Intelligent LIfe

[1up]

what would determine the size of the alien beings? what determines the size of animals, humans etc. here on earth? gravity, size of the planet or something else? I have no clue.

also, I recently read that some professor had a theory why we on earth percieved the universe as expanding. He said that our solar system might be in a black hole. interesting stuff, but I cant find a link to save my life

[Acid King]

also, I recently read that some professor had a theory why we on earth percieved the universe as expanding. He said that our solar system might be in a black hole. interesting stuff, but I cant find a link to save my life

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32433

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

Earth is probably just some kind of giant Zoo created by extraterrestrials for their amusement. Everywhere we look at is just dead rocks, but for some reason Earth has perfect conditions for life and a huge variety of it. Seems too contrived to happen by chance.

[BryanM]

Mars might have had a brief spell. There's some indication there might be living microbes there.

what determines the size of animals, humans etc. here on earth? gravity, size of the planet or something else?

* Gravity - mainly this applies to large animals. Drop a mouse down a mineshaft, and it is stunned. Drop a man, he is broken. Drop a horse, and it will splash. But large crawlies are affected as well - sea scorpions can be bigger than land spiders thanks to the support of water. (Compare also the size of elephants and whales.) The legendary five-foot wide spider probably doesn't exist, considering how slow coconut crabs have to waddle. BTW: Rotten horse corpses are great catapult ammunition when you've got a city to siege.

* Diffusion - Getting air and fluids throughout the body is necessary. Insects just have little "holes" all over their body, that act like canals for air to move through. Flies and other fliers, for example, have a ton of these holes located right around the wing joints to fuel those things. So, bugs in general need to be fairly flat to breath. In older days, there was more oxygen in the atmosphere. And bigger insects. They have like, fossils of them and stuff.

* Food supply - Animals with a limited food supply tend to shrink. Animals with a large food supply tend to grow. There are obvious limits to either end of that for any given body plan. Islands are infamous for shrinking dudes. A fun fact is it's not necessarily done through natural selection - there's this thing called the "epigenome" that switches genes on and off - just having a father who's strong can have some effect on the genes expressed by the chimchar that pops out.

The Biology of B Movie Monsters is a more interesting read on the subject.

[emphatic]

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/skyline/

THIS IS IT FOLKS!

[GaijinPunch]

Everywhere we look at is just dead rocks, but for some reason Earth has perfect conditions for life and a huge variety of it. Seems too contrived to happen by chance.

Or maybe the fact that we've seen about... oh... nothing of the big picture.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/skyline/

THIS IS IT FOLKS!

11.12.10 <-- most confusing release date ever.

Awesome trailer. 2 options: Quicktime... the lamest piece of shit next to iTunes, or Youtube w/ a totally cocked up audio track.

[ROBOTRON]

You sure it wasn't robot DNA?

Nah, it was alien dna...f*cking slut *cries BP Oil tears*
My Wife:


I agree....any civilization that is advanced enough to fly here would be to advanced to even notice us.

[Jockel]

If that jacket is made out of solid metal, i'd say it's highly impractical.
And what does the grill on her ass mean? Does she let out robot-farts?

[CMoon]

worm holes are at least mathematically proven

But not actually observed. We have no real clue whether worm holes exist or not.

and there was at least one case when space-time itself traveled faster than the speed of light (the first .0000000000000001 or so second after the Big Bang). Now, whether any of that can be manipulated again... not for a while, if ever.

There is some murmuring in the science community of the return of the Steady State Universe; apparently the idea is picking up in popularity again; though I'll admit the big bang is so thoroughly entrenched in my mind I'm having problems imagining the alternative (actually, both are hard to imagine.)

[CMoon]

Earth is probably just some kind of giant Zoo created by extraterrestrials for their amusement.

