Submitted by EricFromOuterSpace t3_z86hpt in space
I wonder if its possible to prove we are alone. Or are we going to search forever?
I hope we cannot prove that we are alone. The sky just wouldn’t be as interesting anymore.
If we prove we are alone then I'd be far more inclined to believe the more "super natural" theories about the universe.
I have to disagree. There'd still be so much worth finding, both biological and otherwise. Finding out we're the only conscious beings would instill in all of us a deep purpose to spread consciousness everywhere. We'd be the primordial being, enshrouded in perpetual myth throughout the cosmos. 'The First Ones' .
Also, who knows how violent or immoral some other conscious being may be. We seem to be kind, for the most part. With a little more widespread knowledge and direct democracy, I think we could be very successful in our voyage to the stars.
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Just need to read the 3 Body Problem series to make it feel better about being alone in the universe.
Your yogurt is going to expire in 2 days.
Watch out for Pizza The Hut
I believe this is where I come in
See you in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.
this did make me curious if there was some mathematical way to prove an absence of life. not sure how that would be possible tho.
I think it’s a logical fallacy, you can prove the existence of something, but you cannot prove the non-existence of it.
There are some interesting models based on the formation speeds of stars and planets and how long they remain habitable, as to how prevalent life might be at the different stages of the universe.
They suggest that the peak of habitable worlds that have existed long enough for life to exist and evolve to an intelligent stage (given certain assumptions about the difficulty of that) is actually some billion years in the future, and that humanity could be relatively early on the bellcurve of the distribution for life. Not extremely early, but well before the theorized majority of opportunities for intelligent life.
It involves assuming that earth life is typical, or at least no an extreme outlier in terms of requirements and timeline to evolve, because it's the sole datapoint we have, and assuming humanity is special or unique would be a form of anthropocentrism.
It's called the anti-life equation
You first have to define "life". There could be forms of life that we'd never consider or think possible and be nothing at all like any life we see on Earth. But if you do develope a working definition, it could be possible to disprove its existence by a form of proof by contradiction by proving the existence of things or conditions that would prevent your "life" from being able to exist.
I think, unless we can literally colonize everything, it'll be sorta like the argument for/against God. Where are they/we can't know they aren't there. Both of which are technically valid.
wouldnt that be more interesting if we were alone?
We're not going to exist forever. It's possible that intelligent life is born, looks out into the sky, and fizzles out before finding even the graveyards of other intelligent species who once did the same.
I agree, we likely have been staring at the skies for millions of years, even before we reached our ‘modern human’ point of evolution I imagine we looked to the skies and wandered what it all was about for a lot longer than we would like to give credit to.
I find it hard to believe we will ever get close to another intelligent life form to the point of a handshake, we might end up picking bio-signatures in the composition of far away planets atmosphere, perhaps even signs of artificial lighting, but that does not mean we will ever actually go there, if science is still lacking we might still not have a effective way to make the distance of space near negligible, then we have problems.
To me, from that point it makes sense that we end up sending some sort of drone technology there, even if it takes 1000 years to get there and Humans are all dead, its still contact in some format.
My point is, even at this current stage of technology we realistically and absolutely could send drones to pretty much every close by potentially habitable planet.
Im in full belief that if we ever do experience ET, it will actually be their technology sent here, nice little care package if you will.
Voyager 1 and 2 is the drone technology you speak of. Too bad we wont be around to see what finds them…
Are either of them aimed at anything in particular though?
Technically I don't think it's possible to prove we are alone, the universe is just too vast. If we keep searching for centuries and don't see or hear anything, I think we can logically place some constraints on the prevalence of ET across the cosmos ie. rare to the point of one civ per galaxy or local group or something. We are nowhere near that, however.
Civilizations could have already occurred or haven't yet. If we don't settle other worlds, the mantle of earth will eventually gobble up all evidence of our own existence if we aren't around by then. Applying that to a "Past" civilization on Earth is moot as well due to it being impossbile to find the evidence of such an outstanding claim.
Not really. The universe is just too vast. We don't even know for certain that life HAS to be carbon based. We might see an exoplanet, decide it's not habitable, move on, and all the while a thriving sulfur based life form forms civilizations, learns, grows, puts things in orbit, travels to their moon, then nukes themselves into oblivion for no good reason.
Not to be too much of a downer, because what you say is possible, but odds are overwhelming that extraterrestrial life will be carbon based. Carbon is just so flexible, there's a good reason why organic (carbon-based) chemistry, as a discipline, is larger than inorganic chemistry (everything not involving carbon).
It's also very likely that it will exist along with liquid water. At lower temperatures there just isn't enough energy to lead to complex life in reasonable time frames; at significantly higher temperatures you start bumping into other issues even before you reach plasma (which will probably make life development impossible to bootstrap).
Oh sure. But when we're talking about even just our galaxy, there are so many planets that we just can't say anything for certain. We have life evolved to live and even thrive at hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean. And our planet is pretty young. 1 in a billion odds mean very little when you get over 100 billion chances. We'll never be able to prove or disprove. That's what's so exciting about the universe. Anything is possible.
Without faster than light travel that would be impossible to prove since the universe is alot bigger than just the observable universe. With the speed of expansion increasing and already expanding faster than the speed of light, it would get harder and harder as our technology improves.
You probably would need to make distance a completely negligible factor in travel for this, you would have to make it so you could travel instantaneously to visit the complete opposite of the universe. The problem is, obviously these galaxies on the other side of the universe probably are moving away from us at a ridiculous velocities, to the point that you could not catch up to them perhaps.
You would some how have to have the energy to accelerate to FTL and likely not stop accelerating at any given point for x amount of time to outpace the movement of the galaxies.
I feel like some manipulation of quantum physics or dimensional science could be the real route for space travel, i don’t believe physically travelling point A to B is our real end goal.
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No.
You'd have to exhaustively rule out all life.
In your trek to do so you would seed the universe with microbes or heck even those who just split off and settle down, and new forms of life would develop.
We'll not be able to "prove" anything of that sort anytime soon. We're not entirely sure how our own brain works, let alone the Universe.
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