ZOMBIE FORUMS

There's this annoying English lessons in my school that I have to attend. They involve me writing a research project (eight pages long) on a subject of my choice. I wanted to write about something interesting, so I chose xenobiology.
Xenobiology is basicly non-earthly life(Including artificial, but my project won't elaborate on this point). Here is the reading material I have gathered 'till now:
1) Xenobiology – general: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Xenobiology
2) Drake’s Equation: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Drake-equation
3) The Fermi Paradox: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Fermi-paradox
4) The SETI Project: http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/SETI
5) ‘Life’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life
6) ‘Intelligence’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_%28trait%29

Could there be aliens, or it's improbable? Discuss!

The question is, are you reffering to aliens as in 'life on another planet', or 'intelligent life on another planet'?
If the former, then most certainly, yes. There have been findings of fossils in meteor fragments on earth that resemble that of earth's microorganisms. (I have not yet been able to find an article on this, but I saw it on the news a good while ago). If there has been microbial fossils in space objects, such as meteors, then it is definate that there were microbial life out there; and it is highly probable that there still is. And maybe more advanced life forms, even if they're not intelligent.

For the latter, I would say there is a high probability that there is intelligent life on another planet, perhaps not in out solar system or even galaxy. But if you consider the fact that there is intelligent life on Earth, and the number of planets there are, or are likely to be, in the universe, then I'd say it's a safe bet that at least one more of them is inhabited by intelligent beings.


well, thats my two sense.
DH

All the so-called microbial fossils (exactly how does a microbe fossilize, anyway?) have later been found to be nothing more than natural rock formations. There has been no evidence thus far to support the theory that there is life, intelligent or otherwise, in the universe.

Is it possible? Certainly, everything is possible to some extent. Is it likely? That depends on your point of view. The main question though, is whether or not there is intelligent life, according to our standards, somewhere in the galaxy or the universe beyond it. My take on it is that it isn't very likely, and if there is inteligent life, it's going to be quite some time before it comes by for a visit.

We've only recently announced ourselves to the cosmos with radio waves. By the time those waves reach another intelligence, are studied and determined to be of sentient origin, and replied to or further investigated, centuries, if not millenia, will have gone by. Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take a great deal of time for extra-terrestrial aliens to communicate with us or show up in our region of space, once they get our radio message.

So unless aliens have been visiting Earth on a regular basis and/or have instantaneous travel across vast regions of the galaxy, we're not going to find out whether or not we're really alone in the universe for quite some time. An almost geological scale, really.

And even if there is intelligent life, who's to say it's as technologically advanced as we are? We could be beaming radio transmissions to bronze age feudal warlords for all we know. Or better yet, their technology could be so totally different from ours that it's totally incompatible. They could bypass the radiowaves we use and communicate on an entirely different band altogether. Even if they do have similar technology to ours, it's hardly going to be compatible. Maybe a radio on some alien world will pick up our transmissions and turn them into intelligible communication that they'll be able to figure out and understand, maybe it'll be useless gibberish and background static that gives them bad reception while they watch their version of football.

Probably the closest we'll come to encountering another intelligence in the next thousand years or so will be AI, and that simply isn't feasible at this time. Maybe, MAYBE, in the next century we'll be able to make machines that think and behave indistinguishably from humans, but I wouldn't count it. Machines are purely logical, and 90% of what makes humanity isn't logic.

Heck, maybe by the time the aliens show up to say hello, we'll have been conquered by the Skynet-Matrix-Borg Alliance of Human Oppression or something like that.

If we find intelligent life, most likely by the time we find it it's civilisation will be in ruins. Or, we'll find it billions of years too early, as simple multicelled organisms. The chances of us encountering a civilisation of intelligent aliens is very small. Human empires last only a few hundred years, or maybe a thousand or so if your lucky, so maybe the aliens will hang around for a hundred thousand. One hundred thousand years out of billions is not really a good timeframe.

You're basing this on what, now?

Governments come and governments go, but culture and learning have been on an advancing trend ever since we came down out of the trees. It's not like you lose everything every time the peasants revolt.

Granted, humans themselves have only been around for maybe 10<span style="vertical-align: super">5</span> years or so out of 3x10<span style="vertical-align: super">9</span>, which probably means your odds for finding intelligent life on planets the same age or younger than Earth aren't so good, but I don't think we're going away any time soon.



Maybe that could happen. Maybe. On the other hand, there are some fairly constant physical limitations on the kind of radiation you can feasibly modulate, transmit and receive. Longer wavelengths are transmitted better through lossy media like air, but shorter wavelengths are easier to achieve high bandwidth with (for various technical reasons and only up to the speed you can build switching circuits at).