See, I can't figure this argument out. Just this year, the Craig Venter Institute made their own synthetic bacteria. Now it isn't the same as inventing life from scratch, but we're basically steps away from being able to engineer life the way we want it; and with the versatility of bacteria (IE extremophiles, etc.), the range of what is biologically possible should be well beyond what we've seen in any living plants or animals. This is something -we- can very much imagine right now; it's barely even science fiction.

Why humans would be at all exciting to super-advanced intelligent beings is really beyond me. It certainly wouldn't be to eat our cattle and abduct people and put probes in them.

Everywhere we look at is just dead rocks, but for some reason Earth has perfect conditions for life and a huge variety of it. Seems too contrived to happen by chance.

Actually there's Europa (as pointed out earlier), but even Mars looks like it might have once have had conditions suitable for life. Basically you've put the cart before the horse. Life is here, on earth, because the conditions -are- ideal, and like an oasis in the desert, these conditions are rare should be statistically common enough we find them elsewhere. Time is also an issue; it's worth noting that for a good chunk of earth's history it was not ideal for organisms like us.


Edit: BryanM> Awesome post. The link is a really great read for anyone with a moderate science background.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

So how did Earth became habitable? It makes sense that aliens terraformed Earth and populated it with all sorts of living things. Just like humans create Zoos that are comfy and have all sorts of animals that otherwise wouldn't be able to live in those habitats. I imagine aliens would find it amusing to look at all the dumb animals going about their business just like we do.

[CMoon]

So how did Earth became habitable?

Well I can only guess what scope you are thinking of here, but I was referring to the alteration of the atmosphere by the earliest cyanobacteria, changing the concentration of gases to include a large amount of oxygen through photosynthesis.

It makes sense that aliens terraformed Earth and populated it with all sorts of living things.

This begs the question though: Where did the aliens come from? Who terraformed their planet and put them there?

I like Sci-Fi as much as the next person, but why do I need some outside, unobserved, unexplained force (aliens) to make a world and place life here if it can just as well be explained by mundane natural forces that we can observe every day?

[Specineff]

If that jacket is made out of solid metal, i'd say it's highly impractical.
And what does the grill on her ass mean? Does she let out robot-farts?

Dude. A hot robotic ass needs ventilation. Given that metal absorbs and conducts heat, exhausts are a necessity.

[ROBOTRON]

If that jacket is made out of solid metal, i'd say it's highly impractical.
And what does the grill on her ass mean? Does she let out robot-farts?

Dude. A hot robotic ass needs ventilation. Given that metal absorbs and conducts heat, exhausts are a necessity.

Indeed.

The jacket was just for show at the time the photo was taken...believe me if she wore that all the time her transistorized tits would melt and cause a cascade failure of her back up hard drive unit.

[GaijinPunch]

But not actually observed. We have no real clue whether worm holes exist or not.

Fo shizzle. I think the best we've observed for spacetime not being flat is gravity. Who the hell else knows what's going to happen though. It's an exciting time.

There is some murmuring in the science community of the return of the Steady State Universe; apparently the idea is picking up in popularity again; though I'll admit the big bang is so thoroughly entrenched in my mind I'm having problems imagining the alternative (actually, both are hard to imagine.)

Weird. Got a link? I find that interesting... and somewhat strange since the have spent so much time convincing everyone that not only is it expanding, but expanding at an accelerated rate which makes absolutely no sense w/o dark matter.

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

So how did Earth became habitable?

Well I can only guess what scope you are thinking of here, but I was referring to the alteration of the atmosphere by the earliest cyanobacteria, changing the concentration of gases to include a large amount of oxygen through photosynthesis.

It makes sense that aliens terraformed Earth and populated it with all sorts of living things.

This begs the question though: Where did the aliens come from? Who terraformed their planet and put them there?

I like Sci-Fi as much as the next person, but why do I need some outside, unobserved, unexplained force (aliens) to make a world and place life here if it can just as well be explained by mundane natural forces that we can observe every day?

