/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10715555
Firstly because of the lack of evidence of their existence and secondly knowledge is accumulating at the greatest speed in history whilst there is a potential gain there is also the potential of us dying off its a bad tradeoff because on one hand is potential knowledge on the other hand is our end it's just not worth it even if aliens did exist.

>>10715557
>Firstly because of the lack of evidence of their existence and secondly knowledge is accumulating at the greatest speed in history whilst there is a potential gain there is also the potential of us dying off its a bad tradeoff because on one hand is potential knowledge on the other hand is our end it's just not worth it even if aliens did exist.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Dude, what the fuck do we do if all other life in the universe is like Halo's Flood or John Carpenter's The Thing?

>>10715582
Climate change, nuclear war, and food shortages are all much more likely to fuck us over than an alien invasion.

>>10715578
That is true however that statement means absolutely nothing when the question was
>Why is communication with aliens not our top priority as a species?
Why is this board incapable of context?

>>10715584
Yeah. Well I guess I'd rather get nuked or plastic'd to death than THINGified/assimilated by some biological organism worse than any concept of demons/devils.

>>10715555
Besides low proof of actually existing there is no guarantee they would understand us or we understand them
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/Xenopsychology.htm

>>10715555
>Why is communication with aliens not our top priority as a species?

What aliens???

Why not say mankind's number one task should be harnessing dragon fire to make cheap electricity.

>>10715584

>Climate change

Wow, maybe sea levels will rise by a few meters over a century, the monsoons will be diverted killing at MAXIMUM a few hundred million (Bangladesh included)

>Food shortages

You know, this sorts itself out automatically, as a brief look at Chinese/Soviet history would reveal. Even then, we produce way more food than we need. Look how much meat we eat, look how obese people are. Food shortages are a non-issue.

Nuclear war is actually a serious threat because it's sudden and devastating. 1/4.

Aliens however are more of a threat. We don't understand the threat, which is concerning. We know their technology is well ahead of ours. If they wanted, they could probably wipe us out with a minimum of effort. A sane race would be developing the technology to defend itself, we worry about ice slowly melting.

>>10715582
Statistically alien life is most likely to be the kind that grows and expands fast and kills off other types.
>>10715555
1st contact with aliens will be a deathmatch and we aren't ready yet.
Extremely unlikely that aliens and humans will have complementary knowledge gaps and have mutual interests served by an exchange of information.

>>10715557
Aliens must be good, if they exist. Any sufficiently advanced race that is not pacifistic would exterminate itself.

>>10715805
Prove it

>>10715555

Countries on Earth barely manage to communicate coherently with each other and you expect everyone just hold hands and phone ET.

>>10715555
>Why is communication with aliens not our top priority as a species?

Exoplanetology couldn't even get funding to look for proof that other planets exist outside of our solar system, even though it's obvious that they must exist (and we know that they do, in great abundance, thanks to data gathering missions from planet-hunting space telescopes). It's less obvious that alien life exists somewhere out there, and there's going to be much greater hurdles involved in finding enough evidence for it that missions will be approved to find and categorize it. Once that has happened, we can begin trying to solve the problem of communicating with whatever is (or might be) out there.

>>10715555
And why would we even be able to understand eachother? Given that we both evolved, we can assume some basics like understanding what space is (as in, the mental conception not scientific or anything), but there's no reason for us to share enough to be able to exchange 'scientific knowledge' or if 'science' which we have a specific product of our history would even exist (doesn't mean they don't have advanced technology either).

>>10715555
because if they exist they will probly wont need our tech
first we need to achive the speed of light and then look beyond it
maybe then the aliens will give a fuck about us

>>10715555
Going off the theory with the beginning of life starting on this planet from a crash asteroid crash landing here so who knows maybe life rocks were sent out in to space at livable planets to allow them to colonize the systems with life by planet hoping. So maybe they just haven't got here or died on the way.

We also know for a fact that there is planets observed to be just like ours and liveable.

So survival is the universal pattern its seems with life, with other planets like ours convergent evolution would render species like us. In that case its a team deathmatch and hope we get lucky fighting a planet of midgets.

