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Old 09-03-2007, 05:31 AM
factfinder factfinder is offline
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Cool Is there Intelligent Life in Space ???

If we are sitting here on this planet fighting among ourselves for lack of any better distraction, then perhaps,there are lots of planets all over the universe where intelligent beings are either boring themselves as we are, or are trying to establisgh contact with other intelligent beings on other planets … If we eliminate the frozen planets and planets sterilized by heat (this is not to imply that no life would be found outside the so-called habitable zone as there may be living things existing under the hardest physical conditions) , there are about ten thousand million planets in the galaxy for life … so let´s assume that the intelligent life is abundant and occurs on every planet. In this case the average distance from one intelligent community to the next is 10 light yrs, for comparison , the nearest star is about one light year away … However 10 light yrs is a very long distance - a radio signal would take 10 yrs to cover it , so communicating with someone as far as 10 light yrs away would not be like a telephone conversation …
The basis of speculations about intelligent life in space has always included the possibility that contact with life on our planet has already been made by some more highly evolved society from elsewhere in the universe … Let´s suppose that a technical civilization greatly in advance of the present one on Earth visits us every hundred thousand yrs or so to see if anything of interest is happening lately …
Now in earnest : The question to be posed is : Has the Earth in the past been visited by intelligent beings from the region of the star Sirius /the Dog Star ??? (see the book the Sirius Star )
The entire question is framed in terms of an African tribe named the Dogon who live in Mali (the former French Sudan ).The Dogon are in possession of the information concerning the Sirius Star System …(the information was possessed by the ancient Egyptians as well, the Dogons could have preserved ancien Egyptian mysteries in their culture ) ….
The Dogons preserve a tradition of what seems to have been an extraterrestrial contact. The intelligent beings of outer space landed in Africa,told specific informatuion to a West African tribe, then returned to space and left the rest of the world alone …
The French anthropologists in the middle of 19th cent. described the cosmological theories of the Dogons :“ The Dogons regard the star which revolves round Sirius and is actually named Digitaria, as the smallest and heaviest of all the stars … The star which goes round Sirius is the white dwarf Sirius B …
It was the smallest and the heaviest type of star then known as neutron stars and black holes were not much discussed and pulsars had not yet been discovered . So it is a most curious allusion from a supposedly primitive tribe !!! ( In Mali there are also large fields of very strange stones not coming from the Earth and in such quantities that the people are building houses of them … le Monde published photographs of them last year )
How men with no instruments at their disposal could know the movements and certain characteristics sof the star which is not scarcely visible but it is totally invisible ??? and was only discovered with the use of telescope …
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky , the reason of its brightness being that it is large (bigger than our sun) and close … Once an astronomer was looking hard at Sirius over a period of time and got furious because it wasn´t sitting still but it was wobbling … he had a difficult time understanding why but he finally concluded that an extremely heavy and massive star going around S. could make it wobble that way – the only trouble was that there wasn´t any large star going around S. Instead, there turned out to be a tiny little thing going around it every 50 yrs (the Dogons also knew this „50 yrs“ ) So S. came to be called S. A and the little thing S. B …
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Old 09-03-2007, 05:48 AM
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Well, as to your origional question posed "Is there intelligent life in space?" I guess I would have to say that chances are there is. The universe is so large, and planets so abundent that I figure there's a pretty decent chance something is out there. However, I doubt we will make any contact, or even find anything in our lifetimes.
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Old 09-03-2007, 06:48 AM
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The Drake Equation was developed by Frank Drake in 1961 as a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy.
The Drake Equation is:

N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL
The equation can really be looked at as a number of questions:

N* represents the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Question: How many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?
Answer: Current estimates are 100 billion.

··········

fp is the fraction of stars that have planets around them.
Question: What percentage of stars have planetary systems?
Answer: Current estimates range from 20% to 50%.

··········

ne is the number of planets per star that are capable of sustaining life.
Question: For each star that does have a planetary system, how many planets are capable of sustaining life?
Answer: Current estimates range from 1 to 5.

··········

fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves.
Question: On what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining life does life actually evolve?
Answer: Current estimates range from 100% (where life can evolve it will) down to close to 0%.

··········

fi is the fraction of fl where intelligent life evolves.
Question: On the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves intelligent life?
Answer: Estimates range from 100% (intelligence is such a survival advantage that it will certainly evolve) down to near 0%.