So what created the bacteria? Are you saying we come from bacteria? Can a big explosion really create life? I have seen my share of things blowing up, but I have yet to see any animals popping out from them.

[GaijinPunch]

So what created the bacteria? Are you saying we come from bacteria? Can a big explosion really create life? I have seen my share of things blowing up, but I have yet to see any animals popping out from them.

Not at that magnitude. The problem is you're trying to fathom everything on a human scale, which is simply, impossible. Everything to us is microscopic in comparison to most other things in the universe. Singularities for example, are quite a hard concept to wrap your head around, beyond the whole "nothing can escape from them" thing... and we actually know a lot about them. They are zero mass with infinite gravity... how the fuck does that work?!

Anyway, rather than go off on some tangent of how obscure the Universe is and our stable vision of it being a complete delusion, you should probably Google around for various scientific theories on what happened before the big bang and whatnot. Does God Roll Dice (an Essay by Stephen Hawking) addresses whether or not there must be an outside observer to actually create the universe by somehow igniting the big bang.

But, as Michio Kaku said, "it is the biggest question in all of science". Truth is, we'll likely never, ever know, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

[ZacharyB]

I voted "no" due to all of the info I've looked for over the years on human psychology. If there is metabolic life out there with some kind of cultural history, it has probably evolved from the same basic motives... not making it very "alien."

I like the notion that others expressed, that they were too advanced to pay us any mind. Gives me a little hope for the future of our own species, if we can somehow overcome the basal animal motives that brought us to this point so far. But then, what kind of life would that be?

[BryanM]

Are you saying we come from bacteria?

I... sure as hell hope we did. Considering, you know, DNA being made up of the same sort of stuff. Alien genetic information has a good chance of not being identical to the type of stuff life here is made of.

Cooperation is an obvious incentive bacteria would have for wanting to eventually "become bigger". Such progress at this point of time would be hopeless of course - they'd be eaten by tiny little bugs before they could get rockin'. Just like we'll never see poor old Coward Fish ever again, unless we make him in a lab.

Getting something resembling life from stuff that isn't alive is obviously really important to nerds who don't feel like helping out with this cancer thing. /handwave at search engines

(Note again, inert material isn't ever going to give rise to another strain of life here, since as wherever it might arise, it would probably be yummy to bacteria.)

(Also fyi the only atoms that "naturally" occur are hydrogen and helium. The rest have to be forged in stars - the rock you're flying around on is a chunk of a giant corpse. In a universe that is quietly dying.)

[Octopod]

Well I can only guess what scope you are thinking of here, but I was referring to the alteration of the atmosphere by the earliest cyanobacteria, changing the concentration of gases to include a large amount of oxygen through photosynthesis.

I thought that oxygen was a by-product of bacterias. Originally I mean.

[CMoon]

There is some murmuring in the science community of the return of the Steady State Universe; apparently the idea is picking up in popularity again; though I'll admit the big bang is so thoroughly entrenched in my mind I'm having problems imagining the alternative (actually, both are hard to imagine.)

Weird. Got a link? I find that interesting... and somewhat strange since the have spent so much time convincing everyone that not only is it expanding, but expanding at an accelerated rate which makes absolutely no sense w/o dark matter.

I'm with you on this, and no, unfortunately no link. It was dropped by a researcher I know on another forum who said there was going to be an upcoming publication about it in Nature. Either way, it doesn't really fit my very limited understanding of how the universe works. I brought it up mostly because it goes to show that the people researching this haven't necessarily accepted quite a number of things that we often assume are more or less fact.

[CMoon]

Well I can only guess what scope you are thinking of here, but I was referring to the alteration of the atmosphere by the earliest cyanobacteria, changing the concentration of gases to include a large amount of oxygen through photosynthesis.

I thought that oxygen was a by-product of bacterias. Originally I mean.

I probably didn't explain this well. Yes, the early photosynthesizers would have been breaking down CO2 and polluting the atmosphere with O2. Of course, it opens the door for modern cellular respiration.

