Sandia National Labs has made a breakthrough in fusion. Using a technique called Magnetized Linear Inertial Fusion, they've generated fusion energy releases up to 1000 times higher than the input energy applied to the fuel.
I believe Lawrencetown Physics has also had some breakthroughs for plasma temperature and actually have enough proof to get the work published in a refereed journal (Eric Lerner is a bit of an outsider so this is a big deal for them). Importantly the temperatures reached are theoretically enough to ignite Boron-11 fuel.
Rumblings are that the secretive Trialpha have also had some recent successes.
There is also the possibility that maybe, just maybe, WE are one of, if not the most advanced civilizations out there. I know the age of the universe vs. our short existence doesn't lend itself well to that theory, but I mean, someone has to be the top dog and considering how unsophisticated every other species on our planet is, its obvious that truly intelligent life isn't super common.
More than 200 Billion stars in the Milky Way, which is one of 350 or so Billion galaxies in the visible universe. I wouldn't bet on it.
More than 200 Billion stars in the Milky Way, which is one of 350 or so Billion galaxies in the visible universe. I wouldn't bet on it.
Niether would I.
But I'm just saying... Someone has to be top dog and really if you're using scientific method, there is currently no evidence to support the theory that we aren't.
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There is also the possibility that maybe, just maybe, WE are one of, if not the most advanced civilizations out there. I know the age of the universe vs. our short existence doesn't lend itself well to that theory, but I mean, someone has to be the top dog and considering how unsophisticated every other species on our planet is, its obvious that truly intelligent life isn't super common.
The age of life on our planet vs. the age of intelligent/technological life and number of species that fit in this category support it being rare. When I fill out the Drake equation with my own best guesses I get on the order of 1 civilization per galaxy - though obviously things like the probability of life developing intelligence and technology are complete guesses.
I don't know about that.
You're using a sample size of 1.
Hell, I'm just as correct to say that truly intelligent life is super common becasue of all of the planets with life that we know of, 100% of them have truly intelligent life.
We may only have a sample size of 1 in terms of planets with life that we can study, but we have millions of species on earth that we can study and none of them come even remotely close to our level of intelligence.
I'm not disagreeing with you, or even saying that I think we are the smartest civilization out there, I'm just adding more to the discussion.
I don't know about that.
You're using a sample size of 1.
Hell, I'm just as correct to say that truly intelligent life is super common becasue of all of the planets with life that we know of, 100% of them have truly intelligent life.
Let's look at that sample size, shall we?
We also know that there are about 1.5 million species that are currently living on the planet. That is a conservative estimate. Lets take into account that the earth is 4.5 billion years old (that is the age of a solid earth, the solar system is older than that), and that life has existed on the planet nearly the entire time the earth has had a solid surface. An estimate of the number of species that has ever existed on earth would approximately reach say, between 200 million and 2 billion. Lets round that to one billion.
Now, the funny thing about that is the time frame that we are looking at regarding life. Prior to 570 million years ago, there was no real multicellular life. The Ediacran fauna is a facinating subject that could disprove that particular concept, but the timeframe there is only adding about 100 million years at best to the equation. That means, for between 3.7 and 4.0 billion years, all life on the planet was single cellular. That's it. If, somehow, miraculously, the mars rover finds life on Mars, we will know that life is more common that we may be estimating. But multicellular life is another matter. We have no idea why the Cambrian Explosion caused multicellular life to form. None.
If you happened to be looking at the planet earth for the majority of it's lifetime, it would appear to be a lifeless rock. Stromatolites and amoeba would be the apex species.
So let's look at multicellular life. It took another 200 million years before plants came onshore. 50 million years after that before amphibians came onshore. Then 300+ million years after that before the first intelligent life.
We can be generous about intelligence, too. If we ever found Neanderthals on another planet, we would call them intelligent. So now life on earth has consisted of up to two intelligent species. Both these species have only been around for about 200,000 years.
Two species out of a billion. 0.000000002%
200,000 out of 4,500,000,000 years. That's 0.000044%
And we still don't know why life formed the way it did on earth.
No wonder we haven't seen anyone else.
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We also know that there are about 1.5 million species that are currently living on the planet. That is a conservative estimate. Lets take into account that the earth is 4.5 billion years old (that is the age of a solid earth, the solar system is older than that), and that life has existed on the planet nearly the entire time the earth has had a solid surface. An estimate of the number of species that has ever existed on earth would approximately reach say, between 200 million and 2 billion. Lets round that to one billion.
Now, the funny thing about that is the time frame that we are looking at regarding life. Prior to 570 million years ago, there was no real multicellular life. The Ediacran fauna is a facinating subject that could disprove that particular concept, but the timeframe there is only adding about 100 million years at best to the equation. That means, for between 3.7 and 4.0 billion years, all life on the planet was single cellular. That's it. If, somehow, miraculously, the mars rover finds life on Mars, we will know that life is more common that we may be estimating. But multicellular life is another matter. We have no idea why the Cambrian Explosion caused multicellular life to form. None.
