Are we Alone?

[Deleted member 3]

true, but in fact, information cannot travel faster than light, since a light patch that sweeps across the sky contains no information, it cannot be defined as an entity and thus can exceed speed of light

For example, when the universe was in the inflationary phase, it expanded hundreds of times faster than light, but what is expanding is the vacuum between atoms, and it contains no information.

Souces: >4 years of casual science reading

What is your definition of information here?

Also, it's ignorant to believe nothing can go faster than light in some way.We simply don't know of one. Many things we know now have been considered impossible in the past as well.

 

[de.das.dude]

What is your definition of information here?

Also, it's ignorant to believe nothing can go faster than light in some way.We simply don't know of one. Many things we know now have been considered impossible in the past as well.

but not the speed of light. the only way to surpass the speed of light is to fall into a wormhole, or any hole in space.

 

[Deleted member 3]

but not the speed of light. the only way to surpass the speed of light is to fall into a wormhole, or any hole in space.

So you claim that's the only way as if it were a fact even though nothing about wormholes has been proven? It's surprising how peoples views are still so limited. The fact that we have no working theory on which scientists agree to go past the speed of light doesn't mean it can't be done. We know nearly nothing about the universe or science. We've just started discovering things. If everyone had the lack of vision you have we'd never get anywhere. Luckily there are always people who believe in the impossible, those are the ones doing groundbreaking discoveries.

 

[Lionheart]

It would be ignorant to believe we are alone in this vast mystery we call the universe

I see the universe as a giant brain of energy, learning and expanding from our experience's we call life

Here's a great quote from Bill Hicks.

" Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there's no such thing as death, life is only a dream and where the imagination of ourselves"

 

[digibucc]

Here's a great quote from Bill Hicks.

and here's tom with the weather ...

 

[Lionheart]

and here's tom with the weather ...

TY, that made my night

 

[St.Alia-Of-The-Knife]

What is your definition of information here?

Also, it's ignorant to believe nothing can go faster than light in some way.We simply don't know of one. Many things we know now have been considered impossible in the past as well.

Information is something you could measure, it is whether or not you could tell that the object has travelled faster than light. We could say that the vacuum has traveled faster than light, but anyways you cannot know, so since vacuum contains no information, it is like saying "nothing" travels faster than light.

Traveling faster than light in conventionnal means is truly impossible according to theory. Proving it is possible may lead to major overhaul of todays theories, which have currently no problem for defining the universe as we know it. The only way the theory permits ftl travel is a shortcut, or bending the space so you would travel less distance than the ligt actually do, so you get ther faster

 

[Lionheart]

Information is something you could measure, it is whether or not you could tell that the object has travelled faster than light. We could say that the vacuum has traveled faster than light, but anyways you cannot know, so since vacuum contains no information, it is like saying "nothing" travels faster than light.

Traveling faster than light in conventionnal means is truly impossible according to theory. Proving it is possible may lead to major overhaul of todays theories, which have currently no problem for defining the universe as we know it. The only way the theory permits ftl travel is a shortcut, or bending the space so you would travel less distance than the ligt actually do, so you get ther faster

I love Canadians

 

[streetfighter 2]

A question that has plagued humanity since the dawn of self awareness.

Do you believe in other living life forms? Are they microscopic? Are they intelligent? Are they blobs of jello?

I guess it all depends on how you solve the Drake Equation, which also depends largely on how you believe life originated (read abiogenesis).

Since we don't have a proven theory on the creation of life from inorganic materials my answer is quite astutely "dunno", aka "God did it".

. . . the only way to surpass the speed of light is to fall into a wormhole, or any hole in space.

Traversing a wormhole doesn't literally make you go faster than the speed of light. A wormhole is theoretical rip in space-time connecting two places. I'm sure you've seen the rolled piece of paper punctured by a pencil illustrating the concept of a wormhole.

From wikipedia:

Wormholes allow superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time.​

There are other ways to travel faster than light, without traveling faster than light locally and violating relativity. One of them is to fly close to the event horizon of a black hole and zip around near the speed of light (roughly 0.9*c); you'd quite literally be traveling back in time relative to less distorted space-time.

I've also read that the reason why we can't see beyond about 14 billion light years is because the expansion of the universe at that distance is greater than the speed of light. In other words, the universe is traveling faster than light. LOL WUT?

There is also the Alcubierre drive, and it still doesn't violate relativity.

Tachyons? IIRC they violate super symmetry so they're not very popular amongst physicists today.

Quantum entanglement maybe?

So you claim that's the only way as if it were a fact even though nothing about wormholes has been proven? It's surprising how peoples views are still so limited. The fact that we have no working theory on which scientists agree to go past the speed of light doesn't mean it can't be done. We know nearly nothing about the universe or science. We've just started discovering things. If everyone had the lack of vision you have we'd never get anywhere. Luckily there are always people who believe in the impossible, those are the ones doing groundbreaking discoveries.

