Why Only Americans Are Interested in the Hunt for Alien Life | Hacker News Reader

Why Only Americans Are Interested in the Hunt for Alien Life

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29 pointsvmorgulis28 comments

I am Swedish and interested.

There is 100-200 billion galaxies. The estimated number of stars in the universe is between 10^22 to 10^24. Each star on average has more than planet in orbit. That means its at lest 10^22 planets. 10000000000000000000000. Whats the probability we are the only one with intelligent life on it?

Here is a Russian billionare funding interstellar space craft. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-billionaire-u...

We should work together in peace to discover these new planets.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How... http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-univ... http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-...

I used to have a simplistic religious belief and a "worldly" one, but over time they have converged into one thing.

My understanding is that everything in the known universe is subject to time and light. Light is subject to time.

Looking at the number of planets, the probability of life is very high, intelligent life, I don't know. The problem for me is that if aliens exist on say the Sombrero Galaxy, a planet that we could "see" would probably be extinct or much more evolved in our 2017 AD. The Sombrero is 29 million light-years away. If hypothetically intelligent life exists on Sombrero, and we can prove it; would we be proving its existence millions of years ago?

Given that the fastest thing in the universe is light, and as it has a measured speed, it's subject to time. I don't think we'll ever discover modern-day life forms. Even teleportation would somehow be subject to the speed of light. I was fascinated the day I learnt that we technically can't even leave The Milky Way because it's so huge! So how will we find aliens, or they find us?

This is of course a layman argument. If someone with knowledge corrects me, I'd be delighted to spend my morning reading and expanding my knowledge!

While I definitely don't exclude the possibility of life on other planets, I don't think we have yet any way to calculate the probability of its existence.

I can think of two possibilities to estimate the probability of life outside earth. The first requires knowing, given set of planets excluding earth, how many of them have life on them. We obviously can't use this method yet.

Another method is knowing exactly what it takes to create life and then calculating the probability of this process occurring outside earth.

We haven't yet managed to synthesise life in a lab (despite headlines which try to claim the contrary). This does not mean we won't be able to create it eventually, but the fact remains that can't yet assess what more is left to make it work. Therefore, you can't assess the probability for it to work anywhere else.

Bottom line, I can see no serious formula (Drake's or other) which can give us any estimate at the moment.

I am going to take the opposing view here on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. But I do want to say that I think it is good someone is out there looking for it. I have been known to be wrong quite a bit.

I don't think 10^22 is a very big number. If we try to guess the probability of life evolving at random, I can see it being negligible given that number of planets.

First we can try to calculate something easier, the famous monkeys banging on keyboards to try to type Hamlet. If we put 1 trillion monkeys on each planet, and let them try for a trillion years, with three attempts per day to make the math easier, we get a total of 10^49 attempts.

We'll consider a keyboard with 50 keys. 10^49 is roughly 50^29, which means we can expect one lucky monkey to get 29 characters into the play. That is impressive but not very far into a play with 30,557 words (150,000 characters?). (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwo...)

Now consider human DNA. I am not a biology expert so I may not have my DNA right. But it looks like a typical human DNA molecule contains 500,000 to 2,500,000 nucleotides (http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-...). I believe there are 4 possibilities for each nulceotide. That means 4^2,500,000 or 10^1,500,000. That is a lot of possibilities. Worse even then typing Hamlet. And that would be if we just had monkeys supplied with adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine putting DNA together. Never mind that these are each complicated molecules in themselves that have to be assembled at random.

So how did we even get here? Well, thanks to quantum mechanics we have almost endless opportunities to end up here. It just seems unlikely that we and some other life ended up in the universe together.

It sounds like you're calculating the likelihood of a human evolving in an instant though? Which doesn't need to happen and isn't presumed to have happened here on earth.

Intelligent life doesn't have to be like us at all, it doesn't even have to use DNA (although intuitively it does feel like it would need some similarly-complex form of reproductive instruction... eventually).

According to evolutionary theory early life on this planet was something far simpler than us (eg. some form of self-replicating molecule - depending on your definition of life) and evolutionary forces (imperfect reproduction leading to variation along with 'survival of the best fit') do the rest of the work. It's vastly unlikely that it would take all the same forks in all the same paths and end up as something like humans (or even like vertebrates - the whole tree of life begun from scratch on another planet would likely be unrecognisable to us) but it seems (again, intuitively) like something akin to what we call intelligence would eventually arise due to the competitive advantages it offers.

My comment was trying to address the idea of big numbers. People can say there are so many planets there must be other life out there. But relative to the numbers that can be involved here, 10^22 is not that big of a number.

You raise two very good points. The first (or really second) is multiplicity. For the DNA example I gave, there are many different valid human DNA patterns, and there are surely many non-human good patterns. We divide out number of parameters by the multiplicity. I don't think this generally have a big effect on the size of the _exponent_ we are talking about even if it does change the number by a large factor.