Most of this post here is solid, but this bit here I disagree with. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say we've got a dozen different ideas about why that caused the cambrian explosion, ranging from atmospheric and climate changes, to a few specific adaptations that spurred evolutionary diversity, to tipping points being reached in terms of complexity.
If you said that we don't know what caused the cambrian explosion, that's a statement I would fully agree with.
Quote:
If you happened to be looking at the planet earth for the majority of it's lifetime, it would appear to be a lifeless rock. Stromatolites and amoeba would be the apex species.
So let's look at multicellular life. It took another 200 million years before plants came onshore. 50 million years after that before amphibians came onshore. Then 300+ million years after that before the first intelligent life.
We can be generous about intelligence, too. If we ever found Neanderthals on another planet, we would call them intelligent. So now life on earth has consisted of up to two intelligent species. Both these species have only been around for about 200,000 years.
Two species out of a billion. 0.000000002%
200,000 out of 4,500,000,000 years. That's 0.000044%
And we still don't know why life formed the way it did on earth.
No wonder we haven't seen anyone else.
I also disagree with your conclusions here, particularly the 'two species out of a billion' and the '200,000 years out of 4.5 billion'. Let's say I boil a pot of water over a fire. It take ten minutes to boil. Immediately upon the water boiling, I say, "I heated this water for 600 seconds, and it has now boiled for six seconds. So water has boiled for only 1% of the time." That would be true, but you would be correct if you then said to me, "So what?" Presumably, if all conditions stayed the same, it would continue to boil until the water was gone.
The important factor is that universally, life evolves to its environment. A large portion of life on earth has no need to grow and change in complexity, because its external surroundings do not change in a way that specifically alters its role in its niche. This is why, amongst marine life, insects, and even plant life, we have species that are largely unchanged over millions upon millions of years. A species of beetle that remains largely unchanged over the eons simply hasn't had factors driving its evolution.
This is why your 2 in a billion figure is meaningless. The important question is how likely it is, in an ecosystem, that intelligence becomes a major natural selection factor for at least one species. Looking at the ecosystems that we have today, I would have to say it is close to 100%.
If intelligence is a nearly universal natural selection factor (not universal amongst every species but within every ecosystem), then greater intelligence is a nearly universal outcome of evolution. The speed of this growth is going to vary greatly, based on predator/prey relationships and changes to climate and other factors. The only question is how far the most intelligent animal in an ecosystem gets before an extinction event resets the clock.
There's a huge amount we don't know about early life on earth. And there's a huge amount we don't know about life on other planets. It could be that the changing climate conditions that have fuelled evolution on earth are actually pretty rare, for example. But it would be very wrong to arrive at that conclusion based strictly on looking at our rarity within our own ecosystem.
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its obvious that truly intelligent life isn't super common.
Disagree, nothing is obvious when dealing with the Universe, The Drake Equation estimates about 2000 intelligent life forms on other planets with at least human capabilities in our galaxy alone, bring in the crazy size of the whole universe and you have the probability of around 0% of intelligent life not being common.
IMO our brains aren't yet wired to even try to understand the universe, we're like ants in your backyard trying to find life in China, but someday one of those ants will climb on a suitcase on it's way to the airport and land in Hong Kong.
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Just saw a great doc on BBC about "do we need the moon" and it postulated that the distance was key in our evolution and that it could be a important factor in tidal pools which many think might be a key spot where multicellular life took hold.
Sooo many things have to go right for us to be here, meteors, moons, distance from the sun, gas giants taking hits, right type of sun, safe neighborhood in our galaxy, etc, etc, etc..
I think very simple life will be found somewhat abundantly on moons and planets all over the universe, but yeah intelligent life like ours, not to mention space faring ones more advanced than us in this massive universe is a miniscule number.
However even that tiny number means a lot in a super massive universe with mind boggingly many galaxies and solar systems.
Btw here's the BBC doc, man BBC and Horizon docs are just an endless amount of fun, so much good stuff coming out of the UK.
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Most of this post here is solid, but this bit here I disagree with. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say we've got a dozen different ideas about why that caused the cambrian explosion, ranging from atmospheric and climate changes, to a few specific adaptations that spurred evolutionary diversity, to tipping points being reached in terms of complexity.
If you said that we don't know what caused the cambrian explosion, that's a statement I would fully agree with.
No, we don't know. We have a dozen different ideas because everyone who studies it comes up with their own ideas as to what is important, there is no consensus. My exaggeration was not that big.
Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
I also disagree with your conclusions here, particularly the 'two species out of a billion' and the '200,000 years out of 4.5 billion'. Let's say I boil a pot of water over a fire. It take ten minutes to boil. Immediately upon the water boiling, I say, "I heated this water for 600 seconds, and it has now boiled for six seconds. So water has boiled for only 1% of the time." That would be true, but you would be correct if you then said to me, "So what?" Presumably, if all conditions stayed the same, it would continue to boil until the water was gone.
The important factor is that universally, life evolves to its environment. A large portion of life on earth has no need to grow and change in complexity, because its external surroundings do not change in a way that specifically alters its role in its niche. This is why, amongst marine life, insects, and even plant life, we have species that are largely unchanged over millions upon millions of years. A species of beetle that remains largely unchanged over the eons simply hasn't had factors driving its evolution.