>>10715853
What if we look sexy to them? I mean
homo-sapiens killed, fucked and raped all the other humanoids in less then a million years but, we still benefited carrying some of their genes.

Best case scenario we become a planet of sex slaves worst they are like predators and just hunt us for fun then taking our humans starter class buffs to add to their own.

considering universe is ~14b years old and life on earth has existed a a third of that time. There's a good chance, we are the most advanced form of life.

>>10715876
high intelegent extraterrestrial wont think about shit like this
forget about it

>>10715582
Childs was The Thing and drank gasoline.

>>10715895
>considering universe is ~14b years old and life on earth has existed a a third of that time. There's a good chance, we are the most advanced form of life.

Time is insignificant on its own, because the multitude of stars gives plenty of chance all by itself. Time becomes significant again when there's a commensurately rare event that serves as a requisite precondition for the scenario in question. The universe has obliged us with just such a scenario.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmgMboWunkI

The heavy elements that exist in our solar system were seeded by a neutron star merger some 120 odd million years before our solar system formed. This is a very rare event, occurring every 20 million years or so, leaving 600 to 650 such collisions, ever, in the history of the Milky Way. Since some of these elements are absolutely vital to life and they are not in abundance through other processes, it's highly likely that the planetary nebula that were seeded with neutron star collision debris are the only places in the universe where life can exist. With less than a thousand in our own galaxy, it becomes unlikely that there are very many places where life does exist.

>>10715578
This is such a brainlet aphorism. Do black swans exist if there is only evidence of white swans? Perhaps. Does simple inductive reasoning suggest the probability is very low? Yes. The probabilities involved in abiogenesis alone are so unlikely that it beggars belief. Then there is eukaryogenesis which again is so improbable that biologists agree that by its current understanding it could only have happened once in the universe, in one single sell. The probability of both events emerging in the same place is so low that there should not be any other life in the universe that we are causally connected to

It’s also definitely so low that we shouldn’t entertain sub 90 iq garbage like this >>10715688. Thankfully, the people who make these decidions aren’t 90 iq mental midgets

>>10715555
Why is winning the lottery not my top priority as working class member? Once I established millions of dollars, I can buy any luxury item I want, which would usher in a massively beneficial financial revolution

>b-but some people actually win a-anon

1 in 140+ million does, sure. So one advanced species out there in the vastness of the universe made contact with another and made progress in sciences and tech. If the universe is infinite it should happen somewhere, sure. For this interaction there are billions of species that did not do so.

>>10715910
Please consider, that besides Iodine (which might be essential to life on Earth but might be omittable in the formation of extraterrestial life) is the only essential heavier element that cannot also be made in a dying low mass star. And most really essential elements are made in exploding massive stars/whire dwarves

>>10715975
Molybdenum only forms in the r-process, and its also an essential trace element.

>>10715555
>Why is communication with aliens not our top priority as a species?
We haven't found any yet.
It would just be shouting into the night.

>>10715578

>>10715817
War means a comsiderable risk of death; as technology increases the potential for destruction and reduces scarcity, those who go to war would be increasingly more likely to die for a decreasing reward, so the race would breed itself peaceful.

>>10715980
In fact the scarcity of molybdenum may be contributing to an early death, as it is essential in enzymes that remove metabolic waste from cells.

>>10716115
Violence is also the most easy and absolute base way to obtain power and to control a population whilst a case of "war" is likely to be rare for them the act of violence and the traits associated with violence and are likely to either remain as they were or to even intensify depending on unknown circumstances be it culture or a resource scarcity driven by an immense population growth.
Also war is definitely a high risk of death but the reward isn't going to truly decrease there will also be a great reward for the victor be it for political reasons or be it for control over resources even if we go to space we will still always compete for things which necessitates violent and cruel traits

>>10715555
Assume we contact them, and ask them a question. How long do you suppose it will be before we get an answer? What are the chances we'll figure out the answer for ourselves by then?

If we did detect incontrovertible evidence of aliums out there, that would be cool -- but expecting to get meaningful information from them in a timely matter is probably a false hope.