I agree, Einstein was just another jerk in a line of jerks who couldn't think outside the box. LOL WUT?

de.das.dude, like myself, is a student of the universe. Are we not allowed to make mistakes in our quest for knowledge?

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

--Niels Bohr​

 

[de.das.dude]

Traversing a wormhole doesn't literally make you go faster than the speed of light. A wormhole is theoretical rip in space-time connecting two places. I'm sure you've seen the rolled piece of paper punctured by a pencil illustrating the concept of a wormhole.

From wikipedia:

Wormholes allow superluminal (faster-than-light) travel by ensuring that the speed of light is not exceeded locally at any time.​

There are other ways to travel faster than light, without traveling faster than light locally and violating relativity. One of them is to fly close to the event horizon of a black hole and zip around near the speed of light (roughly 0.9*c); you'd quite literally be traveling back in time relative to less distorted space-time.

I've also read that the reason why we can't see beyond about 14 billion light years is because the expansion of the universe at that distance is greater than the speed of light. In other words, the universe is traveling faster than light. LOL WUT?

There is also the Alcubierre drive, and it still doesn't violate relativity.

Tachyons? IIRC they violate super symmetry so they're not very popular amongst physicists today.

Quantum entanglement maybe?


I agree, Einstein was just another jerk in a line of jerks who couldn't think outside the box. LOL WUT?

de.das.dude, like myself, is a student of the universe. Are we not allowed to make mistakes in our quest for knowledge?

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

--Niels Bohr​

i also think its because the universe is spherical and its because of the curvature. may also explain how wormholes may work, kinda like a tunnel through earth from herer to the US.

 

[W1zzard]

i also think its because the universe is spherical

all experimental evidence suggests that the universe is flat

 

[cadaveca]

all experimental evidence suggests that the universe is flat

But could that be due to conventional models preventing a different result?

 

[niko084]

I would say that depends on your definition of intelligent...
We sure like to think we are... But are we really?

I have a hard time believing life cannot exist anywhere else, from the evidence we can gather yes it doesn't look good... However... What kinda evidence can we really gather, not a lot when you really consider how much we even have access to % wise...

 

[twicksisted]

I have too much going on in my day to day to be wondering/worrying about ET's to be honest but I do find it vaguely interesting of course.

Heres a Youtube clip showing various NASA footage of apparent UFO's around the ISS, Moon & Shuttle over the years. Also in the video is an interview with Dr Edgar Mitchell who was the pilot for the Apollo 14 mission who strongly believes in alien life aswell as having seen it for himself. His qualifications and career are impressive (read the youtube clips notes).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-RPWhigpQg&feature=related

 

[Deleted member 3]

I agree, Einstein was just another jerk in a line of jerks who couldn't think outside the box. LOL WUT?

de.das.dude, like myself, is a student of the universe. Are we not allowed to make mistakes in our quest for knowledge?

Read my post again, what you just said made no sense in reply to my statement.

 

[W1zzard]

But could that be due to conventional models preventing a different result?

i dont think so. the current measurements are 97% accurate, with planned measurements going up to 0.001%. however, this does not rule out a much bigger curved universe that is so big that we cant measure the curvature. think you're an ant standing on the earth, your local universe looks completely flat. but we can only go by experimental evidence, not some "it seems possible"

I guess it all depends on how you solve the Drake Equation,

in my opinion the most important term is L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space).

if it's normal that advanced civilizations blow themselves up in a nuclear war or destroy themselves using a micro black hole when they turn on their big particler accelerator or <insert random reason here>, then the chances become incredibly slim of us ever detecting one. its like blips fade into existance and fade out just as quickly and they never get a chance to talk to each other because they dont live long enough.

also our civilization is quickly moving away from radio signals to fibre optics which leaves nothing to detect

 

[NinkobEi]

Radio signals seem to be a primitive way for species to communicate across a galaxy/universe. I suspect that a civilization may have 100-200 years as Radio being a good way, after that its likely they moved on to something else.

Heck it took us forever to figure out that Gamma Ray Bursts exist, and they are the strongest radio waves in the Galaxy. How is a planet supposed to produce anything remotely similar to that

 

[W1zzard]

How is a planet supposed to produce anything remotely similar to that

according to e=mc² it can't

 

[de.das.dude]

all experimental evidence suggests that the universe is flat

yes. and so did it suggest the earth was flat.

first of all, how is something flat supposed to expand properly? like rolling a dough?

and even it is flat, what shape is it? rectangular ? triangular? or organic irregular?

being spherical is the easiest and as its said, the simpler the solution, the more correct it is(or something like that).

 

[Deleted member 3]

yes. and so did it suggest the earth was flat.

first of all, how is something flat supposed to expand properly? like rolling a dough?

and even it is flat, what shape is it? rectangular ? triangular? or organic irregular?

being spherical is the easiest and as its said, the simpler the solution, the more correct it is(or something like that).