The other point is that this was an evolutionary process. What this means is that we could stop and save our work along the way, due to reproduction/replication. When the monkeys try to type Hamlet, they have to start over each time. If one gets the last character wrong, it is back to the drawing board. A better evolution analogy would be if the scientist could stop a monkey when he got the first paragraph and then give that as a starting point for other monkeys. This _does_ seem like it could make a big difference in the size of the exponent.

Back to the size of that exponent - it is roughly the number of components of the system. We are composed of 10^29 atoms. There aren't even that many planets, let alone a number raised to that exponent. Even the most simple life consists of many atoms, but the size of our universe only supports putting a small (100?) number of components together. Given this, I am personally still skeptical the universe is big enough to create life besides us.

I do have one more thing I want to mention related to why life looks easy. When we look back at our evolution, it looks like it was easy, even inevitable. But there is one thing to consider. Imagine we lined up 10^300,000 monkeys or whatever it would take to type Hamlet, and we put a scientist behind each one to check the monkey's work. Imagine if you were the scientist behind that one monkey that actually pounded out all of Hamlet. Given that you did not see the other 10^300,000 attempts, what would that look like to you?

I think the chemical reactions that could possibly give rise to life probably happen many many many orders of magnitude more often than 3 times per day.

I seriously doubt we will ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial life. There are a lot of obstacles - the distances involved, the fragility of life, and the fact that not every intelligent life-form will develop advanced technology.

All that said, I am certain it such life exists elsewhere.

They don't even answer the question. I guess he suggests that Americans are still explorers and other countries aren't. That's hardly an explanation.

From the article:

  So I've resorted to amateur sociology to provide 
  justification. Unlike the countries of Europe, 
  America still resonates to its pioneering heritage, 
  and that heritage is stunningly recent.

The author is misinformed.

Jurij Milner who is Russian, is giving an unprecedented 100 million USD for SETI purposes as part of the Breakthrough Listen project.

I'm absolutely interested in the hunt for alien life. It's just that I don't think SETI (looking for technological radio signals) is a good way to find it. No signal we've sent into space can be detected from more than half a lightyear away. Radio broadcasts lose power over distance far to quickly to be detectable over interstellar distances, unless you're transmitting with the power of a star.

You could send a tight beam of course, but then you need know where to send it. Aliens have to know we're here and they need to care enough to spend significant resource to send us a message.

So while I'd love to see a sign of extraterrestrial life, I don't think searching for radio transmissions is the way to go.

Age of life on earth: ~3,800,000,000 years

Age of earth life knowing about electromagnetic radiation: ~217 years

Radio SETI will arguably only help us find a species in our relative window of technology. But I think it's worth working on.

This feels like one of those articles where the author justifies the truth of some non-obvious "fact" without first showing that it is true.

Like is it really a thing that "only Americans are interested in searching for alien life" -- I am American, and I wasn't aware (and many of my friends aren't American).

didnt China just build a massive radio station for space?..

Given the U.S. propensity for religiousity, perhaps another effort is searching the universe for God?

Quackery. May as well toss in some Freudian penis analogy for rockets too.

An interest in the prospects of space aliens is definitely escapism, but most people interested in the scholarly fields of astrophysics and astronomy are rational enough to confront life without clinging to spiritual mysticism or superstition.

Metaphysical experience, ethics, and philosophy are topics of interest, but why should it be that the topic of space aliens must invade such tiresome and belabored subjects. What are they, Klingons?

dude, if you think the US ranks even near the top 25 countries in terms of religiosity then you need to travel more

While that is true as a percentage of the population, as for total number of religious people the US is in the top 5 just due to population size. [1]

Also, some US states are larger than entire countries and the percentages vary greatly by state. So depending on where you live in the United States it may feel like literally everyone is religious.

I live in a relatively liberal part of the country and I still feel the need to stay in the closet as an atheist for fear or being disowned by my community and family.

But back to the topic at hand, I think finding aliens would be definitive proof that at the very least the part about God creating earth as something unique and special is bogus.

In other words I think the origional poster is completely wrong. If you believe in God you should fear finding aliens. Philosophically many religious people have trouble reconciling with evolution, never mind another living creature on a planet other than our own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun... - yeah I know I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but I only have so much time to debate on Hacker News per day and finding quality sources takes time :(

No less a personage than Carl Jung weighed in[1] on the psychological aspects of the UFO phenomena: http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psycholo...

[edit-1]: https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Saucers-Modern-Things-Skies/dp...

Maybe the rest of the world realizes it would go something like this,

"OK found them!"

"Awesome! Yay! Hurray!"

celebration for weeks, maybe months, hysterical articles, news headlines, further research initiatives, etc

Decades later, still have hunger, famine, rising global temperatures, scarce resources, disease, cancer, wars mongering superpowers, and corporate greed, etc

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