··········

fc is the fraction of fi that communicate.
Question: What percentage of intelligent races have the means and the desire to communicate?
Answer: 10% to 20%

··········

fL is fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.
Question: For each civilization that does communicate, for what fraction of the planet's life does the civilization survive?
Answer: This is the toughest of the questions. If we take Earth as an example, the expected lifetime of our Sun and the Earth is roughly 10 billion years. So far we've been communicating with radio waves for less than 100 years. How long will our civilization survive? Will we destroy ourselves in a few years like some predict or will we overcome our problems and survive for millennia? If we were destroyed tomorrow the answer to this question would be 1/100,000,000th. If we survive for 10,000 years the answer will be 1/1,000,000th.

When all of these variables are multiplied together we come up with:
N = the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.

··········

The real value of the Drake Equation is not in the answer itself, but the questions that are prompted when attempting to come up with an answer. Obviously there is a tremendous amount of guesswork involved when filling in the variables. As we learn more from astronomy, biology, and other sciences, we'll be able to better estimate the answers to the above questions.
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Old 09-03-2007, 09:34 AM
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J.Locke777 I quite agree ... Xotica you are wonderful , thank you very much for making me wiser ...
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Old 09-23-2007, 01:11 AM
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I think there is definitly a possibility for life out there, and more then likely theyve been here, though i highly doubt there abducting people, especially the people who claim to be abducted
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Old 09-23-2007, 10:05 PM
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Why abduct

When you can make them at home in a lab
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Old 09-23-2007, 11:41 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vladward8 View Post
When you can make them at home in a lab
is that a were creation of alien topic started?
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Old 09-25-2007, 11:48 PM
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Statistically, so-called intelligent life likely does exist elsewhere in the universe. Amost certainly there are many other planets beyond our solar system that host life. However, if there is senscient life somewhere out there there is a surprising lack of concrete evidence of its existence. All things considered, if there are several planets with intelligent life at least one of them should have progressed to the point of using some form of radio transmissions and possibly established themselves on other planets. Yet all the efforts to detect extrasolar radio transmissions to date have been strikingly unsuccessful. Other than the natural sounds and signals generated by stars and other bodies, space is hauntingly silent.

There is one school of thought that speculates that intellegent life on another planet would likely follow much the same pattern as has happened on earth. It would progress through primative stages learning to tap into stores of natural energy such as coal, oil and natural gas gaining in numbers and power as time passed. However, every planet would have a finite ability to meet the energy and other resource demands of a civilized specie. Even though the intellegent life specie might reach the point where it could begin to colonize other worlds, the host home world would be exhausted before this step could be carried out. In other words, they probably would be faced with the same limits that we are now experiencing.
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Old 09-25-2007, 11:59 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wheeldog View Post
Statistically, so-called intelligent life likely does exist elsewhere in the universe. Amost certainly there are many other planets beyond our solar system that host life. However, if there is senscient life somewhere out there there is a surprising lack of concrete evidence of its existence. All things considered, if there are several planets with intelligent life at least one of them should have progressed to the point of using some form of radio transmissions and possibly established themselves on other planets. Yet all the efforts to detect extrasolar radio transmissions to date have been strikingly unsuccessful. Other than the natural sounds and signals generated by stars and other bodies, space is hauntingly silent.

There is one school of thought that speculates that intellegent life on another planet would likely follow much the same pattern as has happened on earth. It would progress through primative stages learning to tap into stores of natural energy such as coal, oil and natural gas gaining in numbers and power as time passed. However, every planet would have a finite ability to meet the energy and other resource demands of a civilized specie. Even though the intellegent life specie might reach the point where it could begin to colonize other worlds, the host home world would be exhausted before this step could be carried out. In other words, they probably would be faced with the same limits that we are now experiencing.
But how do we know that they havent already figured out an answer to planets bieng finite?..

did you know that scientists discovered a way, so that if you move fast enough (we're talking extremely fast) through space, it would create a vortex and time would freeze around you?..

leading to the theory that intelligent life on other planets ahs already figured this out, and can travel through space unaged, visiting other planets sucuh as ours..

or our ancestors, as i believe.
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Old 09-26-2007, 02:21 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rodog View Post
This is a wikipedia link to the most earth like planet ever discovered. It's recent and is only 20 LYs away. Earth like planets have never been detected before because they cannot be visibly drrn due to a star's glare. In order to detect an exoplanet they have to calculate a star's wobble which would indicate a planet is tugging on it through gravity. Smaller planets have less gravity so they are harder to detect. Since the discovery of this one however more will most likely be found soon. Also this planet is predicted to be the right distance from it's sun to have liquid water which is considered a neccessity for life as we know it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_d
did u see the mars special about the recent fluid flow on mars, they thought it couldnt happen but pictures they took months ago, and pictures they took after that show that something had flowed through there
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