The point is, if they're at all intelligent, then they'll be able to figure out that our broadcasts are of intelligent origin. Even though a commercial alien radio won't be able to decode say, NTSC television, an alien scientist or researcher would easily be able to recognize the non-random nature of the signal and reverse engineer it.

Of course having said all that, there's an interesting point about the amount of radio energy we leak into space. It's going down. The more we move to high-bandwidth applications with wires, fiber-optics, and directional satellite links, the less high power radio broadcasts we need to send out in order to deliver TV, radio, etc. It's very possible that REALLY advanced races do not have radio-bright planets after all. This would make them much harder to find by accident.

This is true and entirely too possible. Think of how we're switching our communications to direct physical connections, such as cable television and internet, and our long-distance communications are increasingly dependent on lasers and tightly-focused microwave beams.

Also look at the trend in power resources. Fossil fuel-burning power plants are pretty easy to detect from a distance, and an intelligent society could make an educated guess as to whether or not such plants were in wide-spread use by looking at the light scatter in our atmosphere through a telescope. In fact, I think this is one of the methods of detection we've started using, trying to detect industrial pollutants in the atmospheres of relatively nearby planets. We've gotten away from that, and likely any sufficiently-advanced alien race has/will as well. So what's next? Nuclear power, of course. At least for us. Radiation from such power sources is relatively easy to pick up from nearby. If we start looking for that, we might find possible evidence of nuclear/fusion reactors in use someplace, but it's quite unlikely. Our own trend now is toward more passive power sources, such as solar energy, hydroelectric dams, windmill generators, and geothermal. Likely these won't be in use by any deep space-faring species, but it still makes it harder to find people equipped with them.

And our space probes? Ridiculous. The odds of anyone, including ourselves, stumbling across them are worse than the odds of Douglas Adams rising from the grave and conquering the world with a legion of the undead. Hilarity ensues. Most, if not all, of our space probes are dead, with no heat, light, radiation, or other "here I am!" characteristics left after their long voyage through the solar system. Now add in the sheer volume of space that would have to be explored to find one. That's like searching for a grain of sand in the Pacific Ocean, only there's no bottom and no beaches.

Even if someone did find the probe and study it(as opposed to ignoring it as a curiosity, salvaging it for scrap, or blowing it up while shouting Klingon curses to the heavens), what are the odds that they're going to be able to make any sense out of our messages? If they don't see on the same wavelength as us, our pictograms certainly aren't going to help. And God only knows if they'll bring along a record player perfectly suitable to playing that golden disc. Even if, by some miracle/cosmic joke they did have a way of playing it, it still wouldn't make any sense to them. And they'd have no way of back-tracking it to the source. Even if they assumed it had traveled in a straight line for its entire voyage through deep space, that's still a lot of space to cover. Too much for the human mind to even comprehend. And it's not like our solar system would be in the same place if they did trace its path exactly.

The only way we're going to find each other is through radio and similar transmissions, and unless some aliens are currently in orbit around Neptune and feel like stopping by to say hello, nobody currently alive is going to be there when first contact is finally made.

This is assuming that intelligent life WANTS to contact us. They could be totaly xenophobes, afraid of the unknown. Or they might want to avoid us because they're racist or their religion forbids it. Heck, they might want to avoid us because compared to them, our society is a barbaric den of savagery and always will be.

There's always the possibility that they won't have an analogous technology that will allows us to communicate with them or detect them. They could be physically superior beings with an array of psychic abilities ranging from telepathy to telekinesis to pyrokinesis. Or plastic shapeshifters. They may not NEED tools and technology. They may have been equipped with everything they needed right from the very beginning. A completely organic, using our definition of organic, society, and one not possessing, requiring, or wanting artificial tools.

Hmm. That'd make a cool video game. Two alien races locked in battle, the physically inferior but clever technology users with their weapons, vehicles, and tools, versus the physically and mentally superior using nothing but their minds and bodies. It'd be interesting to see how that struggle turned out. Then again, who says such a struggle would ever take place? The two races could use entirely different resources in order to survive or not rely on territory, and thus there would be little to no reason to compete in the first place.

Though the politicians would probably find a way to start an intergalactic war with the first alien race we meet just to boost their popularity in the polls. They've already established they're willing to do everything else.

