinary evidence to back that up. We're talking about evidence that would radically change scientific understanding and would require discarding a large part of all observations made to this day - just to give you an idea of the magnitude. You're basically going to have to demonstrate we're living in the Matrix.
> don't you think there is quite a bit more we could still discover?
I do, but as I said many times in my responses: these discoveries would be about neurobiology.
> We obviously don't have the experimental evidence yet to say things are this way or that
We do have a ton of experimental evidence that does not point to any of the supernatural phenomena you're talking about. We don't have, at this moment, any evidence in support of your hypothesis.
> so where does one begin?
A start would be, when you go on a drug trip next time, bring back some scientific data we can verify that you couldn't have gotten otherwise. There are a lot of these you could do while you're out there in space, starting from exoplanets, to geological observations about our own solar system, the composition of the galaxy, you name it.
> Or is the sort of strict responses that I've received due to my delivery?
Strict is not the right word, and it's not your delivery. It all comes back to your original claim that consciousness is a paranormal phenomenon and that you can take drugs in order to explore the universe. You have to understand this is an extraordinary claim, right? So go out and get us some actual data from your trips, until then, prepare to encounter skeptics.
Well, with DMT etc. you don't need to travel far to BELIEVE you've reached "the outer limits of space or have contact experiences" -- which is not the same as actually reaching it and meeting anyone...
There's a reason they're called "hallucinations".
>Its like, Fermi's Paradox is almost completely irrelevant if you come from the position that any sufficiently advanced civilization is aware of the possible non-local properties of consciousness.
Also if you believe in magic and teleportation.