Recent comments in /f/space

Devil_May_Kare t1_j3ldq5i wrote

Reply to comment by ThatDaveyGuy in Milkdromeda. by Acuate187

We don't know how likely or unlikely the first abiogenesis event was. It could've been a once-in-a-galactic-supercluster coincidence. And then lots of the evolutionary steps since then were nowhere close to guaranteed.

3

RichardWattersonREAL t1_j3kzz0q wrote

Reply to Milkdromeda. by Acuate187

God fucking damn its pics like this is why i love space so much. I could look at this for hours and find something new like every 5-10 mins

2

Melephisance t1_j3kwui3 wrote

Reply to comment by Jester471 in Milkdromeda. by Acuate187

Thank you for this - extremely interesting read that I intend to deploy with my kids later and shatter their fragile perspectives with 👍. Take my award!

4

robertojh_200 t1_j3kvnnc wrote

Reply to comment by chetanaik in Milkdromeda. by Acuate187

Idk about that, to be in a rogue solar system you'd have a completely unfiltered view of the whole universe, like a night sky without light pollution. Imagine being able to view the universe we can't see because the Milky Way's zone of avoidance blocks it from our sight.

4

robertojh_200 t1_j3kvi19 wrote

Reply to comment by Fallacy_Spotted in Milkdromeda. by Acuate187

By that token, the paradox makes some sweeping assumptions about the efficacy of interstellar communication to begin with. Space is big, and interstellar communication almost impossible unless both parties already know and are already expecting communication. Establishing first contact across interstellar distances is like trying to shoot a bullet out of the air with another bullet fired from two different guns in two different states; you'd need an exceptionally powerful gun with even more exceptional precision. And the other guy has no idea you're aiming at him. But you, the shooter, are doing on purpose; two bullets don't collide by chance. First Contact happens when one civilization already knows about the other one before hand and so they send a deliberately overpowered signal to reach out.

It's possible, to be clear, and hell it may have already happened. We just haven't been listening long enough to know.

3

robertojh_200 t1_j3kuhvi wrote

Reply to comment by DroidLord in Milkdromeda. by Acuate187

>But the fact is that we just don't know how common life is (and more importantly intelligent life). Currently we have a sample size of one and that isn't enough to draw any meaningful conclusions.

That's fine, but the baseline statement of the Fermi Paradox is "if there are aliens, why haven't we heard from them?" as if we should have or even could have by now. It makes some serious presumptions about interstellar communication, interstellar travel, the proclivities of aliens engaging in either, and whether they even care about us enough to try and engage with us. Because make no mistake, anything we get from an alien race will almost assuredly have to be a deliberate attempt at communication; local TV and radio signals are far too weak to survive the interstellar void before degrading into indistinguishable background radiation.

Any message we receive would have to be deliberate, and that means that they would have to 1) have spotted us first, 2) recognized that we are a life-carrying planet, meaning their observational technology is at least better than JWST, 3) sent a signal exceptionally powerful enough via tight beam to survive the journey and be recognizable, 4) last long enough for our receivers to be able to parse it from the noise and identify artificial patterns, would need to 5) practically bullseye the solar system as it travels thousands of kilometers per second through the galaxy potentially hundreds of light years away, and we'd need to hope 6) that the Earth is on the correct side of the sun when the signal reaches the solar system so that it doesn't get drowned out by solar radiation, 7) that our receivers are aiming in the right direction at the right time for the right duration, and 8) that during it's travel through the void it doesn't get blocked by some unforeseen object like a black hole. This is all assuming they even use radio.

The amount of things that have to go perfectly right for us to receive a signal are insane; the WOW signal got only partially recorded because the receiver that picked it up was fixed and moved with the rotation of the earth, turning the receiver away from the signal just as it started picking it up. We may literally have missed an alien communication because we just lacked the technology to keep our ear on it for long enough, and it reached us at the wrong time.

We would likely need some kind of space-based radio observatory constellation network to truly survey the void for signals in a manner that leaves little room for doubt. And again, this is communication over vast interstellar distances, which creates its own problems. A 50,000 year old interstellar empire could be engaging in stellar engineering on the other side of the galaxy, and if they're 60,000 light years away, we will be physically incapable of ever knowing about them for 10,000 years. 10,000 years is far, far longer than the timescale upon which we'd been searching for alien life when Fermi asked "where is everybody". What would we have to say for ourselves when, after 9,999 years of not hearing anything, we conclude that we are alone, only to then get the very first light from a sequence of artificially induced stellar collapses on the other side of the galaxy? How foolish would we be, then, to have spuriously decided we were alone when even 9,999 years is a blip on the scale of space and time that separates us from our possible neighbors. At these scales, we will never be able to conclusively state we are alone from the sole vantage point of Earth; surrounded by 400billion stars in our galaxy alone, it would literally be faster and more productive to develop interstellar travel and just go look, than it would be to try and talk ourselves in circles around hypothetical fermi paradoxes, drake equations, and other probabilities all formed out of a sample size of 1 planet.

It's true that the we simply don't know, empirically, but the Fermi Paradox seems to take a presumptuous stance on the subject by implying we're alone and life must be rare simply because, in the vanishingly short amount of time we've been even capable of searching with anything resembling earnest (like, a few decades), we would have heard something. It's the equivalent of our cavemen ancestors approaching the shore for the first time, tasting the water, vomiting, and concluding that the water is poisonous and nothing could possibly live in the ocean simply because we couldn't do it ourselves--when a whole universe of life in fact lives just out of sight, oblivious and uncaring about either our ignorance or our arrogance.

10