Intelligent life extremely rare, study claims

[Abramelin]

18 hours ago, UM-Bot said:

A new Oxford University paper has cast doubt on the idea that the universe is teeming with intelligent alien life.

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/341578/intelligent-life-extremely-rare-study-claims

I think the stress should be put on "alien civilizations", and not so much on "intelligent alien life"

Because what is 'intelligence' exactly? According to Ouspensky almost a century ago, and according to Stephen Hawkins, intelligence is nothing but the ability to adapt to change.

[+DanL]

I suspect that intelligent life has been a fairly common occurrence in our galaxy. That though in no way means that those intelligent life forms are likely to have any contact either physical or via other long range contact methods such as radio. The thing is that it is a four dimensional problem meaning that you have to be near enough to make contact and both be capable of contact at the same time. There has been intelligent life here on Earth for a long time but we have only been capable of making or detecting contact with other "peoples" for a little over 150 years. Before that we could have had neighbors as close as a few light-years and never known or been able to communicate with them.

Planets are dangerous places and regularly wipe off their board and start again. Mankind is very possibly going to be another of the species that have arisen to the top of the pile only to be wiped out by any of a dozen or so possible world ending cataclysms. It is a sort of planetary IQ test. A species has just so long to arise, attain supremacy and GET THE HELL OFF this murderous rock. Failure to do so makes us just another failed species that hit a point and seemed to stop progressing until the next THING wiped the slate clean.

The only chance that any species has of breaking out of this deadly cycle is to get off planet and spread out as far as possible. Even if we spread out in our solar system there would eventually be some sort of sun caused cataclysm that would make survival unlikely. The higher we go as far as the advancement of our technology the easier we become to wipe out. When the power goes off and there is no food on store shelves most people will fail to survive the simple problems of food and shelter because as a people they have individuality lost the knowledge and abilities needed to provide these things for themselves.

We have "evolved" into a weaker species that is dependent on our technologies and to have our food delivered to us in packaged containers.

[thelion318]

Its a statistical impossibility that atoms, elements and compounds would form together in such a way to create a being that can comprehend itself. These guys are blinded by their own limited science and skepticism to the miracle of their own existence. It is foolish to think in a universe of trillions of planets, all made up of those same atoms, elements, and compounds, that it can only happen once. Lastly, there are many ways to prepare successful chicken dinner, many ways to compose notes into a melody, and therefore many recipes for life even if narrow minded scientists cant think of any.

[+DanL]

If you start looking at the details and the numbers ANY life is a pretty unlikely occurrence. The fact that we are here to debate the issue though proves that is was possible once and in the vast number of opportunities that are offered it is even more unlikely that it only happened once than that it happened at ALL.

[astrobeing]

11 hours ago, glorybebe said:

No, I am not saying make stuff up! Where did you get that. 

We have no evidence of how life might emerge and evolve in other conditions. So tell me exactly how you want to study this life that might be on other planet with absolutely no evidence to work with.

11 hours ago, glorybebe said:

What I am saying is that we cannot base every planet on Earth.  Look at the different planets in our solar system.  Look at astronomers thinking life could be in Venus's atmosphere.  How different is Venus's atmosphere from Earth. 

The phosphine they detected has nothing to do with life. It's caused by lightning in the planet's atmosphere. It can be reproduced in a lab without life.

11 hours ago, glorybebe said:

Even with the possibility dwindling that life could be supported there, how did astronomers get the idea? 

A long time ago someone who didn't know much about phosphine said it can only be caused by life. They did exactly what you said you shouldn't do: use Earth as an example! The levels detected are extremely low, barely detectable. The idea that phosphine was evidence of life was only held by a few young and misinformed researchers while the rest of the scientific community knew it meant nothing.

11 hours ago, glorybebe said:

 Not every planet will be the same. Not every planet will have the exact same conditions as Earth.  The whole point us we do not know.  Trying to put all other planets into the exact same conditions as Earth is making assumptions that life can only start if the planets is exactly like Earth.  They cannot say that without out proof.

First you need a quick tutorial on life. Atoms behave the same on every planet in the universe so even here on Earth we can figure out what molecules could be used in life. Life must have some characteristics to be life and it must use the elements in the Periodic Table to have these characteristics. We know just about everything about these elements and sadly there are not many elements that can produce these characteristics.

Instead of hand-waving, let me go back to the example you gave: Venus. The planet has a huge problem when it comes to life. Oh, yeah, the heat is a problem but there's an even bigger problem: life must have hydrogen to exist because no other element behaves like hydrogen. Poor Venus has almost no hydrogen. The planet doesn't have a magnetic field so over the past billions of years the solar wind has ripped all of the hydrogen out of the atmosphere and now hydrogen is extremely rare. That's now we know there's no life there.

This is how actual scientists study the possibility of life on other planets.

[astrobeing]

3 hours ago, thelion318 said:

Its a statistical impossibility that atoms, elements and compounds would form together in such a way to create a being that can comprehend itself. These guys are blinded by their own limited science and skepticism to the miracle of their own existence. It is foolish to think in a universe of trillions of planets, all made up of those same atoms, elements, and compounds, that it can only happen once.