[Randorama]

Aliens certainly exist. Some of them came here and discovered that we're still quite clueless about a lot of things, especially ourselves.

Here's a report.

I agree that I am de-railing a thread after aeons of absence, but to the point:

I find a bit hard (euphemism...) to assess a question like this from a scientific point of view. I am not a physicist, but in my daily work practice I usually say "I don't know" a lot, if from the data I have I can't give a proof of a given argument.

As I have grown older and more expert in scientific research, I have begun to find the type of 'scientific' research on these topics to be little more than kids' sci-fi embellished with fancy math (and with a few smart alecs who sell their books on the topics...). Maybe it is just me, or does anyone else finds some of the 'serious' arguments way too pretentious?

F

[xris]

First, I would like to mention that TidusBlade has brought up something that I'm surprised I haven't heard consideration of before, that maybe we have come into existence fairly early in the celestial timeline.
I've heard murmuring recently of how an organic species would go about exploring the universe, it can't. Time, as previously mentioned in this thread. But, our own space programs have shifted toward the only possible solution, robots. NASA has even said that their space program will be robotic driven for now. Given the right tech, our future selves included, self replicating robots can explore the universe in an exponential rate. Effectively covering all of existence in a matter of a million years. Through the use of forge satellites, it would seek out asteroids, comets, what ever materials need be, set up shop, build a million robots and more forge satellites. Rinse and repeat. I hate to use the reference, but think of the movie *Batteries Not Included.
Now, this may be of little practical use to the lifeforms that created them in the present. But, even our species should start to consider some kind of a successor. Now that time and distance becomes irrelevant, it give a species the opportunity to reach out to truly connect with an intelligent life. I would like to think that even humans can have the chance to be the benevolent aliens to answer that question and share the wealth of our knowledge and experiences. Just to have that proof, for as long as it could maintain itself, that we were here in this tiny corner. That yes, you are not alone any more.
This could also provide instances where we, in proxy, could help to further the spread of intelligent life. Landing on a primordial world, they could act as custodians,. Helping to shape evolution, tipping the scales toward the potential of intelligent life. Waiting to share the potential knowledge that may bring a better existence for them. There is also the possibility of these robots landing on dead worlds that may never hold life, but would be ideal for the evolution of synthetic life, allowing them to evolve into their own being.
Now, do we spread robotic cockroaches throughout the universe? There's always chances that far away from each other that these new robots could change and evolve differently from each other under given circumstances. But, it really comes down to a chance that we really should take. Besides we are still far from developing the artificial intellect that would be required for such a task.
Now, for all you John Connors out there;
Artillect, "What is to stop us from taking the world from you?"
Scientist, "Why bother, we plan on giving you everything in the universe in the end. Just tell them about us."
Side note, there's some young maverick physicist that is working on a gravity driven, space foldy hyper drive that is holding up well in theory. I'm sorry I don't have much more info prepared, is saw it on a Science Channel special on the correlation of time and gravity.

[CMoon]

So what created the bacteria? Are you saying we come from bacteria? Can a big explosion really create life? I have seen my share of things blowing up, but I have yet to see any animals popping out from them.

First, I'm starting to worry that we're derailing the current alien thread. Origins and Evolution threads have typically done poorly here and I don't want to get someone else's thread shut down.

Now, on to your post...

Well as far as the origins and evolution of life, that's a really big topic (big enough there are whole forums set up for discussing it), but consider that you have two alternatives--either some kind of organic/natural origins or you eventually have a creator.

There's no problem saying aliens whisked life into existence on earth (although there's no evidence for that), but then as I said above, it begs the question of where the aliens came from. Ultimately you choose from the two alternatives mentioned above.

There is of course a tremendous amount of evidence today that life started and evolved here (BryanM has mentioned a few examples), far more than the general public is actually aware of. It may be hard to believe or understand how life can evolve, but that's a lack of our imagination, not a shortage of evidence. I hope that evidence for something that seems fantastic or even impossible to you encourages you to want to learn more about it!

