Soldato
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the other big question we haven't covered is why?
and it's worrying to think that if we were to make a simulation, it'll likely be either by accident for entertainment....
Do you believe?
- Thread starter Sliver
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the other big question we haven't covered is why?
and it's worrying to think that if we were to make a simulation, it'll likely be either by accident for entertainment....
Maybe preservation (which potentially ties into one aspect of entertainment) - i.e. if this universe was a rough reflection of another it resided in maybe used for beings that were physically in long term storage i.e. long distance transit or other waiting scenarios (terraforming a planet say) alternative to just shutting down all brain activity.
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Isn't it indisputable that there is life based on the fact that atoms only have a limited number of combinations and so in effect you exist somewhere else?
Yeah it's pathetic. He should be kicked off these forums imo.
When people talk about civilizations coming and going in the blink of an eye, surely any signal they broadcast into space would exist long after they have gone, and therefore should\could be detectable, long after they have been extinct.
Yes, however two issues with this.
One, signals only travel at the speed of light. Even are earliest transmissions have passed very few solar systems so far.
Secondly by the time such signals reach these solar systems they are so weak they are barely stronger than back ground radiation, making them extremely hard to detectm
Can improve by sening strong directional signals like we have done a handful of times, but even those aren't strong signals by the time they arrive.
I think this will help improve our knowledge,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
Anyone with any sense or basic understanding of astronomy would never think we are alone.
Edit*
This year back it was found that "Enceladus’ sea floor has hydrothermal vents like ours" - This further improves our chances for discovering life in our own solar system in the future. If more than one planet (or moon) in our solar system alone can hold some form of life, then the number outside of it can only be even greater outside of it.
It's not worrying at all. The known universe is too big to send any form of known communications from one end to the other before a civilisation's time is up. The distances are just too big. We know quantum mechanics operates at a different level, and entangled particles can instantaneously exchange information no matter how large the distance from each end is, but we don't have the means to realise such technology yet. Maybe another species out there does, and we simply can't detect those signals at the moment.
We are close to having quantum computers, and once we do, things like this will be much closer to reality than just lab proven scientific theories. Spooky action is a thing!
I don't know why people seem to keep assuming this. Sure, Hawking says we should be wary about the kind of signals we are sending out to space, because whoever answers back may not be friendly when we take into account our own gory history of occupation, greed and warfare. but humans are special (for better or for worse) - We let emotions and greed get in the way of everything. Currency ultimately rules the entire planet. Intelligent life in the universe probably don't have those issues, as those are things that don't need to exist for them.
To travel the huge distances of the universe requires harnessing immense power. Something we can't even fathom right now. That kind of technology requires intelligence on another level, or artificial intelligence. The latter is what we humans fear the most. No thanks to Sci-Fi, robot uprisings are always in the back of the mind for many of us these days
In reality, many don't think this will be an issue at all. An intelligent species sprawling the universe most likely won't be hostile.
Think about it this way, if there is intelligent life out there exploring the stars, then why would they need to be hostile? They are more likely to be scientific in nature. They have unlimited resources at their disposal given that they can jump around the universe.
I read and watch so many materials about this topic all the time and looking at it outside of the box, I can never see such an encounter with "aliens" being a troubling one.
In most of the major religions, their holy books are open to interpretation. Most refer to "other worlds", so those of faith would be no different.
But what if our Universe is a hologram? Or at least started off as one?
For some reason I get the impression that any travellers out there are only going to be of the scientific kind. Whether it is AI or otherwise, it will be seeking to gain further information about what's out there, and increase its knowledge in the process.
That is the very direction we humans are heading. With advancements in AI especially. Recently Facebook revealed that its AI developed its own language during a negotiation experiment. Pretty cool stuff out there!
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Yep what we really need though is something that size but designed specifically for exoplanet finding, and one that can analyse atmospheres.
Anyway here's a basic oversight on why our signals are pretty useless.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/zidbits.com/2011/07/how-far-have-radio-signals-traveled-from-earth/amp/
While it’s interesting to imagine how far our radio signals have traveled into space, it’s extremely unlikely that an alien civilization will be able to catch the latest episode of ‘I Love Lucy’. This is thanks to the inverse square law. In Layman’s term, it’s a form of signal degradation.
