Alien life could be found within 40 years - really?

Helix

admiralofthefleet wrote: »

i think its a load of bollox. if they were there we would have found them by now

well SOMEONE has no idea how big space is...

Helix

ArtSmart wrote: »

AFAIK the human size is the most efficient, so they'll prob be human size, and carbon based. probably fitter than us though. hmmm. hope they havent green skin...

the human size is only most efficient for earth

squod

Wibbs wrote: »

.......imagine an earth where the dinosaurs never died out. There were small predator dinosaurs with grasping hands and forward looking eyes and big brains....... you might have have had dino sapiens 60 million years ago.

Dino sapiens? Weren't dinosaurs big fuhken lizards? So, we're talking lizard men here right?

Say these yokes did evolve, didn't like the weather or the big stupid monkeys and just fuhked off into space. Then came back to control those big stupid monkey people??

David Icke was right!!!!!!!!

Cú Giobach

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

So, where are they? /fermi

Somewhere else and not here.
Somewhere else is very very big and here is very very small.

You could spend 100 years sitting on a rock in the middle of the Sahara desert and not meet a single one of the 7 billion humans on the planet.
And the space around us could be teeming with communications by a technology we have no inkling of, using the electromagnetic spectrum with it's limitation of light speed might not be even bothered with by other civilisations (it would probably be seen as efficient as sending a runner to pass a message between New York and LA).

Duggys Housemate

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Somewhere else and not here.
Somewhere else is very very big and here is very very small.

You could spend 100 years sitting on a rock in the middle of the Sahara desert and not meet a single one of the 7 billion humans on the planet.
And the space around us could be teeming with communications by a technology we have no inkling of, using the electromagnetic spectrum with it's limitation of light speed might not be even bothered with by other civilisations (it would probably be seen as efficient as sending a runner to pass a message between New York and LA).

I think everybody on this thread knows the size of the universe.

The guy I was responding to said there would be Type I civilisations out there, Type 1 civilisations would probable leave some footprint we could measure.

Please dont speculate about aliens using faster than light technology for communication. That can't happen.

Helix

squod wrote: »

Dino sapiens? Weren't dinosaurs big fuhken lizards? So, we're talking lizard men here right?

Say these yokes did evolve, didn't like the weather or the big stupid monkeys and just fuhked off into space. Then came back to control those big stupid monkey people??

David Icke was right!!!!!!!!

dinosaurs did evolve. they're flying around in the skies now

123 LC

there's definitely a chance that we could see them through some sort of very powerful telescope, but we wouldn't be able to reach them, i mean mars is the furthest planet that somethings been landed on, theres not really a chance that they could do this with a planet millions of miles further away?

crazy cabbage

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

I think everybody on this thread knows the size of the universe.

The guy I was responding to said there would be Type I civilisations out there, Type 1 civilisations would probable leave some footprint we could measure.

Please dont speculate about aliens using faster than light technology for communication. That can't happen.

I would think that if there is a vastly more intelegent speices (which i presume is what a type 1 species is) would leave almost no footprint. Why would they?

Helix

crazy cabbage wrote: »

I would think that if there is a vastly more intelegent speices (which i presume is what a type 1 species is) would leave almost no footprint. Why would they?

they could leave a bloody massive footprint and we still may never find it

Duggys Housemate

crazy cabbage wrote: »

I would think that if there is a vastly more intelegent speices (which i presume is what a type 1 species is) would leave almost no footprint. Why would they?

Because they would use so much energy for their civilization we could see it - a dyson sphere for instance would cause stars to change luminosity. In any case if the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life you would expect something to turn up.

Duggys Housemate

Helix wrote: »

they could leave a bloody massive footprint and we still may never find it

why not?

Cú Giobach

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

I think everybody on this thread knows the size of the universe.

The guy I was responding to said there would be Type I civilisations out there, Type 1 civilisations would probable leave some footprint we could measure.

Please dont speculate about aliens using faster than light technology for communication. That can't happen.

Wow, you really are stuck in "the present".
I can imagine you having a conversation 500 years ago.

"But man will never be able to travel faster than a galloping horse, do you think we could put a saddle on a cheetah or something, stop talking nonsense"

"Sure how could we talk to someone beyond shouting distance, don't be daft it's just not possible"

The merest glance at history shows us that we can have no inkling of what might or might not be possible in the future.
Definitive statements such as yours litter the pages of history and are today considered amusing, quaint and a touch naive.

Mickeroo

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Wow, you really are stuck in "the present".
I can imagine you having a conversation 500 years ago.

"But man will never be able to travel faster than a galloping horse, do you think we could put a saddle on a cheetah or something, stop talking nonsense"

"Sure how could we talk to someone beyond shouting distance, don't be daft it's just not possible"

The merest glance at history shows us that we can have no inkling of what might or might not be possible in the future.
Definitive statements such as yours litter the pages of history and are today is considered amusing, quaint and a touch naive.

Nah he's just saying there's no point speculating about stuff that defies the laws of physics.

Duggys Housemate

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Wow, you really are stuck in "the present".
I can imagine you having a conversation 500 years ago.

