"Promising hints of life on distant planet"

[Reynard]

Only because we gave up and never built the needed infrastructure. We could have kept going 50 years ago.

It is possible that in the last 50 years we could have built a lunar colony. it is also possible that we could have learned that we were incapable with major advancements in certain technologies.

 

[J.Quondam]

No. There are literally trillions of planet's in the observable universe. If we are alone, that is the very definition of "special", so that line of reasoning should be treated as highly suspect at best. More likely is that civilizations like ours just never extend their footprint beyond their own solar system. We very likely won't.

I mean, I agree. Literally the only difference of opinion i have is equating "aloneness" with "specialness". We don't need to divine some weird mystical purpose for our existence on the off chance we learn definitively that we are the only one. It's just a fluke, no more or less strange than if it turns out there's exactly 5,523 civilizations; and it's just a fluke, whether we're alone within some light-speed limited bubble of spacetime, or within the entire observable universe.

 

[Umbran]

I would argue that all evolutions are more likely to produce crabs, than civilizations.

Hrmph! The power of AND sir!

 

[Umbran]

But I wonder: are "all outcomes of evolution" finite, and able to fit in the (greater) universe? Or are those possibilities infinite, and if they are is it a "small enough" sort of infinity that it fits in whatever sort of infinity that the universe is. Does that make sense?

Yes. in mathematics there are concepts of the "sizes" of infinities. So, I think I understand the question. I just don't know the answer.

I also think all of this is a pretty convincing argument that there's no weird physics allowing for FTL or time travel or the like. If such were possible, someone somewhere with some motivation would have showed themselves already.

Well, one can conjure up any number of reasons why, say, galactic civilization hasn't contacted us. We came up with one ourselves, well-known in pop culture - the Prime Directive.

Or, perhaps now is a good time to mention Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat".

Original Text: They're Made out of Meat

And a video version...

 

[MGibster]

Hrmph! The power of AND sir!

I didn't have Crabraham Lincoln on my bingo card today.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Scientists find promising hints of life on distant planet K2-18b

Scientists find new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.

www.bbc.com

"Scientists have found new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life." Indirect evidence, but quite a bit of a big deal nonetheless.

Very cool and exciting news.

 

[Umbran]

To the question of "Is civilization inevitable?"

If we assume that intelligent life is a given on a world (certainly a bold assumption) than will that intelligent life inevitably form a civilization?

Time to note the Drake Equation:

N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
Where
N, the number of civilizations currently transmitting signals, depends on seven factors:

R* is the yearly formation rate of stars hospitable to planets where life could develop

fp is the fraction of those stars with planets

ne is the number of planets per solar system with conditions suitable for life

fl is the fraction of planets suitable for life on which life actually appears

fi is the fraction of planets with life on which intelligent life emerges

fc is the fraction of planets with intelligent life that develops technologies such as radio transmissions that we could detect

L is the average length of time in years that civilizations produce such signs

Then you would have to assume that species can either consume stationary "plants" like we can, or could find moving creatures that could be penned and cultivated (aka like a cow). Civilization started when humans settled in an area and stopped migrating constantly, if there isn't something stationary for us to live on, civilization is likely out of the question.

There is more in heaven and on Earth than is imagined by your philosophy. Just because we formed civilization a particular way, doesn't mean everyone would.

BUT....if we are talking an advanced civilization such as ours, capable of going to space or at least communicating with it, that also requires access to certain materials. Part of our success in the modern era was access to a HUGE abundance of stored energy in the form of coal and fossil fuels....born out from geologic conditions and the wealth of creatures that came before us.

The geology isn't the hard bit. Burying things is easy.

On Earth the abundance of fossil fuels is owed more to how there was a gap between when plants began using cellulose as a structural element, and when other organisms worked out ways to digest that same cellulose. Generations and generations of plants, and their carbon, that couldn't be digested by anything else, and so was still there to get buried.

There are organisms on Earth now that can digest cellulose, so the process of producing fossil fuels has pretty much stopped.

 

[R_J_K75]

New million dollar idea. Space rockets with baby seats. Or, is everyone going the Ted Williams (a famous American baseball player) route and be cytogenetically frozen for 'someday'.

That didn't work out so well for Teddy Ballgame. The lab techs at the cryo facility accidently froze his head to an empty can of Bumble Bee Tuna. They then tried to dislodge it by using it for batting practice with a monkey wrench.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2009/10/cryonics_whistleblower_details.html

 

[Stalker0]

No. That is not how it works. that is opposite of how it works, in fact.

Time dilation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That is exactly how it works. If I take off in a super fast spaceship, my clock slows down compared to a clock on earth. But looked at it from the ships point of view, Earth's clock speeds up. So 1 year on the spaceship could be 100 years on earth.

 

[briggart]

Well keep in mind though, time dilation is only relative to an observer. If I send a ship out on a 120 light year mission at 99% the speed of light, to a person on the ship it still takes 120+ years to get there, aka they will all be dead or it will decedents taking over the ship. Its just if that ship makes it back to earth, potentially thousands of years would have passed

No. You need to also account for length contraction to understand what's actually going on.

At 0.99c, to a person on the spaceship the planet would be only ~17 light years away, so they will get there in bit more than 17 years of their time.

To a person on Earth, the spaceship will take 120 light-years/0.99c ~ 121 years to reach its destination. Or a ~242 year round-trip (neglecting acceleration, course inversion, etc.)

If you want to play a bit with this and get some quantitative intuition on how this works, here's a neat calculator:

Time Dilation Calculator - With Examples

Special Relativity shows that time slows down for anything moving, including people, and that distances shrink in the direction of motion.

www.emc2-explained.info