When will we find aliens?
bbc.com
bbc.com
That means funding astronomy an order of magnitude more than we do now, and flat-out demanding that we mitigate risk and reduce R&D cost-share by building ten to a hundred of everything. Presently we spend a decade and a half perfecting a design's technical aspects and securing funding only to build one unit over five years, with a 70% chance of scaling back that unit or stretching out construction by five more years because of insecure funding late in the game. We should instead spend 3 years designing, 2 years building a prototype and iterating, and 5 years building and installing a large number of production-run units, before moving on to the next design.
Nearly every instrument on every large telescope today is 'couture', with at most 2 units in existence. Telescopes designed for mass replication, like the ATA or PAN-STARRS, end up getting their funding cut off for further units as soon as first light is reached on the prototype, because of the perverse incentives and interests associated with astronomical research.
It also means devoting actual resources to SETI, instead of having it be something tenured professors do as a hobby, with nearly zero funding.
Maybe the funds could be spent into how to solve the nuclear residues problem, how to design a catascope to look under yellowstone or inside the etna, how to predict and minimise the next fukushima/three mile island, or how to study sea currents and discover if those yummy school of anchovies from japan will cause you a leukemia in two years.
Just an opinion
But intelligent non-life would be even more exciting! Note that SETI is the search for ET intelligence, not ET life.
I mean, read this:
> As robotic space probes continue to explore the solar system, visiting planets, moons, and asteroids, they're finding watery environments where microbial life could grab hold
If robots are better than life for exploring the solar system and visiting remote planets, why are we looking for signs of life, instead of signs of robots?
Viking 1 wasn't the first to land on Mars. It landed July 20, 1976. Mars 3 landed in December 2, 1971.
M3 didn't last long, granted, but that's hardly a reason to twist the facts (presumably for the benefit of narration and not because of any sort of anti-Soviet bias, because that would've been just way too ridiculous coming from BBC, wouldn't it).
As for meeting any of these, I think it will be a loooong time.
There is also plans (not yet funded) to use "starshade" occulter to directly observe planets that don't pass in front of the parent star (by blocking the starlight).
My personal estimate is that we'll definitely detect oxygen in a planetary spectrum within the next 10 years. Which will mostly likely mean photosynthesis on the surface.
"Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?
"Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas."
"ET is 99% likely to be more than 50 million years in front of us and that’s ample time to completely explore this galaxy. So it’s 99% likely they know we are here."
Source: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150429-will-we-find-aliens
I hear this extraordinary evidence claim text often and I think that people that say it in fact ask for an official government statement or a live tv streaming of a landing etc but they will never get it because the government will never admit that is not the absolute power unless it's too obvious to deny it and also to avoid population panic.
> What is an extraordinary evidence for you?
Any alien piece of technology. Forget tech, I am assuming an alien Pencil would be out of this world too.
> Even if thousands of people saw something out of this world is not enough of evidence?
That is my point, thousands saw yet nobody captured it on a good high definition camera. Now everyone has HD cameras yet no sign on UFO's, coincidence?
Also having thousands confirm the event rules out a hoax, on top of that the former governor who was also a trained pilot could easily identify flares or other military plane. You need to look at all the evidence and details.
To have a piece of alien technology you can only have it if you receive it, you or me will surely not be that special to receive it and if world leaders will have the privilege you might never know.
Also it's enough proof to hover that big craft in mid day over a big city but for whatever reasons they still give us a chance to doubt, I suspect that the reason is to avoid panic as a big percentage of world population is still religious and not ready yet but they still give us a sign that we are not alone.
There are 4 videos shot from the event on youtube that you can watch, also high definition cameras still don't have very good optics to focus on moving objects at high altitude, a better sensor alone will not help much with the video quality especially in the night.
Also these kinds of events are very rare so there too many things, like good camera with good lenses, tripod, being in the right spot, last long enough etc to be in place to get that clear hd video.
Lets say there really was a a big craft. Maybe it belonged to the Soviets, who built that huge craft in secret. So it was a UFO but that does not mean automatically that it were Aliens.
I saw the 2 videos, those can be faked too. People believed the yeti video was real. People believe in the loch ness monster.
So many people claim that they were abducted by aliens, they talked to the aliens, well then next time just grab a small medical device, hide it somewhere maybe in the mouth and then once you are back on earth have a press conference and show the world.
> big craft in mid day over a big city
The videos I saw were taken at night. Can you please link to a video taken in daytime.
> but they still give us a sign that we are not alone.
They can just say hello using radio, we are listening for decades yet there is radio silence.
Seriously from earth we are only likely to find aliens at the same or slightly ahead of our own technology. If one visits us first it might come sooner. If the aliens are far ahead of us we may never even notice them. It's like dumping Newton in a modern corn field and telling him he is surrounded by people communicating. He would have no idea about cell phone, microwave and other transmissions. Take technology from 300 years in the future in an alien today and we might be equally clueless.
It's like amerindians wanting to find spaniards.
We are right now like amerindians building a lighthouse to contact people in the old world. If we point it to Africa, elephants and tigers won't know how to respond. If we keep building it higher and higher and point it to Europe, spaniards will come and slaughter us all.
There would still be the possibility that the presence of oxygen was geologic in nature, and if we sampled a billion exo-planets, it's reasonable that some could have an exotic geology to cause this 'false positive'.
The next step might be to look for a pattern in the carbon-cycle connected with orbits: e.g on Earth the North vs. South hemisphere have different amounts of plant life, and we see C02 wobble several ppm in summer vs. winter. Getting accurate readings of exo-planets to the ppm level might take a while for telescope technology to acheive. For these reasons, I'd say 2100 is a good estimate for when we would have the ability to sample 1B exoplanets, and promote at least one to the rank of 'strong possibility of harboring life'.
N ~= 2flfefcL
where fl is the fraction of habitable planets hosting life, fe is the fraction of life-bearing planets that develop an intelligent life-form, fc is the fraction of intelligent life-forms that decide to communicate, and L is the length of time a given civilization is transmitting "visible" communications. Taking ourselves as an example, L is already on the order of 100 years. The original estimates for these values were fl = 1, fe = 1, fc = 0.1-0.2, and L = 1000-100,000,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation).
For instance, if we were living on a 9 Billion year old planet but we could only find fossils dating back to 2 Billion years ago, we'd surmise that it took life around 7B to get life started on this planet. Under those circumstances, your hypothesis would be stronger than it is under actual conditions (4.5B and 3.5B respectively).
1) 13.8 - Age of Universe (Billion years)
2) 4.5 - Age of Earth
3) 3.5 - (minimum) Age of life on Earth
Our ancestors have already been alive here for at least 25% of the duration of the universe. To me, the most fascinating number is the small gap between 2) and 3). Suggesting that life here, at least, was almost inevitable. Whether through panspermia or ab initio, it appears difficult neither for life to get started nor to keep hanging around.
I read last year about a hypothesis that iirc 100,000 years after the big bang, as the entire Universe was cooling, for some duration it was lukewarm in patches all over. Ideal for the first iteration of life and perhaps for an initial panspermia event that seeded all parts of the expanding universe.
Edit: I think it was called 'The Privileged Planet'.
"Embracing the concept of intelligent design and refuting the theory of evolution, this intriguing video posits that Earth was created not by a series of random events but by a 'creative designer' who knew exactly what he was doing. Several proponents of intelligent design, including philosophers and scientists, share their views about this controversial theory and provide evidence that supports their premise. Actor John Rhys-Davies narrates."
I'll pass.