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The implications of cosmic silence


Tweedledee

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BUT - it depends on 

a. Life being carbon based - other forms could and do exist. e.g. Arsenic-based life form discovered on Earth by Nasa

b. Communication being possible over great distances  :unsure:- so life could be there at this moment in time but we cant communicate and we/them are missing the signs. Hell we still dont know how to read some old tablets/scrolls on earth.

c. Someone has to be first but odds one its would be in an older Universe. Else we have one hell of a void to fill.

d. They would want to communicate with a lot of Apes who really arn't that advanced or civil

e. Maybe there has been millions of other species but half died out via there own hand or just plain bad luck.

 

I suspect (b) is the problem and "life" will come in many forms - maybe some intelligent others like bacteria etc. One is for sure I hope that if they are intelligent they don't behave like "Elitists" on this planet

 

Mathematical models are fine to a point but as the words spoken in the film  Jurassic Park "life always finds a way"

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Interesting points. :thumbsup: 

 

I'm intrigued by the arsenic based life. Not heard of that, will have to google it later unless you have a link.

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Thanks Clive. Seems like they are still carbon based, but are rather weird. I think these extremophile articles are very interesting. Some very good stuff on that Nat Geo site. :thumbsup:

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  • 8 months later...
On 11/08/2017 at 13:33, Tweedledee said:

Very interesting indeed and rather worrying I would say.

When you consider that life seems to spring up in almost any place imaginable on earth and we know that statistically there must be thousands if not millions of earth like planets in our arm of the galaxy you would perhaps expect a civilisation at our level to rapidly advance. A routinely spacefaring species would need to communicate across vast distances, probably using a focussed beam like a laser (ignoring fanciful sci fi faster than light devices.)

Einstein tells us it isn’t possible to travel faster than light so any advanced spacefaring civilisation is going to have to use some part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

 

We’re looking on all kinds of different wavelengths – and nothing. Perhaps we are the first but thats starting to look like the ancients ideas of an earthcentric universe.

Copernicus and Galileo etc had a long hard fight to get away from that idea.

So where is all this interstellar communication? If we are in fact average then space should be alive with communication, surely?

If we are in fact average where are all the civilisations that developed before us? If they did develop there are they now? What caused them to fail?

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I am not always convinced that the speed of light is finite and cannot be exceeded. The theory is that in the very early stages of the universe after the Big Bang, things did in fact travel faster than the speed of light, ( the period of inflation where the universe expanded exponentially) the premise being that there wasn't technically any space or time in this dimension for it to travel in.

Einstein proposed the theory that light is a finite unbreakable speed and as with science in general, the theory remains the best theory until another one comes along which is better.

 

What if another civilisation has exploited something like a quantum property that allows a loophole for either communication at faster than light speed, or much more difficult, faster than light travel for themselves. We are still in the dark ages so to speak regarding the quantum sciences, in fact they are counter intuitive to what we already thought we knew.

 

If we spent anywhere near as much money on science rather than armament, we would probably be a lot further forward.

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Totally agree Martyn. ?

 

Just a few years ago when we were kids, a blink of an eye in cosmic terms, we never even envisaged some of the technology we take for granted today, sat nav, smart phones, internet etc. I remember as a child thinking we'd all have flying cars well before 2018, but also thought that Star Trek communicators for the masses would still have to wait till the 23rd century. How wrong was I? Who knows what fantastic innovations we might develop in another hundred or even thousands of years, still a blink of an eye in cosmic terms. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up in the meantime. Speculating about possible advanced alien technologies and communications methods is probably out in scifis wildest dreams.

 

They're probably out there watching but giving this primitive warlike planet a wide birth.

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Hello,

 

Great topic, I can recommend ‘Rare Earth, why complex life is uncommon in the universe’ as a good read. I read it a few years ago and it covers many aspects of the difficulties in achieving complex life. It would be nice to think something is looking back when you’re at the telescope.

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