"But man will never be able to travel faster than a galloping horse, do you think we could put a saddle on a cheetah or something, stop talking nonsense"

"Sure how could we talk to someone beyond shouting distance, don't be daft it's just not possible"

The merest glance at history shows us that we can have no inkling of what might or might not be possible in the future.
Definitive statements such as yours litter the pages of history and are today considered amusing, quaint and a touch naive.

The speed of light restriction is fundamental to the understanding of the galaxy and is integral to any understanding of the universe as it is. It is not going to be superseded. Nothing can now, or ever will, go faster than the speed of light. This isnt a technical limitiation, it is a real physical limitation of the universe.

crazy cabbage

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

Because they would use so much energy for their civilization we could see it - a dyson sphere for instance would cause stars to change luminosity. In any case if the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life you would expect something to turn up.

I thought we said that they were more intelegent

More intelegent doesn't equle more energy. Maby it does up until a point but after which i would think it is the exact opposite.

And even if they were used vasts amounts of energy who is to say that we would know about it. Space is a massive place.
To put it in context if you were to travel at the speed of light from our star you would reach us in 8 min, Reach the end of our solorsystem in a day, reach our next nearest star in about 2 years. Imiganine how far you would travel in 2billion years at the speed of light. Now imigane that in every direction.

Cú Giobach

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

The speed of light restriction is fundamental to the understanding of the galaxy and is integral to any understanding of the universe as it is. It is not going to be superseded. Nothing can now, or ever will, go faster than the speed of light. This isnt a technical limitiation, it is a real physical limitation of the universe.

We don't understand the nature of this universe yet, let alone others that might be out there. What is Dark matter? What is Dark energy? Is the universe "stringy", "lumpy" or something else? What is time? We know and understand nothing yet and you are just making definitive statements based on this tiny knowledge we have so far, and as I said such things are looked at by future peoples as amusing and naive.

Getting around* the light speed barrier could be no harder in 500 years than popping up to the ISS is today, relativity actually allows for faster than light travel, the difficulty is getting around the barrier and the technology.

*Difference between going around something and going through it.

3ndahalfof6

is it not strange that we have done so much in such a short space of time, considering how long we have been on the planet yet done so much in the last 150 years,

I just find it odd why now, all of a sudden.

crazy cabbage

To those who say that it is impossible for anything to travel faster than light i will prove otherwise.

Lets take the fact that when we shine a tourch that the light travel from it at the speed of light. Now take the fact that the moon is 400000 kilometers away.
Now shine your light at one end of the moon and flick your wrist.
Each photon of light (that are still only traveling at the speed of light) creat an image traveling across the moon that could be traveling at 20 times the speed of light.

I win...

:rolleyes:

Cú Giobach

crazy cabbage wrote: »

To those who say that it is impossible for anything to travel faster than light i will prove otherwise.

Lets take the fact that when we shine a tourch that the light travel from it at the speed of light. Now take the fact that the moon is 400000 kilometers away.
Now shine your light at one end of the moon and flick your wrist.
The image created by each photon of light (that are still only traveling at the speed of light) creat an image traveling across the moon that could be traveling at 20 times the speed of light.

I win...

:rolleyes:

Your idea is covered here.

Think about how fast a shadow can move. If you project the shadow of your finger using a nearby lamp onto a distant wall and then wag your finger, the shadow will move much faster than your finger. If your finger moves parallel to the wall, the shadow's speed will be multiplied by a factor D/d where d is the distance from the lamp to your finger, and D is the distance from the lamp to the wall. The speed can even be much faster than this if the wall is at an angle to your finger's motion. If the wall is very far away, the movement of the shadow will be delayed because of the time it takes light to get there, but the shadow's speed is still increased by the same ratio. The speed of a shadow is therefore not restricted to be less than the speed of light.

Others things that can go FTL include the spot of a laser that has been aimed at the surface of the Moon. Given that the distance to the Moon is 385,000 km, try working out the speed of the spot if you wave the laser at a gentle speed. You might also like to think about a water wave arriving obliquely at a long straight beach. How fast can the point at which the wave is breaking travel along the beach?

This sort of thing can turn up in Nature; for example, the beam of light from a pulsar can sweep across a dust cloud. A bright explosion emits an expanding spherical shell of light or other radiation. When this shell intersects a surface, it creates a circle of light which expands faster than light. A natural example of this has been observed when an electromagnetic pulse from a lightning flash hits an upper layer of the atmosphere.

These are all examples of things that can go faster than light, but which are not physical objects. It is not possible to send information faster than light on a shadow or light spot, so FTL communication is not possible in this way. This is not what we mean by faster than light travel, although it shows how difficult it is to define what we really do mean by faster than light travel.

Mickeroo

I hope you aren't taking that seriously?

JONJO THE MISER

3ndahalfof6 wrote: »

is it not strange that we have done so much in such a short space of time, considering how long we have been on the planet yet done so much in the last 150 years,

I just find it odd why now, all of a sudden.