As radio signals leave earth, they propagate out in a wave form. Just like dropping a stone in a lake, the waves diffuse or “spread out” over distance thanks to the exponentially larger area they must encompass. The area can be calculated by multiplying length times width which is why we measure it in square units – square centimeters, square miles, etc. This means that the further away from the source, the more square units of area a signal has to ‘illuminate’.
Another way to think of it, is that the strength of a radio signal will be only 1/4 as great once you are twice the distance from the source. At ten times the distance, the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great.
Because of this inverse square law, all of our terrestrial radio signals become indistinguishable from background noise at around a few light-years from earth. For a civilization only a couple hundred light-years away, trying to listen to our broadcasts would be like trying to detect the small ripple from a pebble dropped in the pacific ocean off the coast of California – from Japan.
Moronic or interesting though? 
Think of it as a wave. (After all, it is an electromagnetic wave). It rolls across the ocean and once it passes our tiny little atol, it is gone. Only for as long as the civilisation exists and uses radio waves, will it send out those waves.
Do I think there has been, is or will be life on another planet? Yes. The sheer amount if time the universe has existed and will exist for added to the number of planets make me think it is certain that life can exist elsewhere. This same arguement holds true in my opinion for intelligent life too.
Do I think we will ever find any though? Maybe, it depends on luck. Given enough time I don't think it is outside the realms of possibility our technology advances far enough for intersteller travel. Time is the enemy though as it is more a question of when than if we have another mass extinction event.
Do I think we will ever find any though? Maybe, it depends on luck. Given enough time I don't think it is outside the realms of possibility our technology advances far enough for intersteller travel. Time is the enemy though as it is more a question of when than if we have another mass extinction event.
Does that mean that, somewhere in the universe, exists a bound copy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, that no sentient creature created, but came into being as a random combination of atoms?
Sounds ridiculous.
I'd hazard a guess that most of us believe some things cannot have come about entirely be random collisions of atoms. Some things have to have been created.
With enough iterative repetition of a limited enough combination then yes that would be possible - the universe we can observe doesn't seem to match that kind of scenario though other than in a very general sense.
I don't think we're alone, but I don't think we've been visited either. If there existed a species with the technology to visit us without the millions of years of travel, then it's safe to assume we'd be like ants to them. Chances are they wouldn't even bother. Why would they?
Its possible we have or will be visited by something like the proposed with Breakthrough Starshot - I've never looked into it to see if anything matches but I did wonder in passing if the "wow" signal was something like that being launched - not sure if applicable types of propulsion for that use would be detectable as that kind of signal.
You wouldn't need any special propulsion when the means to travel from one end to the other is provided by nature on its own. Wormholes.
General relativity allows for wormholes to exist, but they bring about dangers like radiation and their supposed random nature. So technology would need to be so adavnced to either hold them in place, or detect when they appears, and a heavily shielded ship then "jumps " through it.
The biggest issue with any kind of travel like this is that you're going to be dealing with things that have immense mass in space, and the closer you are to those objects, the more severe the effects of time dilation. You can probably expect the people back on Earth to be very different (if they're still alive), on your return journey.
Hollywood makes space travel out to be like a trip to the shops. It's going to be way more complex than that with all the problems it brings about. Which is why AI machines are the logical answer to space travel.
General relativity allows for wormholes to exist, but they bring about dangers like radiation and their supposed random nature. So technology would need to be so adavnced to either hold them in place, or detect when they appears, and a heavily shielded ship then "jumps " through it.
The biggest issue with any kind of travel like this is that you're going to be dealing with things that have immense mass in space, and the closer you are to those objects, the more severe the effects of time dilation. You can probably expect the people back on Earth to be very different (if they're still alive), on your return journey.
Hollywood makes space travel out to be like a trip to the shops. It's going to be way more complex than that with all the problems it brings about. Which is why AI machines are the logical answer to space travel.
Tbh the chance of that happening is probably so miniscule, that it is statistically *practically* impossible.
Mathematically possible, but like you said, the universe doesn't really behave in such a way that everything mathematically possible can actually happen.
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There is life out there.