The Plausibility of Alien Life

Parasomnium writes:

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Our atmosphere contains a relatively large amount of oxygen. This is indicative of life

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Um...that's indicative of life here. Who said that life requires oxygen? One of the big reasons we're looking at places like Titan is because it is at a triple point: Methane exists as solid, liquid and gas there much like water is solid, liquid, and gas here.And don't forget, for much of life's existence on earth, we didn't have oxygen. It's only recently that the atmosphere became heavily oxygenated. That there is oxygen in the atmosphere would be indicative of a chemical process, yes, but not necessarily life.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

It depends on how you define life, of course. But I think we can at least agree that whatever causes so much oxygen in a planet's atmosphere is surely an interesting phenomenon.

Parasomnium responds to me:

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But I think we can at least agree that whatever causes so much oxygen in a planet's atmosphere is surely an interesting phenomenon.

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Eh. Not really. We find it interesting because we live in an oxygen-rich environment. Venus is filled with carbon dioxide. Titan is covered in methane. Io is overflowing with sulphur, so much that it's feeding a ring around Jupiter, if I recall correctly. All of this is interesting.Given that we have seen life in so many variations based upon just the one foundational chemical set of our own to the point that some thrive on oxygen while some shun it, I'm not sure that we can call an oxygen-rich environment a calling card of life. It's a calling card of our life and it would certainly be interesting to us.But that's just us.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

This is rather gross over-simplification. Would you say the same to your child if:1. You win the lottery(great, you were lucky)2. Then, the second time you buy a ticket, you win it again.In this case, would you say to your child:Son, if I didn't win the lottery twice consecutively, you'd be asking "Father, why didn't you win twice in a row?" This is again a gross over-simplification of how the universe works. The universe is mind-bogglingly complex, it's not simple in any humanly imaginable way. The universe is stranger than we can imagine, and i think this last bit of Einstein's is a bit oversimplification as well. It does look to the casual observer like things are the way you are describing them in the above quoted paragraph, but atheism has an awful lot of explaining to do, before it gains any solid grounds. "Existence adapted to it" is not good enough for everyone, and not everyone believes it. Not everyone believes that the 10^28 atoms in your body(Carl Sagen) - that's 100 000 trillion trillion atoms, combined randomly to form possibly the most complex entity in the visible universe that could explore the rest of this random environment that looks strangely fitted to its needs and has enough resources to sustain it for millions of years.I am not saying God did it, but i am saying that your view towards how the universe is, looks incomplete.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Let me put it this way: if I were an alien looking at Earth, seeing that a large fraction of its atmosphere is oxygen, and knowing that without replenishment this would not be the case, I would think that something interesting is going on there. It could even be a form of life. Not my form of life, obviously, because I breathe liquid nitrogen, but still.

My understanding is that all we know about antimater particles is that when they encounter corresponding matter particles, they disappear. Does that mean we have no knowledge of where antimatter particles go, their capability and how fast they are capable of moving? Could the encounter of anti-matter particles with matter particles generate invisible intelligent phenomena? It appears that a not is still unknown relative to what exists in the universe and the capability of the invisible.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

You have a wrong impression of matter particles. Matter particles are not solid balls. If i were you, i'd delete this part. Would an atomic blast create humans? Did the Hiroshima bomb create angels?EDIT: Hahaha. Did you mean that the blast would kill people whose souls would become the "generated invisible intelligent phenomena"?Your ex-president must have generated a lot of invisible intelligent phenomena around Iraq. IMO, this would only make some sense if you substitute the word "invisible" with "undetectable".Edited by Agobot, : HahaEdited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Ha ha ha! I can't help but chuckle at the perplexity of this statement. Chauvinistic yet, so true. Edited by homunculus, : one too many words

Hi, Rrhain. Of course it's not the same thing: because that was them and this is us.Our current understanding of science is infinitely projectable into the future, while the understanding of those before Bernoulli is not.Isn't that the gist of your objection?

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-Bluejay/Mantis/ThylacosmilusDarwin loves you.

Although obviously you do have a point, I'm mostly with Rrhain on this one.Speculating about technology this far ahead (circumventing all currently known physics foundations and/or requiring amounts of energy that surpass ours tens of orders of magnitude) feels a bit too much like a game without rules to remain interesting. Sure there is still a whole lot out there that we don't know anything about yet. But there's also no special reason why some of that still-to-be-discovered knowledge would increase our chances to achieve some of the imagined feats like interstellar (or inter-galaxy) travel. Let alone make it routine. The chance that we take or wishes for granted is much bigger than the chance that some of the new knowledge will actually do this, IMO.The technological barriers could even be less important than some of the other. What about a situation where interstellar travel would become achievable, but only if a significant percentage of the human population would have to be "degraded" to some type of work-ants, just to give an example? I.e. it would require us to give up many of our current ethical ideas of what it means to be human.

Rrhain, permit me to reitterate what you just said. That's not the same thing. The amount of windspeed required to get a ship moving that quickly is decidedly non-linear. That's why a sailboat could never move at such a speed that would allow us to travel from continent to continent in less than months time. Efficiency is one thing, but Scotty was right: You kinna change the laws o- physics. I don't doub that technology will advance to allow greater efficiency. I suspect that lighter but stronger wood material could conceivably be developed. But sailboats that travel at incredible speeds are the stuff of science fiction. Longboats don't get as much drag, but they are too small to carry enough people and supplies for long periods of time across the oceans. This is why I say I can conceive of it being done: Your sailboat has to be really big for the sails to be big enough to catch enough wind and the boat itself has to be light but strong enough to allow greatest efficiency in speeds, but I certainly don't say it's physically impossible. I say it is emminently impractical.If u stil don understan buy nowe, your using current language, current science, current technology, and current understanding of space to describe what future star travel might be like. Just close your eyes, sit back, and imagine talking to a 15th century person about faster ways people could be using to travel from continent to continent and see how frustrated you are when that person keep using his current "science", current technology, and current understanding of the world to describe what future intercontinental travel might be like. Are you high on pot? How in the world did you get the idea that this is what I was saying? The world is so large that the cost of sending your family half way across the world for a 1 week vacation is impractical.

Note that I haven't speculated anything. All I've done is drawn a similarity between Rrhain's objection to star travel and how 15th century people might object to vacation travel to the other side of the world. Both base their objections on their contemporary science and technology and understanding of what's possible and what's not. The zero-zero drive I mentioned was a joke.How might we travel to other star systems? I don't know. I'll tell you this much. If I had been living in the 15th century, I would never have guessed HOW people could travel to the other side of the world in less than a few years time.

I'm a proud chauvinistic, sexist pig. Actually, I'm not.

By the time we've come up with a vast energy source, I think might have learned how to manipulate our brains into creating a sort of realistic virtual reality(sort of like the "brain in a vat" hypothesis). This i think will be much more interesting than roaming the milky way, as we will be the creators of our own reality. To me, this will be like us being Gods. If religions can fool people into seeing jesuses, gods and Lucifers, why wouldn't it be possible for us to manipulate the human brain into seeing another pre-programmed reality that would be as real as the reality we experience?And how would that be different to us becoming God? Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Hmm, sort of like the Star Trek pilot episode "The Cage" and it's follow on remake and addendum "The Menagerie"? Read Decartes much? Or Plato's allegory of the cave? This is a logical argument of "what is reality?" going back thousands of years. It is good mind game but it would be really hard to determine if we are or are not a dream manifistation in the mind of some deity or "fill in the blank".

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Dr. Carl Sagan