[BryanM]

Maybe it is just me, or does anyone else finds some of the 'serious' arguments way too pretentious?

I've... had pages from the Epona Project thing open in my browser for days and my eyes keep falling off the screen whenever I tab to it.... does, does that kind of count?

[GaijinPunch]

The whole robots making other robots thing is kind of an accepted practical way for contact to *eventually* happen, and that you'd assume any other advanced civilization would have done that. If that's the case, it's a question of time. But since we've never seen any, there are a few logical possibilities.... none really disprove the idea of intelligent life being out there, but you would question why we've seen nothing like that if in fact there are thousands of civilizations out there... many of which could be further advanced than us.

[Randorama]

I've... had pages from the Epona Project thing open in my browser for days and my eyes keep falling off the screen whenever I tab to it.... does, does that kind of count?

I am not sure I understand your question. What do you mean?

The only thing I wonder, why 'aliens' should bother to contact us? Personally, I think that "if aliens exist, then they want to contact us" is indeed a big conditional or, more precisely, it simplifies a lot things, to put it in mild terms. Some of us are really curious about other (intelligent) life forms but, why some different life form should *think* in such a way that they want to bother contacting someone else outside their world?

Being able to think ("Intelligence" loosely defined) does not necessarily means sharing the same goals, I would say. I don't know of any clear evidence that rules out other life forms on other planets, but in all honesty, I wonder why they should necessarily care, like
an handful of human beings do (the others being too busy to fuck around/work to pay rent/etc.). Out of sheer ignorance, do we need the life-forms we have on Earth, to have any chance that intelligence forms arise? (I am serious, I am not a biologist and I really don't believe in 'Intelligence').

[GaijinPunch]

The only thing I wonder, why 'aliens' should bother to contact us? Personally, I think that "if aliens exist, then they want to contact us" is indeed a big conditional or, more precisely, it simplifies a lot things, to put it in mild terms. Some of us are really curious about other (intelligent) life forms but, why some different life form should *think* in such a way that they want to bother contacting someone else outside their world?

Indeed... but assuming they *don't* want to meet us is equally baseless. Assuming there is intelligent life out there, we can only assume it's similar to us in some sort of ways... IE, would of course follow the laws of physics, but that's about all we know for sure (at the moment). For all we know, all intelligent life are in a galactic contest of hide and go seek, with everyone being determined to win.

However, just about anyone can agree on a few things that would at least lead us to think a space-faring race would want to meet it's neighbors (for either good or bad intentions), assuming their survival was in their best interest. Is there any species of animal where the destruction of their race is in their intention (other than humans, seemingly)?

-Nothing lasts forever. Resources, including the main one (a local star) will eventually be depleted. The only way to truly be indestructible would be to be an intergalactic race... as galaxies as well, have destructive ends. However, being only an inter-stellar race would keep you alive for much longer (statistically) than not.

-We've seen through our own history that being reclusive simply does not work. Japan's shenanigans of 1600-1850 are biting it in the ass even today (xenophobia leading to depopulation, etc.), North Korea and similar nations not being able to support themselves, etc. etc. Taking a step back, apparently homo sapiens conquered physically superior beings due to teamwork. Even now, we're seeing things get done when people stop fucking about and pull together.. And for you capitalists out there, I read an interesting article recently that credited commerce for our development, and that it is what truly sets us apart from everything else.

-Plain and simple: it's the way we would do it (for the most part). Obviously this is dismissive, but it's hard to think outside the box. Face it -- if we knew there were apes on a planet orbiting Proximus Centauri, we would at least be sending signals there.

(I am serious, I am not a biologist and I really don't believe in 'Intelligence').

You only have to read a few posts here think that.

[Mero]

They're out there, but we'll never meet them - the distances involved are astronomical