“And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.”
Extraterrestrial life and interstellar travel are two totally different things. Without some magical warp drive, travel to other stars would be very difficult. The best option we can think of right now is sending robots at like 1% the speed of light (somehow) and hoping they still work when they get there. It may be theoretically someday possible to send frozen embryos on ships with the knowledge of earth (ala Kal-El) and colonize the local galactic cluster that way.
I don't even think it's a matter of being civilized or being intelligent enough, but rather just having the desire to know. We assume other intelligent life forms even care at all.
The only reason why humans began looking up to the stars was for navigation purposes. Environmental conditions forced us out of the trees and made us wanderers. Predicting celestial events became a survival mechanism which sparked our interest and even sculpted us socially by making agricultural communities, and eventually cities possible.
It's quite possible that other more intelligent species simply don't have the wonderment or fixation of what is out there and focus more inward.
I would think a requirement of any technologically advanced life form would be to have curiosity and desire to explore/research the unknown. How else would they become advanced without curiosity to learn?
Extraterrestrial life and interstellar travel are two totally different things. Without some magical warp drive, travel to other stars would be very difficult. The best option we can think of right now is sending robots at like 1% the speed of light (somehow) and hoping they still work when they get there. It may be theoretically someday possible to send frozen embryos on ships with the knowledge of earth (ala Kal-El) and colonize the local galactic cluster that way.
Extraterrestrial life and interstellar travel are two totally different things. Without some magical warp drive, travel to other stars would be very difficult. The best option we can think of right now is sending robots at like 1% the speed of light (somehow) and hoping they still work when they get there. It may be theoretically someday possible to send frozen embryos on ships with the knowledge of earth (ala Kal-El) and colonize the local galactic cluster that way.
Yep, planet seeding is the way to go if we want to colonize other planets. And hope that we are biologically advanced enough that we can deal with any kind of microbes and viruses that may kill us early in the process.
I always think of eating a 1,000 lb apple. You do it one bite at time. Even thinking about colonizing other planets is pointless until we learn everything about how this one works.
I get that space stuff is interesting, but I personally don't think it is always the best use of our Earthly resources. Control biology then worry about the physics part. The applications will be more universal at first and will be needed by the time we start colonizing other worlds anyway.
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I would think a requirement of any technologically advanced life form would be to have curiosity and desire to explore/research the unknown. How else would they become advanced without curiosity to learn?
This is another stumbling block for finding advanced life elsewhere in the universe.
Maybe intelligence is a very rare evolutionary trait. For all we know there's life everywhere in the universe but the dominant species resembles dinosaurs more than it resembles humans.
I would think a requirement of any technologically advanced life form would be to have curiosity and desire to explore/research the unknown. How else would they become advanced without curiosity to learn?
Maybe they are curious, but in different ways. Maybe instead of exploring physical realms, they are more interested in manipulating biology to make an immortal master race that travels inter-dimensionally.
Maybe they live on a massive honeycomb-like planet that they are still exploring/meeting new races and haven't reached the point where they care about space. Or maybe they calculated how futile it is and moved on to other things more realistic.
I don't see why we define intelligence of a species by the desire to travel in outer space.
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How much of our desire to understand the heavens has to do with our massive moon? Take away the moon, and also things like eclipses and you've taken away what makes most people look up.
Add to that a planet like ours that is always cloudy, and culture could evolve with no desire to even look past the clouds.
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How much of our desire to understand the heavens has to do with our massive moon? Take away the moon, and also things like eclipses and you've taken away what makes most people look up.
Forgive my ignorance but wouldn't we not exist without our moon?
I dont know what you all are yammering on about, I watched a documentary indicating that Aliens are mining for Oil on the moon, so we clearly are not alone.
Not only are we not alone, but we didnt even know there was oil on the moon! and its our moon! I cant believe we missed that.
Well played Aliens. Well played.
Let them have it they'll never get approval for a pipeline anyhow so won't be able to do anything with the oil.
It seems that the stars were a lot more important to ancient cultures than the moon was. I don't think not having a moon would have affected much in a cultural sense. Physically ... no tides, no moon meat shield for some asteroids. Who knows from that angle.
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Originally Posted by jayswin
Forgive my ignorance but wouldn't we not exist without our moon?