It's a disc, and it sits on 4 elephants, who in turn stand on a giant turtle.

 

[War_God]

This is the proverbial "more than it seems" question. It isn't as straightforward as it seems, and as such, no straightforward answer will do.
I'll give my 20 cents, despite no-one asking me to do so

On one side of the fence we have the evolutionists. Life on Earth appeared from a proverbial soup, full of elements now on the periodic table, which allowed for life to begin as soon as a discharge of energy unbalanced things. Earth was just a lucky planet that turned out to be at the right place, at the right time, with exactly the right conditions to develop life. Quite a handful of convenient coincidences, right?

Which brings us to the creationist side of the table. We were all created by a supernatural, omnipresent and omnipotent being, that created us to it's own image. According to this train of thought, we human beings are the only living organisms in the galaxy, made in It's rightful image, with everything else being here just to accommodate us and keep things interesting.

So... this Is a hard subject.
Personally, I believe that we (human beings in general, not humanity, since humanity Doesn't exist) created God, Allah, or whatever we call them, just for the sake of giving ourselves some higher purpose. It really is depressing when you think that there is no reason for you being here other than spreading your genes, that there is actually no higher purpose in your life. God gives us the belief that we actually are important.

Then, there is the not-so-obscure idea of Panspermia (very succinctly, the idea that life on Earth only developed thanks to the arrival of an Extra-terrestrial bacteria or whatnot. This would make us all aliens to the planet Earth, therefore, the question "are we alone" - is answered on it's own.

Now, on to the real answer to the question, i'll just quote Carl Sagan:
"There are 10000 grains in a handful of beach sand. And there are more stars in the Universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches in the world".
For me, there's just NO WAY that Earth was or is the only planet able to sustain life. And this gets even trickier when we consider that life in other planets doesn't even need to be carbon-based like ours - it could be hydrogen-based, hell, even silicon-based, why not?

Maybe on another planet there are animated motherboards all to a super powerful biological, silicon-based microprocessor

 

[streetfighter 2]

The fact that we have no working theory on which scientists agree to go past the speed of light doesn't mean it can't be done.

I was trying to say that... err... you know... Einstein would disagree with you and all.

It's a bit like hacking where the password would effectively take more time than exists in the universe to crack. Fortunately, as it turns out it's fairly simple to hack the handshake protocol instead. In other words, you can't travel faster than light, but there are ways to work around it.

in my opinion the most important term is L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space).
. . .
our civilization is quickly moving away from radio signals to fibre optics which leaves nothing to detect

As I understand it, the radio broadcasts we've been sending out since WWII are completely drowned out by background radiation by the time they reach the edge of our solar system . (In hindsight, it's kinda nice that Omicron Persei 8s first blip from us isn't Hitler )

Once you get to distances in excess of one light year you have to broadcast a directed signal in order to retain enough energy to be properly demodulated*. You then need to wait however many years for your signal to be retrieved and then wait another bunch of years to get a reply. I believe it's likely that any effective inter-solar/galactic communication system will utilize quantum mechanisms which are not dependent on relativistic physics. Unfortunately I have no idea what such a mechanism might be.

*Obviously this is my personal speculation; uncited.

It's a disc, and it sits on 4 elephants, who in turn stand on a giant turtle.

From wikipedia:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"​

Possibly one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

 

[wahdangun]

What about Resources, and working labor,in form of Slaves?
An Alien lifeform would just need to infiltrate the top layer of society, to be able to keep us working for them, without us even knowing.
Ooops! a look at our modern society told me that may not be far from reality...

wait. Why they need to make us their slave? Or even use our resource? Its not like planet earth contain special matter that alien can't get in other planet, we need to throw away that kind of thinking, our earth is not speciall.
Ok. Let assume that we have some special matter on earth(witch I doubt it) and came to earth to get it. But I can't get it, why they need to enslave us, if alien civilitation is so advance, I'm sure they can build some worker robot and just kill us all, after all we are to fragile, and robot will not turn against them.

 

[AphexDreamer]

statistical analysis will quickly tell you if it's natural or not. basically what seti@home does

a galactic internet with latencies in the tens of thousands of years makes absolutely no sense

I didn't say it, Michio Kaku did. So I can't expand in his defense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or8iEagHztg

However, his message is clear in that perhaps Alien Communications are taking place right under our noses and we our still as of yet, to primitive to know.

 

[wahdangun]

everybody pretty much has an hd camera in his pocket that works anytime, anywhere .. where are the sightings now ?

maybe because our earth technology can't "sense" it ? I mean we can only see a very limited light spectrum that our sun pouring at us, and our other sense is very limited, and after the fact there are more matter that we can't sense like ghost particle, x-ray, etc there aven a matter that we can't detect with our most advance equipment like dark matter and dark energy.

but my reason why there are no alien visiting us is because we are not speciall after all, it will a waste of resource for them to just came to us, just for harvesting our resource and enslaving us.