Here's a fact of the universe: most events only happen once, and the more complicated the event, the more unlikely that it will happen twice. Life is the most complicated thing in the universe. There is nothing in chemistry or physics that would suggest that life is an natural product of them. Everything we know about them tells us life actually goes counter to what they generally do. What do they generally do, you ask? Look at all the other planets in our solar system. That's what usually happens.

We know that life on Earth was a series of extremely unlikely events that happened in an extremely unlikely order in extremely unlikely conditions that somehow stayed in these extremely unlikely conditions for a extremely unlikely amount of time. If you know how statistics work then you know that when you multiply all factors you get an extremely unlikely probability. This number can easily be larger than the largest possible number of planets in our galaxy and lucky Earth was the only planet to hit the life jackpot.

3 hours ago, thelion318 said:

Lastly, there are many ways to prepare successful chicken dinner, many ways to compose notes into a melody, and therefore many recipes for life even if narrow minded scientists cant think of any.

If you honestly think life is as simple as a chicken dinner then you don't even understand the fundamentals of abiogenesis.

[Abramelin]

1 hour ago, astrobeing said:

Here's a fact of the universe: most events only happen once, and the more complicated the event, the more unlikely that it will happen twice. Life is the most complicated thing in the universe. There is nothing in chemistry or physics that would suggest that life is an natural product of them. Everything we know about them tells us life actually goes counter to what they generally do. What do they generally do, you ask? Look at all the other planets in our solar system. That's what usually happens.

We know that life on Earth was a series of extremely unlikely events that happened in an extremely unlikely order in extremely unlikely conditions that somehow stayed in these extremely unlikely conditions for a extremely unlikely amount of time. If you know how statistics work then you know that when you multiply all factors you get an extremely unlikely probability. This number can easily be larger than the largest possible number of planets in our galaxy and lucky Earth was the only planet to hit the life jackpot.

If you honestly think life is as simple as a chicken dinner then you don't even understand the fundamentals of abiogenesis.

If you don't understand a simple analogy, then who are you to pretend you can 'teach' us all?

Edited December 6, 2020 by Abramelin

[Abramelin]

Astrobeing, you think astro-scientists have it all figured out  right?

But maybe all they are doing is feeding us ignorants nothing but "educated guesses".

 

Edited December 6, 2020 by Abramelin

[astrobeing]

2 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

If you don't understand a simple analogy, then who are you to pretend you can 'teach' us all?

If you wanted to teach those "narrow minded scientists" about life then you should have used a more appropriate analogy.

[Abramelin]

I don't think those scientists are narrow minded.

But I think you are.

 

[astrobeing]

1 minute ago, Abramelin said:

Astrobeing, you think astroscientists have it all figured out  right?

Nope, people here have it all figured out. Life is simple so it must be everywhere just like on Star Trek and scientists who have studied life their entire lives don't know the first thing about it.

2 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

But maybe all they are doing is feeding us ignorants nothing but "educated guesses".

I'll take an educated guess over an ignorant guess.

[astrobeing]

1 minute ago, Abramelin said:

I don't think those scientists are narrow minded.

But I think you are.

I'm telling you exactly what scientists are saying. I'm sorry that they aren't saying that life is simple and abounds in the universe.

[Abramelin]

I have studied chemistry, and have been a lab assistant for 10 years in an Eastmann-Kodak laboratory, and I can tell you that many scientists get flashes of insight by dreams, day-dreams, and during trivial conversations.

Many of the earth-shaking scientific discoveries were not made by deducing from scientific facts.

They were made by flashes of insight.

[astrobeing]

13 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

I have studied chemistry, and have been a lab assistant for 10 years in an Eastmann-Kodak laboratory, and I can tell you that many scientists get flashes of insight by dreams, day-dreams, and during trivial conversations.

I have a degree in electrochemistry and I worked as a developer and project manager for semiconductor fabs here in the Northwest for twenty five years. Before I retired I based my department's decisions on long and dull scientific papers written by our chemical engineers and physicists. Although I don't work for them anymore, they're all doing much better than Kodak is. They're creating new products, not convincing people that old products are better. So much for flashes of insight!

13 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

Many of the earth-shaking scientific discoveries were not made by deducing from scientific facts.

They were made by flashes of insight.

You're absolutely wrong, lab assistant. I can tell you from my professional experience that 99% of science is long hours of hard work, collecting evidence in a boring lab, studying evidence on a computer, and trying to make correct conclusions from that evidence without any bias from outside influences (like the people who want to make money). That slow and dull scientific process is how you're reading this text.

Edited December 6, 2020 by astrobeing

[Abramelin]

Heh:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

-Albert Einstein

[Abramelin]

10 minutes ago, astrobeing said:

I have a degree in electrochemistry and I worked as a developer and project manager for semiconductor fabs here in the Northwest for twenty five years. Before I retired I based my department's decisions on long and dull scientific papers written by our chemical engineers and physicists. Although I don't work for them anymore, they're all doing much better than Kodak is. They're creating new products, not convincing people that old products are better. So much for flashes of insight!