Well the Americans reversed engineered alien tech from the crash at Roswell, there are many accounts that most of the tech in the last 50 years came from Alien tech.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread59681/pg1

Muir

I'd love to be still alive if/when we find life on other planets.

I think it's possible that we could find, or some other species has already found, a way to travel faster than the speed of light. It's only a year since CERN thought they had found that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light, it was later disproved but scientists believed that it was possible. The laws of Physics as we know them may not be completely correct, most of the time it's just our understanding based on the information we have now. Also there could be worm holes or other things that we've never considered as means of traveling to other parts of the universe more quickly.

Cú Giobach

Mickeroo wrote: »

Nah he's just saying there's no point speculating about stuff that defies the laws of physics.

I just noticed this post.

If it wasn't for people speculating about the seeming impossible we wouldn't be where we are today, and speculating about getting from one part of the universe to another faster than a beam of light would is not speculating about stuff that breaks the laws of physics.

aidan24326

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

that terms means anything which can be carried on an electromagnetic frequency - and nothing can go faster than light.

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

Please dont speculate about aliens using faster than light technology for communication. That can't happen.

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

This isnt a technical limitiation, it is a real physical limitation of the universe.

How can we be so sure though? There are loopholes for how we could get around that. Not technologically possible anytime soon but theoretically possible. People like Michio Kaku and Steven Weinberg have shown how bypassing the speed of light limitation could be possible. But it would require technology very far beyond anything we have now. Then again we're only an infant civilization so who knows what will be possible in the future (if we're still around)

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

1) Solar System has Earth like planet
2) Earth like planet in proper orbit.
3) Solar System has large Gas Planets to hover up debris.
4) Earth planet has similar sized moon.
5) Life begins on Earth Type planet.
6) Multicellular life begins on planet.
7) Life moves out of the sea
8) Intelligent life emerges - for most of Earths history that was unlikely to happen, the dinosaurs ruled the roost.
9) Intelligent life developes scientific society.

My purely arbitary guesss are

1/10 * 1/100 * 1/10 * 1/1000 * 1/100000 * 1/100000 * 1/100000 * 1/100000 * 1/100

= 10 ^ -29.

Why would a planet have to be earth-like? There is no reason at all to believe that life needs an earth-like planet with water, oxygen atmosphere etc. The fact is we have no idea what form alien life might take or what kind of planet they might live on. Maybe it'll be an earth-like planet with earth-like life but maybe it'll be something completely different. It begs the question of how exactly we define 'life' in the first place.

Primitive microbial life was really nothing more than a bunch of molecules that got a little smarter than your average molecule by somehow 'figuring out' how to self-replicate. And that really wouldn't be all that interesting if it wasn't for what came after, the complexity it led to.

zenno

Cú Giobach wrote: »

We don't understand the nature of this universe yet, let alone others that might be out there. What is Dark matter? What is Dark energy? Is the universe "stringy", "lumpy" or something else? What is time? We know and understand nothing yet and you are just making definitive statements based on this tiny knowledge we have so far, and as I said such things are looked at by future peoples as amusing and naive.

Getting around* the light speed barrier could be no harder in 500 years than popping up to the ISS is today, relativity actually allows for faster than light travel, the difficulty is getting around the barrier and the technology.

*Difference between going around something and going through it.

I have a feeling the faster than light barrier will be broken sometime in the future, maybe tachyons or something else but as usual we will progress and eventually find out that faster than light particles exist, i'm sure of that.

Cú Giobach

zenno wrote: »

I have a feeling the faster than light barrier will be broken sometime in the future, maybe tachyons or something else but as usual we will progress and eventually find out that faster than light particles exist, i'm sure of that.

If we are right so far in our understanding then moving anything up to that speed is impossible, and since you are practically travelling at infinite speed if you got there (because time would stop) going beyond it seemingly has no real meaning.
Getting around it however could indeed just be a matter of time and technology.

dttq

Anyone have Jim Corr's phone number?

zenno

Cú Giobach wrote: »

If we are right so far in our understanding then moving anything up to that speed is impossible, and since you are practically travelling at infinite speed if you got there (because time would stop) going beyond it seemingly has no real meaning.
Getting around it however could indeed just be a matter of time and technology.

Yep, well maybe the large hadron collider might find some new discoveries with this faster than light scenario in the future. Wormholes sounds nice but creating one would take a type 2 civilization i think or a type 3 one if you could somehow harness a suns energy in some way but that is way out there. Interesting times ahead though, it will be interesting to see what new discoveries they will find.

citrus burst

zenno wrote: »

I have a feeling the faster than light barrier will be broken sometime in the future, maybe tachyons or something else but as usual we will progress and eventually find out that faster than light particles exist, i'm sure of that.

lol and how do you plan on detecting them? Its not a barrier, its a limit. You can't reach it, let alone break it.

FTL particles would cause havoc on the universe.

Using a wormhole isn't FTL either

Lollers

Forgive me if I'm interrupting this thread, but it's about future theory, and I've heard some great replies so far. What does anyone think about time travel, is it a paradox too far ?.