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Prof Cox we are alone

starnut

By starnut
in The Astro Lounge

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davkt

davkt

Posted
Posted

Saw him on TV tonight, must say his view we'd have heard from ET if they were out there shows a distinct lack of imagination! Maybe c is the ultimate speed limit, that explains why we haven't had visitors, distances just too vast. Maybe RF communications are just a short lived stage of technological development and in a few years or centuries they will be replaced by systems that don't randomly spam the whole universe with our broadcasts. Maybe we have been visited but the visitors don't want to seen, if they have the tech for interstellar travel I'm pretty sure they could stay hidden if they want to. Maybe all planetary top predators are as self destructive as we are and no one ever develops to the interstellar travel stage before trashing their planet and nuking themselves!

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Moonshane

Moonshane

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If you send a message at the speed of light from one side of our galaxy to the other it would take 100,000 years to get there. If they get the message and reply immediately, it will be a total of 200,000 years before the message is returned. I don't know about you but I am not waiting around for that! The problem is one of time, space, luck and coincidence. I tend to share the view that we seem to be statistically unlikely to be 'alone' but that, sadly, we may as well be as we are also seem to be statistically unlikely to ever find anyone else for the above reasons.

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SkyJamie

SkyJamie

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I haven't watched any of the Human Universe episodes yet but I do follow Prof Brian Cox on Twitter and he just tweeted:

"FOR LAST TIME: I think life is common in universe. We MAY be only civ. in Milky Way. There WILL be other civilisations in univ."

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AndrewG

AndrewG

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What I really like is how he refers to us being technologically advanced????????  

Given we fundamentally do not fully understand a considerable amount I.e. how, when and what (laws of physics are always being altered..  just stick in another constant or maybe dark matter)? surely if an Alien race was technologically advanced  it would not be difficult for them to either keep their distance or hide from our technology.

As with others here I was originally a fan of BC but lately he does appears closed minded to the chances of intelligent life in space.   I remember a couple of years ago he mentioned on the TV that it would take far to long for Aliens to reach us given the distance, within minutes he was then explaining relativity, event horizons and that as you approach the speed of light time would slow right down.   Therefore if we could travel at close to the speed of light time the time to travel across large distances would take many years,  for the occupant it would only feel like a short time indeed... Hence his initial response for vast distances taking to long even at high speeds is not totally correct.

Personally given the size of space, the vast odds etc. anything could be out there........... :alien: !

Andy

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jamespels

jamespels

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Who's to say we are not immersed in signals from other civilisations in the galaxy? Our current understanding of physics says that c is the universal speed limit, but the key phrase here is "our current understanding". Assuming there is a new branch of physics we do not understand, it could very feasibly not be constrained by the same limits  (think hyperspace for a sci-fi analogy) and other civilisations could be using it to communicate and travel all the time. At the moment, however, we have no way to perceive these communications so we assume they are not there. Who knows - one accidental discovery or out-of-the-box scientist could unlock this technology tomorrow to reveal a whole universe we simply do not know about!

Dark matter: sodding great alien cities we just cannot see?? :)

James.

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ronin

ronin

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I suspect he is right.

If you said 100 billion stars that is 1011 so taking a very oversimplified view that any factor had a 1 in 10 chance of being right that means just 12 factors and the chance of life is less then 1 in our galaxy.

Right sun, right planet, right distance, right chemical composition, right amount of water.

I suspect that having a large moon is relevant and that could be 1 in a thousand, then large iron core generating a magnetic field, tectonic plate activity.

That simple view gives 1 in 1010 identify 1 more and that is 1 in the number of stars, another one after that and you would need a galaxy 10 times bigger then ours.

Earth did not start off really suitable for life, the atmosphere was methane and other obnoxious gasses and the seas were red/brown from the amount of iron in them. The first life to get going here destroyed all that by burping out oxygen as a byproduct.

The one area that part of what he said falls down on it the presumption that there is already advanced life out there wanting to fill the Milky way up, what if we are the first to crawl out of the slime and built a rocket? Someone has to be first, the next one may be 10 million years behind us.

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jamespels

jamespels

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Regarding whether or not we are alone - almost certainly not. We now know life can survive in all sorts of unlikely places; chemistry we can detect in places like the Orion nebula shows clear signs of the complex organics that are the pre-cursors of proteins necessary for life, suggesting that simple organic life must be common-place (and who knows about non-organic life?). We are finding an immense number of planets in the immediate vicinity so the odds that another planet within the Milky Way has not formed complex life is also approaching zero by my estimation. This is still quite a step from technological life but I still think the number of opportunities and the likely prevalence of life makes other technological civilisations almost certain even within the Milky Way.

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starman1969

starman1969

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I don't believe that.

We are intelligent, but who says we will ever be able to travel interstellar distances, whatever our technology of the future. It could be the same problem for other civilizations out there.

Also,  other intelligent life could be so vastly different to any kind life on earth we know, that any possible communication from that life would be inconceivable to us.

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D4N

D4N

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I didn't assume he meant the universe, even though the program is titled that way what he was discussing was calculated for the Milky Way.

But the calculation was flawed in that it assumed a technologically advanced species would be expansionist. There are plenty of reasons why alien life could evolve to be intelligent then not decide to expand from their home system.

Life on Earth is like that, it moves into any vacant space and colonises it, alien life might not be like that.

Or an intelligent species may just be physically incapable of surviving the rigours of space travel and morally unable to accept changing themselves.

Imagine if exposure to micro gravity always resulted in an agonising death, there wouldn't be so many potential astronauts wanting to go into space.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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JB80

JB80

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I don't get the fuss, I didn't come away from the show with the feeling that he said we are alone. That is more the headline that made that conclusion. I have just re-watched that part of the programme in case I missed something and apart from the aquatic pigs cracking me up again I don't think I did.

Taken out of context and mountain out of a mole hill as usual and it was in reference to the Milky Way and not the universe but still too many if's, could's and maybe's, he was going through a list of possibilities and scenarios. I took it as more of a suggestion than anything.

And this tweet may suggest a bit different..

https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/527265063921389568

Watch the last 20 or so minutes again and see or from 56 minutes for the gist.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIi4bQEAqLs

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JamesF

JamesF

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Is there any good (scientifically sound) investigation of the idea that if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a meteorite that mammals wouldn't have been able to evolve into something like humans?  It seems on the face of it a very weak claim.  My understanding is that mammals certainly co-existed with dinosaurs and might be considered to have some significant advantages over them.  Changing climate (and therefore changing vegetation) as well as the success of other branches of evolution might well not have favoured such large body sizes over the last sixty million years (otherwise there would be more of them still about, surely?) and the removal of huge animals from the ecosystem might well give all sorts of others a fighting chance of survival.

James

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baggywrinkle

baggywrinkle

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Is there any good (scientifically sound) investigation of the idea that if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a meteorite that mammals wouldn't have been able to evolve into something like humans?  It seems on the face of it a very weak claim.  My understanding is that mammals certainly co-existed with dinosaurs and might be considered to have some significant advantages over them.  Changing climate (and therefore changing vegetation) as well as the success of other branches of evolution might well not have favoured such large body sizes over the last sixty million years (otherwise there would be more of them still about, surely?) and the removal of huge animals from the ecosystem might well give all sorts of others a fighting chance of survival.

James

The beautiful Raquel certainly did... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060782/

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davkt

davkt

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Is there any good (scientifically sound) investigation of the idea that if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a meteorite that mammals wouldn't have been able to evolve into something like humans?  It seems on the face of it a very weak claim.  My understanding is that mammals certainly co-existed with dinosaurs and might be considered to have some significant advantages over them.  Changing climate (and therefore changing vegetation) as well as the success of other branches of evolution might well not have favoured such large body sizes over the last sixty million years (otherwise there would be more of them still about, surely?) and the removal of huge animals from the ecosystem might well give all sorts of others a fighting chance of survival.

James

Yep the early mammals were around at time of the dinosaurs and the dinosaurs wern't wiped out, they adapted to a changed environment by getting smaller and learning (fot the most part) how to fly, which they happily do in our skies the world over today. I'd say it is pretty much impossible to have any certainty (other than things would be different) about what life on earth would be like if the asteroid hadn't done for big dinos. Oh and its worth noting the time since the end of dinosaurs dominating life on earth is less than the time where they were the dominant life form.

The more interesting question to me is what comes next after we are wiped out by something (quit probably ourselves) as evoluition will certainy fill the ecological niche we have vacated.

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