You're absolutely wrong, lab assistant. I can tell you from my professional experience that 99% of science is long hours of hard work, collecting evidence in a boring lab, studying evidence on a computer, and trying to make correct conclusions from that evidence without any bias from outside influences (like the people who want to make money). That slow and dull scientific process is how you're reading this text.

And, based on your experience and hard work  did you make any "earth shaking" discoveries?

I guess not. What you did was slowly improving things. And that is great, no problems with that at all.

Btw., Eastmann-Kodak feels like from a former life to me.

I now work as a gardener.

 

[astrobeing]

17 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

And, based on your experience and hard work  did you make any "earth shaking" discoveries?

Hell, yes we did!!!!! I saw at least two dozen patents filed in my career! Of course these are boring applications of complicated chemical compounds that were found to have unique properties and absolutely no one outside semiconductor manufacturing would care about.

Did these discoveries come to our scientists in dreams or beams of energy from heaven? Nope, they were discovered by spending hour after dreary hour in a goddamned lab trying every possibly combination of compounds to see what they would do. That, my friend, is how you learn about the universe.

17 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

I guess not. What you did was slowly improving things. And that is great, no problems with that at all.

If you study science you'll find that discoveries are useless until a million hours of boring labor is performed after them.

Edited December 6, 2020 by astrobeing

[astrobeing]

22 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

Heh:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

-Albert Einstein

Heh: Einstein was talking specifically about his field: theoretical physics. His discoveries were mostly from thought experiments.

Oh, if only all of science could be performed with a pencil and a piece of paper! Then we wouldn't have to pay so many expensive scientists to work in expensive labs using expensive test equipment! What a world that would be!

[Abramelin]

Believe me, I love science and its accomplishments.

But I also know that leaps in knowledge are often the result of anything but deducing from known facts.

That is all I was trying to convey.

 

[astrobeing]

9 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

Believe me, I love science and its accomplishments.

I feel like you don't appreciate how much work the practice of science actually is. Even the most arrogant physicist I've met acknowledged that his work would mean nothing to world without dozens of other scientists working to make his discoveries apply to the real world.

I saw scientists who regularly worked in the lab all night because they wouldn't be able to sleep until they knew the answer to something. Those are the ones who are making the world a better place every day. They don't get Nobel prizes for what they do.

9 minutes ago, Abramelin said:

But I also know that leaps in knowledge are often the result of anything but deducing from known facts.

They are extremely rare and you can't count on them. For every miracle discovery like penicillin there have been thousands of uncelebrated discoveries done through hard, painful, tedious, and unglamorous labor.

Americans love to celebrate the accidental discoveries because it makes them feel like anyone could make a discovery at any time. "Hey, some guy could find the cure to cancer tomorrow!" People want to believe that science is a series of miracles but it's anything but.

Discoveries are never made in isolation. You'll never discover life on another planet through imagination or from a thought experiment.

[Trelane]

19 hours ago, joc said:

You won't find humans either naked and alone wandering around.                                                                                                 

That depends on what neighborhood you're in.

[Big Jim]

16 hours ago, DanL said:

The only chance that any species has of breaking out of this deadly cycle is to get off planet and spread out as far as possible.

I doubt that this would preserve our species because after years of living on separate planets we would evolve into different species, like Darwin's finches.  We would share the same distant lineage, as we currently do with other primates, but we would be as different from each other as we are from apes.

[Abramelin]

6 hours ago, astrobeing said:

I feel like you don't appreciate how much work the practice of science actually is. Even the most arrogant physicist I've met acknowledged that his work would mean nothing to world without dozens of other scientists working to make his discoveries apply to the real world.

I saw scientists who regularly worked in the lab all night because they wouldn't be able to sleep until they knew the answer to something. Those are the ones who are making the world a better place every day. They don't get Nobel prizes for what they do.

They are extremely rare and you can't count on them. For every miracle discovery like penicillin there have been thousands of uncelebrated discoveries done through hard, painful, tedious, and unglamorous labor.

Americans love to celebrate the accidental discoveries because it makes them feel like anyone could make a discovery at any time. "Hey, some guy could find the cure to cancer tomorrow!" People want to believe that science is a series of miracles but it's anything but.

Discoveries are never made in isolation. You'll never discover life on another planet through imagination or from a thought experiment.

Astrobeing, I *do* know that science is about hard work. Hard work like performing thousands of experiments, then changing one variable, and again perform a thousand experiments. Statistical analyses of the results in the hope of finding clues to some process or whatever.

But sometimes some individual looks at things in a different way, from a different angle, and makes a discovery that doesn't follow logically from deduction.

Occasionally these 'miracles' as you call them happen.

But I agree, you can't count on it.

 

[Big Jim]

5 hours ago, Abramelin said:

Occasionally these 'miracles' as you call them happen.

There are also fortuitous accidents, like the discovery of penicillin.

[+Desertrat56]

On 12/5/2020 at 9:36 PM, joc said:

You won't find humans either naked and alone wandering around.                                                                                                 

There is a televison show about that, though with a camera crew following, they are not alone, just naked in the wild with one survival item.     Anyone who likes train wrecks would love this show.  I can't remember it if is on Discovery or National Geographic.