I firmly believe that we are not the only intellegent race on this planet and infact there are probably hundrads of thousands of alien species out there, thousands of which are self-aware (as in intellagent); the universe is so mind bogglingly big and the elements needed for life are so abundant that to think otherwise is foolish, and (for lack of a better term) egotistical. The chances of us ever encountering them? I wouldn't know... but I believe the chances to be very small, perhaps infinitesamaly so.

ptlis

I'm surprised none of you (I'm looking at you, I_M) thought about the biggest question: do we really want to find extraterrestrial intelligence? All the logical tools I know of point that if we'll find aliens, they will try to annialate us.
I won't bother proving my statement since I don't have the time, so I'll give but one argument: the strong survive. And aggresivnese = streangh.
Think about it, if we would find any less technological civilazation, we would probably enslave them. Humans are xenophobic, stupid, beastly entities. Any other civilization would be the same as us.

So says I.

Personally, I only want to meet aliens face to face after our solar system is strongly fortified in every way feasable. I want nucular mines in the oort clouds. I want rail guns on every sizable rock plus in space. I want automated factories capable of cramming out anything we can put the schematics in for and power plants big enough to power it all. Anything less and the risk of somebody doing a Pizzaro would be too strong for my tastes. Even if we couldn't beat whatever might come at us in an all out fight, I would be content for us to be economically unpalatable enough to make it so nobady is going to try.

I don't think we would get a ~EARTHLING! Bring me your women and your children. I must feast.~ thing going on but I doubt the universe is a StarTrek-type paradise. There might be von Neumann boogeymen out there, or some species who thinks earth might look good if it had some de-terraforming. We would have an equal chance of becoming the universe's third world country, ready for exploition. I don't hold much stock in any of this but, when in doubt, get a bigger gun.

As it is, if we got unignorable proof of sapient alien life, especially if it was closer than comfort, nobody would need to destroy us. We would be wracked with far more religious wars, weird-ass cults, and maddness than we are experiencing today. God help us if we ever meet aliens who want an embassy. Or the right to immagrate. We need about 250 more years to get comfy with the fact that something is out there. Most of the world still hasn't hit the 20th century, much less the 21st.

If there is going to be any invading and subjugating going on, I want to be the one to be doing the invading and subjugating. It is better to assrape someone than be assraped.

Somehow I don't think you mean that.

Agreed.

I meant it. But can't you have both at the same time? They aren't mutually exclusive.

I still think that our fisrt encounter with extra-terrestrial intelligence we will be completely unprepared for.

Frankly, I think we can't have any expectations when dealing with something that could be completely outside of our knowledge.

Remeber, these things aren't alien, as in why do the french need to spray their asses with water alien, but could quite easily be completely incrompehensible to us.

For all we know they could be silicone based rocks, that live millions of years, and absorb energy through solar radiation. Our lifetimes might pass in the space of their blinks.

I don't think it'll be a matter of conqueror and conquered, but rather "what the hell is this thing, and how do we speak to it?"

C.J. Cherryh tried to address this in her "Foreigner" novels, as did the Pini's in Jinx, but both essentially just took a non-european culture, and altered it slightly.

Chances are these things will be so different from us, we will have no idea whatsoever of how to deal with them.

Either that, or they'll look like humans with blue face paint and antennae.

Because it's fun?

Who says that we haven't already encountered them and won the freedom of our planet! Or maybe they realized we weren't ready and decided to leave us unscathed.

;D

No, I don't know if it's the movies I've watched or the influences from my paranoid history teacher last year. I think we've only had history in the blink of the world. The world, and man, has existed far longer than we have written down. Who's to say intelligent e.t. life hasn't already visited?

We want to find it, we just don't want to find it nearby. There are a few benefits to finding evidence of an intelligent ET race, even discounting the "Contact" style benevolent aliens trying to help us join the galactic community. Benefits like a bigger push for space exploration, advances in communications technology and other spin-off technologies as we try to decypher the signals, etc.

On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for not finding aliens in the neighborhood. They might be as bad as us. They might have unreasonable expectations ("Monks" from Larry Niven's The Fourth Profession) or we might go bat shit and start a war we have no chance of winning.


In an infinite universe, anything merely improbable is certain to occur.
. . . The sounds like a quote, does anyone know where it might have come from?
Basically, i'd have to say that my take on it is: It is more likely that there are non-terrestrial intelligences, the question is whether we will find them before we or they self-destruct.

That's Mister Wabbit for you.
The quote is as the following: "If you'll give an infinite amount of monkeys typing machines and infinite time, at some point one of them will write Sheikspear's Macbeth."

I don't see why either. But this is a possibilty, because there's no way to prove it since there are a million excuses in the world. I don't know. But if there is highly advanced intelligent life out there, it just seems to me more probable if they were anywhere close by, that they've already found our planet. If not, then I highly doubt we're going to run into any threat from them before the sun explodes.

You are weak! Committ seppuku immediately! And the quote is actually "An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters will eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare."