So, was it aliens?
And not the “illegal alien” kind—the extraterrestrial kind.
Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, thinks it just might have been:
On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as “a red and extremely elongated asteroid.” It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it ‘Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.”
There is no photo of ‘Oumuamua, but it apparently has a lot of anomalies that are difficult to explain. I wouldn’t jump to “extraterrestrials” as the most likely explanation, however, although of course it’s certainly a possibility. Loeb is apparently keenly interested in them.
I’ve written about a related subject before, the Fermi Paradox (see this), which I find troubling and compelling. There’s also Drake’s equation, if you like speculating about these things.
Note the two categories into which I’ve placed this post. These matters are where science meets the philosophical—although actually, science very often meets the philosophical.
I would be much more interested in a Mars probe digging into the Martian soil to see if Archea-type organisms are present. This is the most likely life form we will find in the universe, at least until we have a system to get to stars.
If you bet that there are some aliens out there, you at least have a chance at being proven correct. If you bet that there are none, you can never prove it.
I seriously doubt that Oumuamua was some sort of alien probe. If there were a civilization that was advanced enough to operated interesteller probes like that I gotta believe that they would also be advanced enough to defeat detection.
Oumuanua was looking for the first scouts they sent. Octopus.
It must be noted that, given its trajectory, Oumuamua is the first object of Interstellar origin ever observed in our Solar System.
Looking at the trajectory of Oumuamua, it dives down into our Solar system from above our system’s orbital plane, dives down, inside the orbit of Mercury, and loops back up, passing the Earth, as it heads up and out of our Solar system.
A trajectory, I note that, gave it a good look at Mercury, the Earth, and none of the other planets in our Solar system.
As a many decade’s long, avid reader of Science Fiction I am pretty familiar with scenarios in which some sort of Interstellar probe is detected in our Solar System, and some of the characteristics that would be used to determine what the object was.
Until I read their paper (way too much math here that I don’t understand) and the comments of the two Harvard Astrophysicists who proposed that this object, dubbed “Oumuamua,” could be an Interstellar probe, I didn’t realize that the depiction of it that I had seen on several different sites on the Internet was just an artist’s conception, and not an actual—and very detailed—image of what looked like a very substantial object.
But, we apparently have no actual, detailed image of the object itself or, at least, anything other than what would probably be just a blob of light.
Moreover, at the speed and in the direction it is traveling, Harvard Astrophysicists Bialy and Loeb say that it is too late to get any useful telescopic images of Oumuamua, or to send a powered rocket to investigate it.
So, in trying to determine just exactly with this object is, scientists have to rely on other things.
That’s where the arguments of Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb, two scientists from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, their reasons for thinking that this might be an Interstellar probe, look like they might well be worth considering.**
As I understand it, one of the chief ways of determining if an object in space is under some sort of intelligent control is to determine if it does not follow the trajectory that an object would normally follow if it were under the influence of gravity and Solar wind in our Solar System but, instead, the object changes speed/course.
And Oumuamua changed its speed/course.
Such a course change could be accounted for if such an object—say, a comet that, in moving closer to the Sun, had some of its frozen gasses melt and escape as vapor—released gasses that would change its course, push it onto a new trajectory.
However, if such gasses were to be ejected they would have changed Omumuamua’s rate to rotation, and that didn’t happen.
Moreover, scientists were able to check, and found no absorption lines indicating such gaseous emissions in the vicinity of this object, nor did Oumuamua have any cometary tail.
However, Bialy and Loeb do say that it is possible that such a change could be accounted for by pressure from Solar wind.
Oumuamua’s reflectivity also changes in ways that indicate that it could be a very thin—paper thin, pancake shaped disc that is tumbling.
Reading their arguments, it appears that—based on past observations of other comets—this is a highly unusual configuration.
If I understand what they are saying, their calculations also indicate that an object as paper thin as this object appears to be could possibly withstand traveling through Interstellar space and remain intact.
One speculation by Bialy and Loeb is that, if Oumuamua is not a full probe, it could be a discarded “lightsail” from one.
But, we shall never know.
** See https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf
Nonapod–If they were so far ahead of us technologically they probably couldn’t care less if we were able to observe their probe.
What could we effectively do, wave to it as it passes by?
If it was an Alien probe, just be glad it apparently wasn’t of the Von Neumann variety, and started gobbling up everything in sight to make countless replicates of itself.
Oh, please, lets not go off the rails on this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wICOlaQOpM0
“Oumuamua” – I love it. You can spell it anyway you like and nobody would notice.
Earth has been a valuable and well-developed planet for at least a couple hundred million years, and it’s easy to argue for several times that. During this time nobody has come here in any substantial way. Not a single smidgen of evidence … assorted authors and notions notwithstanding.
My working line is that on the way to the stars, something unexpected comes to light, and as a result of this discovery, virtually nobody ever goes to the stars. The future is not in the stars. You can’t go to the stars in a meaningful, successful way, without being permanently derailed or side-tracked by something we don’t know about yet, but will inevitable encounter.
Then too, there are the real hazards of interstellar and intergalactic space. Gamma ray bursts, for example, will sterilize organic planets at a distance of several thousand lightyears. There is a menagerie of ways that Nature smites very large swaths of the galaxy, repeatedly. It could well be that thus far, we’ve just been extraordinarily lucky.
And Oumuamua changed its speed/course.
That, or our original calculations were a little bit off, and better ones “revealed” a course correction that actually was nothing of the sort.
This is the standard operating procedure for Global Warming Scariness (TM), whereby ancient and thoroughly inaccurate readings are pressed into service to prove a recent change, which actually is nothing of the sort.
I accept the existence of saucers,
I concede there’s a case
To be made for believing that something’s achieving
the conquest of space;
I find it completely convincing
Whenever I hear
That creatures from Venus were recently seen
As a spaceship drew near:
And yet there’s a problem remaining
That baffles me still.
I’m not disagreeing that some super being
Can wander at will
From one universe to another-
But if it be thus why on earth (so to speak)
Should he bother to seek
Any contact with us?”
— Anthony Brode
A meme making the rounds: “Aliens probably lock their doors when they pass earth.”
I’m extremely skeptical of the alien probe idea. Unless it originated within our solar system (now that would be a discovery!), it’s been on its way for probably hundreds of years. I’ve long been inclined to think that unless some sort of hyperspace-type workaround for the speed of light limitation actually exists, interstellar travel is highly unlikely, for us or anybody else.
I have a very informed opinion on this subject.
My opinion is directed by many years of study of things going on around me.
It is my highly refined opinion that I don’t know.
Atlantic quotes Loeb: “The only thing that came to my mind is that maybe the light from the sun, as it bounces off its surface, gives it an extra push. It’s just like a wind bouncing off a sail on a sailboat. So we checked that and found that you need the thickness of the object to be less than a millimetre in order for that to work. If it is indeed less than a millimetre thick, if it is pushed by the sunlight, then it is maybe a light sail, and I could not think of any natural process that would make a light sail. It is much more likely that it is being made by artificial means, by a technological civilization.”
The only reasonable interpretation is that Ouroboros (or Jörmungandr) sheds its skin every couple of million years, and this is a fragment.
Speaking of, I’ve had a copy of The Worm Ouroboros for over 30 years, and still haven’t gotten around to reading it. At this point I’m not sure if I’ve unpacked it yet. :>(
It turns out that there’s a copy, text only, to read or download at
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/two/ .
I’ve never been particularly impressed by the idea that we are alone in the Universe—a one off, a never to be repeated accident of molecular combination or that, if we are not alone in the Universe, that the distances between the various solar systems mean that travel between one and another would be scientifically and/or economically impractical.
Or the idea that, while civilizations might have arisen somewhere in the Universe, in our Galaxy, most—if not all of them—eventually imploded, died out, and did so before they were able to send out the kinds of automated probes or manned space ships that might reach other solar systems, like ours.
This assumes that, today, we know all that there is to know about the laws and forces that govern the Universe, how it is constructed and functions, and are aware of all the forces and elements in play; that all scientific progress has been made.
That we can say, with certainty, that this or that development is impossible, and cannot possibly take place.
The Universe is many billions of years old, with many billions of years to go.
This view assumes that, during all those billions of years, some entity, somewhere, would not arise, that it would not have the desire or necessity to, nor could or would develop some method to travel those distances.
Given the scientific progress made in just the last few decades, this view seems remarkably shortsighted.
As for the first idea, in the last few years the estimate for the number of stars, in just our galaxy alone, has grown tremendously and, as well, the estimate for the percentage of those stars that have planets that could potentially harbor life of some kind has also grown exponentially as well; scientists are finding more and more “exoplanets” on an almost daily basis.
In addition, the continuing and ever expanding discovery of “extremophile” forms of life means that the conditions under which life—of many different kinds—can develop and survive are far broader than we used to think they were i.e. life can develop in far more harsh and varied environments and thus, potentially, in many more star systems, planets, and other bodies than we used to think it could.
Add it all up, and I think that the chances of their being other life in the Universe, in our Galaxy, in our stellar neighborhood, are pretty good and that, moreover, methods have very likely been found to travel between the stars.
Thus, the chances of us having been visited, or to be visited in the future are very good.
Or, perhaps, we will someday be the ones doing the visiting.
Snow on Pine:
Are you familiar with the Fermi Paradox?
P.S.–I also try to keep in mind that the boundaries of the little perceptual box we are in do not define, much less encompass the totality of the Universe.
That, as we are wired, we are limited–in what we can see, hear, and feel–to things on just a small section of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum that extends both above and below our little section.
That we are limited, as well, in perceiving a few lower dimensions as Reality, while Quantum Physics posits 11 dimensions to make things work, and there may be even more and higher dimensions beyond those 11.
Neo–My point above was that we now have better–and far higher–estimates for the number of stars in the Galaxy, and for the number of them that could potentially have exoplanets, capable of developing life and, moreover, we now have proof that life can arise and exist in far harsher environments than we previously thought it could and, thus, potentially in many more solar systems than we thought in 1950, when Fermi asked the question, (If there are intelligent aliens able to fly to other stars) “Where are they?; that the numbers are orders of magnitude higher that they were thought to be back in 1950.
It also looks like the estimates for the factors i.e. the wild ass guesses, used in calculating the 1961 “Drake Equation” may well be a lot different than they were thought to be by Drake.
Thus, the probabilities of some sort of intelligent life arising in the Universe are a lot higher than they were thought to be 60 or 70 years ago.
As my last post indicated, it is also quite possible that, if we have been visited or were to be visited, we would not necessarily perceive or recognize the fact.
Snow on Pine:
Fermi’s Paradox didn’t rest on low probabilities or numbers of possibilities. In fact, it rests on “the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates” of life existing elsewhere.
And of course we might not have recognized visitors. But that’s not what the Paradox rests on, either. The following is part of it:
There is no question that we know very little, and of course we don’t know—and may never know—whether we are alone in the universe.
There are plenty of excellent reasons to expect that intelligent species with technological civilizations are really, really *extremely* rare. If there is a long list of features that a planet must have in order to host such a development – for example, a very high iron content molten core (so the magnetic field is strong enough to block cosmic radiation), just the perfectly balanced amount of moisture to allow large oceans *and* dry land, just the right temperature range / distance from the star, an extremely stable almost perfectly circular orbit, maybe even a double planetary system (which the earth / moon basically is, because of the moon’s very large size compared to the main planet), who knows what else? And then on top of all that it seems to require at least 3+ billion years with no events quite cataclysmic enough to totally extinguish life.
It’s not clear that all of those features are really needed to allow a species like us to develop, but none of them can be ruled out as necessities since we only have one example. There may be a myriad of other requirements that we don’t even know about, as well. Some of the requirements might themselves be very rare, making a system that has everything needed even more unlikely.
The scale of the universe seems to pretty much guarantee that there *must* be other species like us, but if they are rare enough, that same scale works against us ever discovering each other, let alone having any sort of meaningful interaction. What if the closest one is somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy? Are we going to communicate with them by waiting four million years for the responses?
Another probable factor is that, although the universe is something like 13-18 billion years old, it requires many generations of stars to accumulate enough heavy elements to produce rocky planetary systems. It is possible that we may just be one of the earliest species to develop this way. Someone has to be first, eh?
These are the best answers to the Fermi Paradox that I’ve heard so far. It would not be surprising to me if they one day find that the universe is positively teeming with life, but almost all of it is like bacteria/archaea and blue-green algae, as it was on Earth for about the full first half of life’s existence here.
“It’s not clear that all of those features are really needed to allow a species like us to develop, but none of them can be ruled out as necessities since we only have one example.” NJ Mike
Indeed.
“Quantum Physics posits 11 dimensions to make things work…”
No, while various “string-theory” offshoots posit such dimensions to make THEMSELVES “work”, quantum mechanics works just fine in describing reality using the 3 or maybe 4 dimensions we already have. Quantum physics perfectly predicts the behavior of the subatomic particles of reality – it’s just that aspects of it are a bit counterintuitive.
Latter-day Saint scriptures include an extended version of Genesis, called (not surprisingly) The Book of Moses, which includes a passage that has been interpreted as implying that there is, indeed, human life on other planets.
https://www.lds.org/new-era/1971/04/people-on-other-worlds?lang=eng
MOSES 1
27 And it came to pass, as the voice was still speaking, Moses cast his eyes and beheld the earth, yea, even all of it; and there was not a particle of it which he did not behold, discerning it by the Spirit of God.
28 And he beheld also the inhabitants thereof, and there was not a soul which he beheld not; and he discerned them by the Spirit of God; and their numbers were great, even numberless as the sand upon the sea shore.
29 And he beheld many lands; and each land was called earth, and there were inhabitants on the face thereof.
30 And it came to pass that Moses called upon God, saying: Tell me, I pray thee, why these things are so, and by what thou madest them?
31 And behold, the glory of the Lord was upon Moses, so that Moses stood in the presence of God, and talked with him face to face. And the Lord God said unto Moses: For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me.
32 And by the word of my power, have I created them, which is mine Only Begotten Son, who is full of grace and truth.
33 And worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten.
34 And the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many.
35 But only an account of this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, give I unto you. For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.
36 And it came to pass that Moses spake unto the Lord, saying: Be merciful unto thy servant, O God, and tell me concerning this earth, and the inhabitants thereof, and also the heavens, and then thy servant will be content.
37 And the Lord God spake unto Moses, saying: The heavens, they are many, and they cannot be numbered unto man; but they are numbered unto me, for they are mine.
38 And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words.
39 For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.
40 And now, Moses, my son, I will speak unto thee concerning this earth upon which thou standest; and thou shalt write the things which I shall speak.
…
Brigham Young has said, “… there never was a time when there were not Gods and worlds, and men were not passing through the same ordeals that we are now passing through. That course has been from all eternity, and it is and will be to all eternity.”
To paraphrase something I once read: a paradox is a paradox because SOMETHING IS WRONG with our thinking about one (or both) of the two parts of it!
So when you read that a) life should be everywhere in the galaxy, but b) we have never seen evidence of it beyond ourselves, you must realize that this formulation only dares to challenge the veracity of a), while implicitly accepting b) as proven. That necessarily assumes that among the (at least) tens of thousands of reports of things that could be interpreted as evidence of extraterrestrial life, EVERY SINGLE ONE MUST BE FALSE for the Fermi Paradox to be an actual paradox. Fermi was of course aware of this when he famously asked “So where is everybody?”, but few people who opine about his paradox today seem to fully understand its true nature.
For distant galaxies, travel times may well explain the lack of alien visits to Earth, but a sufficiently advanced civilization could potentially be observable over a significant fraction of the size of the observable universe. –neo’s quote on The Fermi Paradox
That bothers me too. An ant crawling on the ground might not know what a shopping center is but couldn’t a somewhat intelligent ant notice the shopping center wasn’t part of the usual landscape.
When I look up into the sky or peruse a decent star atlas, I see wilderness — beautiful, awesome wilderness, but wilderness.
Which doesn’t mean no one is out there, but the Kardashev Type II, much less Type III, civilizations don’t seem to exist in the billions and billions. We haven’t observed one yet and we’ve been looking.
A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.
A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet’s parent star (the most popular hypothetical concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet(s)).
A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
I wouldn’t be surprised if intelligent technological life is sufficiently rare that it occurs less than once per galaxy and who knows how long that life burns before destroying itself, being destroyed, or fading out.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if unicellular life is reasonably common. Earth life remained stuck in that phase for a few billion years before somehow making the jump to multicellular life.
“There are plenty of excellent reasons to expect that intelligent species with technological civilizations are really, really *extremely* rare.” – NJMike
And the amazing thing about really, really *extremely* large numbers, like the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, is that anything that CAN happen, WILL happen. And it will happen a really, really *extremely* large number of times.
I would be much more interested in a Mars probe digging into the Martian soil to see if Archea-type organisms are present. This is the most likely life form we will find in the universe, at least until we have a system to get to stars.
Mike K: Likewise. I then ask whether those organisms are based on DNA as we know it. I consider that quite possible.
I lean toward panspermia — the theory life on earth developed elsewhere and arrived here via meteors or comets or something. Critics correctly note that panspermia doesn’t answer the ultimate question of the origin of life, but pushes the question back further away in time and space.
I take the point, but I have a hard time believing the sophisticated DNA mechanism could develop in a few hundred million years, while the Earth had barely cooled and was still heavily bombarded with meteors.
However, maybe life is a strongly emergent property of planets. Maybe. I find it easier to believe it took DNA a few billion years to emerge somewhere else before reaching the earth and fertilizing it.
When I was nine I saw a UFO, though no doubt it wasn’t. Of course it couldn’t have been. But maybe it was? Somehow I remain optimistic.
“There are plenty of excellent reasons to expect that intelligent species with technological civilizations are really, really *extremely* rare.” – NJMike
And the amazing thing about really, really *extremely* large numbers, like the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, is that anything that CAN happen, WILL happen. — Ray Van Dune
There are plenty of stars in the galaxy but not what I would call extremely large numbers of stars. Wiki says “100-400 billion stars.” The current US federal deficit is nearly $800 billion dollars and the debt around $22 trillion dollars.
When I was a kid and Sagan did his “billions and billions” shtick I was impressed. Happily, our top men in Washington have put such trifling numbers into perspective.
As a child I saw a UFO, though no doubt it wasn’t. Of course it couldn’t have been. But maybe it was? Somehow I remain optimistic.
Esther: If it was an object, unidentified and flying, it was a UFO.
I saw a UFO when I was in the sixth grade. I was an amateur astronomer. I knew it wasn’t a plane, a satellite, a meteor, the planet Venus or anything with a conventional explanation. I got the other kids in the neighborhood to see it. I read an account of it the next morning in the local newspaper.
I saw something and so did others. But it didn’t land and its occupants didn’t come out and talk to me, assuming it was a craft being piloted by aliens.
There’s an argument on the internet that UFOs stopped being seen once everyone had a camera in their cell phones. Untrue. People are still reporting strange lights in the sky, but we don’t know what those lights are. Newspapers and authorities stopped caring because we don’t have answers and the lights don’t seem hostile.
I must say, if one sees a UFO and takes it seriously, it’s a crisis. One asks, or at least I did, what is reality, how do we know what we know, and how much should we trust our authorities.
I never got over seeing that UFO.
Sagan’s response is I must have been hallucinating or lying. By Occam’s Razor that’s an understandable response, if one is merely listening to someone else’s account. I can’t dispute Sagan in terms of logic.
But I saw it and other people saw it with me. Occam’s Razor doesn’t help me, unless I want to live in a world where I can’t trust anything I see because I might be hallucinating.
I believe UFOs have an explanation. I don’t know how weird that explanation might be, though I doubt it’s alien beings flying super-alloy saucers out to say hello or study us.
—-
Comment re-edit working tonight.
The astronomers are biased in their belief and hope of the existence of intelligent life out there somewhere. That is clear from the naming and the Harvards’ speculation. Of course they are rent-seekers; they want more financial support to pursue this sort of “as yet unexplained” aberration.
Building/sending a less than 1mm thick thing to sweep interstellar space (for data of what sort?) makes little sense in the absence of other modes of interstellar searching/signaling.
See us humans. We can build solar wind sails but we also emit radio signals, have radio telescopes… and the yield from out there is…nada.
Creation, as in the Big Bang, needs a Creator. Thus I am happy with the Creation story of Genesis.
True, then they could mark down system PX-273-45-12 as “mostly harmless”. On the other hand, if we had destroyed the probe, or merely boarded it and copied all it’s data, they could mark our system as “advanced, potentially dangerous, avoid if possible”.
Basically, run.
“And the amazing thing about really, really *extremely* large numbers, like the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, is that anything that CAN happen, WILL happen.” — Ray Van Dune
Well, yes, but let’s pretend there is roughly one technological species per large galaxy. That would mean the universe could have a good 100 billion such species. But, if most galaxies only have one, they would never be able to really interact with each other. We can’t rule out the possibility of some kind of superluminal capability for a sufficiently advanced civilization of course, but I doubt that faster-than-light tech is ever going to progress beyond the sci fi plot device level. (I’d love to be wrong, though).
“Thus, the chances of us having been visited, or to be visited in the future are very good.”
Sadly no. Not very good at all. The gross number of stars is irrelevant. It’s the position that counts and that doesn’t count for much.
Fermi’s question persists in the absence of any proof whatsoever of life elsewhere: “Where is everybody?
Huxley, when I saw the UFO I believed it and still believe it, even though it doesn’t make logical sense. Hello, middle of Brooklyn 1969 and no one else saw it?
In fact, my mother was standing right next to me, we were taking out the garbage. I was practically hyperventilating with excitement pointing, “Ma! Look, look! There’s a UFO!” but she weirdly refused to raise her eyes. So frustrating.
My mother was definitely weird in general… but her refusal to simply raise her eyes to look gave me the idea that UFOs are somehow able to actively repel observation.
Anyway, that’s my theory.
Personally, I believe reality in general is a sort of hallucination. After all, the only way we perceive anything is through our one faulty brain. Needless to say, I enjoy epistemology:-)
My reading of Sagan is that he believed in UFO’s, he was just rigorous about examining proof.
Esther: I don’t know what to say about your mother’s lack of interest. I was able to summon four or five neighborhood kids including my sister for our UFO sighting.
John Lennon and his mistress saw a UFO off their New York apartment terrace. They called the police who told them to calm down and assured them others had reported the sighting too.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/703116/I-can-t-believe-it-Bizarre-UFO-sighting-John-Lennon-had-in-New-York-42-years-ago-TODAY
That’s the thing about sightings. What do you do? Maybe you tell others. Maybe you call the police or newspapers. But the UFO is gone and almost never leaves traces.
My take is UFOs are primarily interacting with consciousness. Jacques Vallee, on whom the LaCombe character in “Close Encounters” was based, has written well on this angle. Recommended if you ever wish to pursue the subject further.
Carl Sagan, as I read him, believed in extraterrestrial intelligence, but considered UFOs to be fringe craziness which ought be suppressed lest it distract from rationality and the true scientific investigation of alien intelligence.
Huxley, your idea that UFO’s could be interacting with our consciousness seems plausible to me. Certainly entertaining! I will definitely look up Jacques Vallee, thanks!
My favorite Sagan story is that John Lilly, the notorious dolphin-LSD-Ketamine-sensory deprivation tank scientist, was a friend of Sagan’s and at one point Lilly was concerned Sagan was smoking too much marijuana!
That’s rather like the story of Keith Richards being concerned his musician friend, Gram Parsons, was doing too much heroin.
Pro-tip: If Keith Richards is running your drug intervention, you are in big trouble. Parsons OD’d in 1973 at the age of 26.
“Carl Sagan and Pot”
https://hightimes.com/news/carl-sagan-and-pot/
God bless Carl Sagan for that.
Esther: I’ve read most of Vallee. Vallee got his start when he was working at a French observatory, recorded a UFO sighting, and his supervisor told him to delete it.
He wrote several books on UFOs. It’s tough to summarize Vallee or pick a best book. As a start I would recommend “Messengers of Deception,” which goes into psychological/political angles.
The flying-saucer UFO community didn’t appreciate Vallee had gone off message on the aliens-spacecraft narrative they preferred.
I met Vallee in 1983 when I worked at my first software startup. Vallee had an office down the hall. His Ph.D was in computers and he had morphed from an astronomer to UFO researcher to venture capitalist. I told him I appreciated his work, shook his hand and that was it.
The Drake Equation: xkcd is on the case. ;>)
https://xkcd.com/384/
.
The Drake Equation and Fermi’s paradox both use probabilities — that is, “probabilities” in the mathematical sense — that are whatever anybody wants to plug into them, basically.
Forbes has an article, “The Drake Equation Is Broken; Here’s How To Fix It,” that’s interesting and does point out some of the parameters that with improved technology might be a little narrower than just “whatever X pulled out of his hat,” but in its conclusion it still relies on probabilities, which at best only suggest leads to follow in investigations of realities — of what is or is not.
And a good discussion that points out similar problems with the Fermi Paradox points out that
Messed up the html blockquote tags above, and Edit’s AWOL again. :>(
It’s a fascinating, intellectual exercise, but equations, theorems and postulates are almost certainly off, way off. If we look at life on Earth during the single cell days, what equation tell us the odds of a porpoise evolving? All the random, events that transpired over millions of years (and likely events that didn’t transpire) would be impossible to predict, or quantify.
The tyranny of numbers tells one, probabilistically intelligent life MUST exist elsewhere in the Universe (as others have pointed out), but nature and chance are not slaves to probability.
I’m very open to the idea, but I also think it’s entirely possible Earth is the only planet where living things evolved to build machines that escape their planet’s gravity, or send communication to space via radiation. So many things had to happen to get us here, and many of them are of no interest, or even antithetical to natural selection. Biology doesn’t particularly view intelligence as a great advantage. Thinking takes a lot of energy.
Electrity has been in the natural world long before homo sapiens evolved, yet 99.9999% of our ancestors made no attempt to understand its nature. So even if a planet evolves life with an intelligence to comprehend the natural world and a physique to manipulate nature (porpoises are smart, but they’ll never build a simple telegraph, or even mine copper to transmit the signals), it’s very possible the innovation to get to space travel may never take place.
Pharoah’s Generals in 3,000 B.C. knew everything Washington did about moving men and horses in 1776. You could send either in a time machine in either direction and almost nothing would be different. 5,000 years of civilizations, cultures, religions, monarchs, republics, wars, famines, pandemics.. and no science approaching anything capable of leaving our atmosphere. Then we started down that path. For no obvious reason. To quote Faraday, “Of what use is a newborn child?”
I’m not convinced that if life evolves it’s an inexorable march towards intelligence and discovery. If you take a pure, statistical approach one would have to conclude trilobites have done much better on Earth than humans. Nature, Evolution, God?… loved trilobites.
I don’t know why I didn’t just fix it in the comment. Here:
And a good discussion that points out similar problems with the Fermi Paradox points out that
is “The Fermi Paradox,” at
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
.
Rufus, plenty to chew on there.
Julie in Chicago–Thank you for the link to this very lucid exploration of the Fermi Paradox and the ideas surrounding it.
What Snow on Pine wrote, very thorough. And, as the xkcd strip someone posted lampoons; it’s all wild-*ss speculation. I tend to side with Sagan. A species capable to engineer vehicles to transport the huge distances required would almost certainly have no reason to fear us, and would likely contact us openly.
Ray Kurzweill, the computer scientist behind OCR and MIDI, speculates about what he calls the coming Singularity, in which humanity ascends to near-Godhood using the advances of artificial intelligence/robotics, nanotechnology and genetic manipulation.
In “The Singularity is Near” Kurzweill revisits the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox then argues humanity may well be the first species to achieve sufficiently advanced technology to reach the stars. He argues that technology advances not linearly but exponentially. Thus advances come faster and faster until the possibilities are beyond our current understanding, i.e. the Singularity.
So his argument is once we reach lift-off, we will explore our galaxy rather quickly in a matter of a few hundred-thousand years. To Kurzweill the Fermi Paradox means we are probably the first.
Kurzweill is worth reading. I think he is overly optimistic about the speed of advancement but I can’t discount him entirely.
Another reason to read Kurzweill is that he sees the Universe as a process of evolving complexity and intelligence.
As such, humanity is a marvelous, yet natural, inevitable outgrowth of the universe’s functioning. This is so much of an improvement over the environmentalist attitude that humanity is a cancer plaguing the planet and the world would probably be better off without us.
Regarding the Drake Equation… Before his passing Michael Crichton noted the issue with it — it’s just a freaking bullshit speculation, with zero basis for evaluating most of its terms.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
http://www.crichton-official.com:80/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
I highly recommend that one AND his speech (nothing to do with this thread, it’s just a great speech),
Complexity Theory and Environmental Management
http://www.crichton-official.com:80/speech-complexity.html