I know there is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that our current evolution is related to the moon and the tides churning up the oceans. However that is just one theory. And even if it's true in our case, from what I've read many scientists believe that life would have evolved on Earth without it. We might just be 100's of millions of years behind.
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Weren't interested in the stars until we needed them for guidance?
Wouldn't be interested in looking up if it weren't for the moon?
Do you people ever get laid?
We're not talking about us though. We are talking about prehistoric ape-like creature that we evolved from. Their main concern was survival and the stars helped with that. Before that, I doubt they cared any more than animals like monkeys today.
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We're not talking about us though. We are talking about prehistoric ape-like creature that we evolved from. Their main concern was survival and the stars helped with that. Before that, I doubt they cared any more than animals like monkeys today.
No, we're talking about intelligent life.
And since humans had time to communicate with each other, the stars have fascinated us. Ancient art (pre-sailing) would support that.
And since humans had time to communicate with each other, the stars have fascinated us. Ancient art (pre-sailing) would support that.
We are talking about how intelligent life evolved to consider the stars something worth noting. And that came way before cave paintings and ancient art. Our non-human ancestors were using the stars for survival purposes before then. It was then that they noticed patterns and those patterns became a matter of life and death. One of the recent Cosmos episodes goes discusses this point better. You should watch the series if you ever get a chance.
If our non-human ancestors left the trees and had sonar senses, magnetic senses, or even a strong sense of smell to guide them, they could have theoretically evolved into intelligent life without revering the heavens.
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Astronomer Yu V. Sotnikova of the Special Astrophysical Observatory:
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On August 30, 2016 there appeared a number of reports in different mass media on possible detection of a radio signal at RATAN-600 associated with the activity of an extraterrestrial civilization; in this connection, we consider it necessary to make official comments.
In the last few years, the astronomers of the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lomonosov Moscow State University together with their colleagues from the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SAO RAS) have been conducting a survey of astronomical objects in the framework of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program. SETI is the common name for projects and activities for the scientific search for activity of extraterrestrial civilizations. The program is oriented towards searching for radiation of possible artificial origin. The studies are carried out with RATAN-600 using wide-range continuum radiometers in the frequency range of 1-22.7 GHz. Such observations at RATAN-600 are made possible owing to its large collecting area of thousands of square meters, and this high sensibility of the telescope allows us to search for extremely weak signals in the Universe, to which SETI objects also refer. The objects of research within this program are solar-like stars with planets and solar-like stars with possible non-detected planets. In the framework of this program, an interesting radio signal at a wavelength of 2.7 cm was detected in the direction of one of the objects (star system HD164595 in Hercules) in 2015. Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin.
As for the other objects of the RATAN-600 survey, it is too early to claim about any reliable scientific results. Using the obtained measurements, we are only able to estimate the upper limit of the detection of the studied areas. It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet.
Given all this, that seems the most likely scenario. I can’t say much about this for sure: It may or may not have come from that star, it may or may not have been natural, and it may or may not be from a military satellite or radar. But if I were a betting man—and I am— I’d wager heavily this was not from aliens.
We're not talking about us though. We are talking about prehistoric ape-like creature that we evolved from. Their main concern was survival and the stars helped with that. Before that, I doubt they cared any more than animals like monkeys today.
Harari argues in Sapiens, that the cognitive revolution for Homo Sapiens was only 70,000 years ago. Any reliance on the stars for useful information is likely a very recent discovery.
We are talking about how intelligent life evolved to consider the stars something worth noting. And that came way before cave paintings and ancient art. Our non-human ancestors were using the stars for survival purposes before then. It was then that they noticed patterns and those patterns became a matter of life and death. One of the recent Cosmos episodes goes discusses this point better. You should watch the series if you ever get a chance.
If our non-human ancestors left the trees and had sonar senses, magnetic senses, or even a strong sense of smell to guide them, they could have theoretically evolved into intelligent life without revering the heavens.
lol
The discussion about curiosity towards the stars started with the suggestion that maybe other intelligent life isn't even interested in the sky and others.
You seemed to argue that we were potentially the same, with no real interest in them, until the stars became useful for navigation.
I think that's not accurate. And we are derailing, so I'm out.