Besides, look up what happens when a technologically advanced civilization encounters a less advanced one. The history is not promising. If they are advanced enough to know a lot more than us, it may not go well for us, whatever their intentions.

>>10715799
>Statistically alien life is most likely to be the kind that grows and expands fast and kills off other types.

Or not.

Plotting curves using zero data points is not really worthwhile.

>>10715805
What about a race that is good to itself but insanely aggressive to everybody else? Again, assumptions without any data are not really valuable.

>>10715578
>The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

This is a hugely misunderstood concept.

If you have not yet looked for evidence of something, the fact that you have no evidence for it is not evidence that it is absent.

If you have searched for evidence that a thing exists, and cannot find any expected evidence, that is evidence (not proof) of its absence.

If I go look in the kitchen for any evidence of of the dog shitting all over the floor, and don't see any shit, and don't smell any shit, that absence of the sort of evidence you'd expect is indeed evidence that Fido has been a good boy, and has not shit all over the floor. It is not conclusive proof, since it is always possible that my wife cleaned it all up so I wouldn't get mad at the dog again. But it is valid evidence.

Similarly, we have made the beginnings of a search for ETIs, and so far have found no evidence of them. this is not proof they are not out there -- they could be hiding, we could be making some false assumptions in terms of what we are looking for, etc. And our search is by no means exhaustive. But the results so far are evidence that would tend to support a very preliminarily hypothesis that maybe they are not there after all, at least not near enough for us to detect them.

>>10715937
You've been listening to creationcucks too much. Only they have such a laughable understanding of probability.

>>10716126
The point is your population won't be willing to fight, because all that were prone to do so died in past wars.

>>10716126 #
The point is your population won't be willing to fight, because all who were prone to do so died in past wars.

>>10716150
>Believing complex multicellular life is somehow teeming in the universe despite an astounding sample size of one
>Ignoring every point at which intelligent life could fail
>Thinking just because intelligent life can exist that they would somehow converge on the same technology or culture as we did and overcome the speed of light to visit other worlds

>>10715555
The more we discover about the early conditions for life in our planet, the more we find out about the average star/exoplanet out beyond our solar system and the more we look at the evolution of life on earth the more obvious it has become that we are almost certainly the only intelligent life in this galaxy and/or that whatever other life there is out there is so far away from us that they might as well be in another universe.

The drake equation was extremely simplistic and overly optimistic. By orders of magnitude. There is absolutely no point in deducating more of our resources into "communication" with aliens. There is nobody out there for us to communicate with. We are alone.

>>10716150
>Koonin's problem (the central problem of biology, he claims (cf.p.6)) is that traditional evolutionary models can not help conceiving the emergence of replication and translation systems: for him, they would be too complex to have evolved independently of a primordial replication-translation system by natural selection acting on ribozymes alone.

>Despite considerable experimental and theoretical effort, no compelling scenarios currently exist for the origin of replication and translation, the key processes that together comprise the core of biological systems and the apparent pre-requisite of biological evolution. The RNA World concept might offer the best chance for the resolution of this conundrum but so far cannot adequately account for the emergence of an efficient RNA replicase or the translation system. The MWO ["many worlds in one"] version of the cosmological model of eternal inflation could suggest a way out of this conundrum

Toy calculation from his paper too. I don't necessarily agree with his application of anthropic principle to eternal inflation or MWO to solve it but if the biologist with one of the highest h-indexes thinks abiogenesis is a VERY improbable event (so much that it shouldn't happen in any one observable universe) then you can't just brush the probabilities under the rug

>>10715555
Or, we could be eaten and die helplessly and stupidly thinking aliens have shit to share with us. There is that. Which is more likely? That out there as in here, life is hostile competition for resources? Or that life in the universe is teeming with happy feelgoods and intergalactic good will?

>>10715555
Because ooga booga green paper is the pinnacle of existence.

>>10716236
You say that as if humanity hasn't been engulfed in endless wars since long before we even started recording

>>10716236
>>10716440
Also as a rule of thumb conflict is one of the fastest ways to achieve status and power and thereby massively increasing ones ability to reproduce which is a likely explanation as to why it's still part of humanity.
As a somewhat anecdotal piece of evidence, it's extremely rare to meet someone whose family linage doesn't at least include one or more recent ancestors who fought be it in war or just some ancestor shanked another guy.

