You are assuming we are amongst the most developed. We could very well be extremely primitive and be grouped amongst the middle. There could very well be societies that have existed that are hundreds or thousands of times more advanced. There may even be life that we wouldn't even recognize using our definition of it.
One of the biggest variables in discovering other life is having that other life form exist in the same window of time as us so that we can actually communicate with each other. Thousands, even millions of other intelligent life forms could have existed over the the last 13 billion years, but we have only been able to listen for them for about 75 of those years. And that is assuming they will use radio waves for communication.
These other life forms could very well be extinct now, or have evolved past a physical form, and are now on a plane of existence we are not compatible, or intelligent enough to communicate with. Or their technology could be so different, we haven't yet discovered the method they are using.
I was actually assuming that the Big evolutionary steps we took were vary hard, and maybe only 5% of life is capable of making that step. It is an assumption.
I don't think it is that different from NASA saying there is likely 17 Billion Earth Like Planets in the Milky way, and we think 100 Million have life. So they are giving life a .5% chance. I'm randomly giving Evolution 10x as much credit.
so what I was saying is if 5% of the time Bacterial manages to evolve into complex organisms that would be great.
And if 5% of the time those complex organisms start to control the environment around them that would be even better. Like Primates Tools or Birds Nests or Burrowing Animals.
And if 5% of those organisms start to learn Science and Math it would be really great.
You are quickly looking at numbers in the hundreds or thousands rather than the millions of organisms that are even capable of looking towards the stars. And it is all just a thought experiment. So maybe I am way off and those steps are easy to make and happen 95% of the time, but if that was true I really believe with our imaging and listening technology we would have stumbled over some evidence of life by now.
I think the big game changer for the amount of life is if we discover some kind of reproductive molecules or bacteria on Titan or Io, that is completely based on a different chemical makeup than we are. But still don't think that will change projections on how much life has Math and Science, because if you look at the amount of energy that reaches Titan the kind of life that could develop there probable would not develop quickly enough to out run the life cycle of a star.
Yet another thing I thought of is the chemical make up of the Universe, and how different it was during the first 8 Billions (the life cycle of most of the first stars). allot of the heavier Elements came to be when stars died, and have decay to lighter elements over time. So following the big bang were there more or less heavy elements, and how would that have effected the ability of life to form. Maybe life had to wait for a second or third generation star like our sun to have the right chemical composition in the system to feed life. So once again just a random thought, but maybe life only exists in systems 5 or 6 Billion years old or younger. That would put us in the top half of all life in terms of age.
Sorry for the Rambling, it just there is so much you can speculate about when considering the possibly of ET life. All I was saying is that 100 Million is not this massive number that implies we are now at the bottom of the evolutionary chain. I'm also not assuming we are at the top, but simply being able to look at other worlds make be think we are at least near the top.
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Not Really, think of it this way IF they are right. They are saying they believe 0.03% of stars host planets that contain life.
Just as a thought experiment. Lets be aggressive say 5% of those have evolved beyond bacteria, into something like Plants and Amobea. Down to 5 million, ~ 1 billion years ago
Then you look at the same 5% might have complex animal life, you are down to. a 1/4 million. ~600 million years ago on earth
Then if you look at the same 5% having life that has developed, manufactured tools or clothing or selective breading or agriculture. Something that shows long term thinking, Your down to 12,500. ~18,000 years ago
Then if you look at 5% of that developing writing, something that allows passage of knowledge, science and math, you are down to 650. ~6000 years ago
Is there a chance we are the most developed of 650 planets that have developed Math and Science, maybe, maybe not.
I could see my line of thinking being completely wrong because of Moores Law normally used with computers, but seems work just as well if you look at evolution.
As you were trying to f#%k with our brains with odds you forgot that our star is relatively young compared to other similar stars that scientist think have "goldilocks" planets.Or even that we may not even need a star similar to our sun for life to exist and advance.
And I really don't think Moores law will ever have anything to do with the odds of evolution or odds of life in the cosmo's.
As you were trying to f#%k with our brains with odds you forgot that our star is relatively young compared to other similar stars that scientist think have "goldilocks" planets.Or even that we may not even need a star similar to our sun for life to exist and advance.
And I really don't think Moores law will ever have anything to do with the odds of evolution or odds of life in the cosmo's.
Biodiversity expands as a factor of its current self, not at a set rate.
And i did consider age, I was not discussing age of living things. I was discussing odds that big evolutionary leaps would happen. I gave it 5%. I thought that was overly fair. Earth sat lifeless for 70% of its existence.
Like I said it was just a thought about how a 100 M planets with life would translate into only 100's planets with intelligent (Math & Science) life, vary quickly. Until we get out there there is really no way of knowing where we lay on the scale of intelligent life, but I was suggesting the scale might be much smaller than some are suggesting.
Federal scientists who keep a close eye on the Arctic ice would like to routinely brief Canadians about extraordinary events unfolding in the North.
But newly released federal documents show the Harper government has been thwarting their efforts.
In 2012, as the Arctic ice hit the lowest point ever recorded, scientists at the Canadian Ice Service were keen to tell Canadians about the stunning ice loss.
...
Braithwaite and her colleagues — aware of the national and international interest in the shrinking polar ice — wanted to hold a “strictly factual” technical briefing for the media to inform Canadians how the ice had disappeared from not only the Northwest Passage but many normally ice-choked parts of the Arctic.
The briefing never happened. Nine levels of approval — from the director of the ice service up to the environment minister’s office — were needed for the “communication plan,” according to the documents released to Postmedia News under the Access to Information Act.
“Ministerial services” — the sixth layer — cancelled the briefing, the documents say.
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
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The idea of a completely transparent solar panel has always been a bit of a dream. Such revolutionary technology would mean that we could turn windows into power generators and build phones with self-charging screens. Well, guess what? That dream is becoming a reality.
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This is what is finally going to get me off my ass to vote in the next national election. I don't even particularly like Trudeau, but I'm tired of Harper and his administration censoring the scientific community so much. Their social and environmental policies are so backwards that it's just too much to ignore anymore
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good article with history and accompanying music on Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977
Quote:
"We could launch as far as Jupiter; we could not launch farther," says Kohlhase, without a simple but ingenious trick pointed to by Kepler's laws: the "gravity assist" that allowed the planet-hopping trajectories pursued by Voyager 1 and 2.
Quote:
Those new trajectories were the handiwork of a UCLA graduate student named Michael Minovitch who in 1961 wrote a technical memo called "A Method for Determining Interplanetary Free-Fall Reconnaissance Trajectories." In it, he boldly proposed for the first time to steer from planet to planet by using the gravity of each world to serve as the spacecraft's rudder and sails.
As a demonstration, he showed how to send a spaceship from Earth to Venus to Earth to Mars to Saturn to Pluto to Jupiter to Earth without burning a drop of fuel. To a rider on that spaceship, it would seem like the vessel was simply falling from one planet to the next.
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("The 'Goldilocks Year' was 1977," Kohlhase says, offering the just-right alignment of the outer planets needed for gravity assists.)
NASA's newest rocket will be the largest rocket ever constructed, standing 400 feet tall — 40 feet taller than the massive Saturn V rockets that carried men to the moon. The new launch vehicle is designed to send astronauts to asteroids or even Mars.
New dinosaur found in Argentina, Dreadnoughtus, weighed as much as 65 tons!
Still amazed at the size of animals back then, that thing was about 14x bigger than a full grown elephant, have they ever figured out how and why dino's grew so big? I remember a story about possible different oxygen levels but nothing really stood out.