>>10716260
While we aren't even close to understanding the exact mechanism for Abiogenesis how quickly it occurred on earth definitely implies it's not actually that rare. The earth is 4.54 Billion years old, and the earliest traces of life range from 3.5-4.3 billion years. Considering at first formation earth had no liquid water and was basically a ball of lava it's possible life occurred in under 100 million years after the formation of the oceans.

>>10716498
That's like saying winning the lottery isn't rare because someone who only bought one ticket won. It being an unlikely occurance doesn't change the fact that most people never win regardless of how many tickets they buy. 100 million years vs 1 billion years is basically nothing if the likelihood of life forming is like once ever 100 billion years per planet (which is probably an extremely low ball estimate).

>>10715555
Comms with aliens would result in very bad things for human civilization, better to lie low and annihilate any radar blip.

>>10715555
Because survival long enough to get an reply back is part of communication.

>>10715582

then we purge them all.

-THE EMPEROR PROTECTS-

>>10716498
Why does it? The leap from single-celled to multicellular life took far longer at 1 billion years and must by your logic be a more rare step. Yet, we have observed single-celled organisms evolve into a multicellular one in labs many, many times now. On the other hand, we are nowhere near understanding how life is created from prebiotic material, and, harder still, how these materials spontaneously emerged.

In the last ten years we have started discovering so many key building blocks of DNA and protein i interstellar space so a possible explanation is that simple life emerged in our pocket of the universe before there even was an earth

>>10715555
The aliens are here but are apparently unwilling to engage in a technological exchange

>>10715578
Yikes.

>>10716626
given our current understanding, it's much more likely it's more probable than we think than we won the billion lotteries instantly.

>>10717068
The first multi cellular life we have evidence of existed 3-3.5 BN years ago, given the margin of error and how incomplete the fossil record is plus the fact that it's happened many times independently implies it's not terribly rare either.

>>10716626
>>10717068
Fuckers need to learn conditional probability and think about what emergence actually means. With no life, you have exactly one process happening on a planet: Weather. In all that time, nothing, NOTHING is causing decay. Only erosion. That's not going to happen at the chemical level, since erosion is a purely physical process. The MOST weather does is create ozone during lightning storms. Regardless of the process, it doesn't maintain a singular probability of happening over a million year time period. The structure is constantly building, the conditions add up, and by the time the critical moment arrives, there won't be another probability to account for; it'll have simply happened.

What creations can't comprehend is the sheer timescale involved. Can you imagine running an experiment to produce RNA for a million years? Can you fathom the result of conducting it for even a mere hundred thousand?

Emergence is the possibility of building further possibility. You can't apply probability to a complete change in the structure of possibility.

>>10717033
Walk softly and carry a big gun,

Let's put all our resources into trying to something we don't know for sure exists, let alone wants to talk to us or is even able to

>>10715555
It is strategically more advantageous to achieve first detection. This lesson is drastically well taught in EVE Online, when you warp to a galaxy and wake up the hostile AI Autonomous Drone fleet that destroys whatever whatever wakes it up.

>>10715555
1) space is fucking huge and the idea of finding and transmitting a signal of sufficient strength to aliens is by itself sci-fi bullshit.
2) what makes you think any alien species we did find would have any interest at all in communicating with us, let alone sharing technology.
3) any aliense capable of finding us would be so advanced that we would be nothing more than an oddity for them to study

>>10715895
This, we may very well end up becoming the "elder race" seeding the galaxy with life

>>10717967
I don't need to imagine it or do the calculations because smarter people than you and I already have. Refer to Eugene Koonin here >>10716260. Assuming you meant the environment with your possibility building possibility argument, the calculations already assumes an optimally built environment from the get go. If you tried to apply it to RNA itself, I don't know what to tell you

>>10715805
I kind of agree with this just logically. The Flood would not be able to build a spaceship plus every advanced lifeform would consider them an existential threat and committ to destroying them