This is why your 2 in a billion figure is meaningless. The important question is how likely it is, in an ecosystem, that intelligence becomes a major natural selection factor for at least one species. Looking at the ecosystems that we have today, I would have to say it is close to 100%.
If intelligence is a nearly universal natural selection factor (not universal amongst every species but within every ecosystem), then greater intelligence is a nearly universal outcome of evolution. The speed of this growth is going to vary greatly, based on predator/prey relationships and changes to climate and other factors. The only question is how far the most intelligent animal in an ecosystem gets before an extinction event resets the clock.
There's a huge amount we don't know about early life on earth. And there's a huge amount we don't know about life on other planets. It could be that the changing climate conditions that have fuelled evolution on earth are actually pretty rare, for example. But it would be very wrong to arrive at that conclusion based strictly on looking at our rarity within our own ecosystem.
I thought your response was pretty well thought out, but there are a few issues I have here with your response.
Your statement "universally, life evolves to it's environment. A large portion of life on earth has no need to grow and change in complexity", shows an issue with your understanding of evolution. Nothing needs to change. The environment of a place doesn't force organisms to change. Organisms randomly mutate, and if those mutations are favorable, they keep those mutations. They mutate even if environments remain stable. Even if those mutations aren't perfect, they can still keep them. Many of those unchanged species of beetle likely spawned other species of beetle that did not stay so steady.
Your other claim, about ecosystems, also is flawed. Ecosystems do not select for intelligence. Creatures live in them. They succeed in them, or they don't, and they breed in them. Often creatures change them, but ecosystems do not change creatures in the same way.
By the way, what constitutes an ecosystem? If you are talking about the earth, then it's likely that only one (or two?) ecosystems created man. African savannah. The peat bogs of Northern Canada did not. The hydrothermal vents of the Tethys seas did not. The deserts of Gondwana did not.
Did you mean planets? If that's the case, then it's possible that we have a 100% intelligence rating. But Mars was potentially amenable to life for most of it's existence. We have possible fossils of single cell organisms from Mars, as well as possible chemical signatures of life(even if I am a skeptic). So, if life existed on Mars at one point, all of a sudden our statistics are now cut in half. But it brings up the biggest issue I have with life in the universe, but in a different way. Time.
The Universe is 13 billion years old, give or take (depending on your cosmological model). According to Hawking, the first 3 to 4 billion years of the universe there was no complex elements. No Carbon, no Oxygen, no Silicon. Primarily it was made of Hydrogen and Helium. About 10 billion years ago, the first star systems formed in the early universe. These were the first that may have contained Carbon, Iron, Aluminum. We don't know the concentrations of these elements in these systems, but I think it's fair to assume that as the universe gets older, the more of these heavier elements can get concentrated as stars create more of them in their furnaces. These complex elements are vital for life. You cannot make either DNA, or an artificial version of this, without these elements. Using this understanding, I think we can rule out the potential for life in the first 2 billion years of this time frame. We might argue that it is possible, but I'm skeptical.
The solar system we live in is about 4.75 billion years old, give or take. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. As far as the rock record, life formed very early in Earth's history. Life has existed - that we know of - for about a third of the lifetime of the universe. That's a non-trivial amount of time. When you factor in the composition of the universe, life has been around on earth for half the time it theoretically could have.
During much of that time, Earth and Mars were quite similar. Bare rocks bathed in radiation, with liquid water on the surface. Life thrived on Earth. It may have at one point on Mars. But it didn't have long enough (if it did exist) to change from single celled to multi-cellular (that we know of). That analogy, of a pot boiling, is a good one. Mars was taken off the fire. Life didn't have a chance.
We don't know what makes earth unique. Thor brought up the moon. Other factors are important as well. If the Earth was formed in a galactic bulge, the number of stars in the night sky would be far greater than they are here - and the amount of radiation would go up as well. Too far out from a galactic edge, and the complex molecules needed for life may be missing. Not to mention extinction level events. How important is the magnetic field?
Time is the part of the equation that Drake didn't pay close enough attention to. A geologist knows, that a million years is a very short amount of time. Humanity hasn't been around for a million years. We've been around for a very short amount of time. But life hasn't. Life has been around for a very long time. And it took 4 billion years for life to evolve into an intelligence on earth, a place with very favorable conditions. You may be right, that if we look at the pot long enough, the whole thing will boil over. But it starts with one little bubble of liquid water flashing to steam. I think that's us.
Last edited by Knalus; 09-21-2012 at 10:14 AM.
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The Drake Equation estimates about 2000 intelligent life forms on other planets with at least human capabilities in our galaxy alone, bring in the crazy size of the whole universe and you have the probability of around 0% of intelligent life not being common.
The Drake equation can estimate just about any number depending on what you put into the variables, several of which are complete unknowns that could vary over many orders of magnitude. I find that physicists and astronomers tend to put in higher values for some of the "unknowns" than biologists do in general. I get around 1 intelligent life form per galaxy, and have seen others come up with much lower estimates than that. We just don't have the data to get a meaningful number out of the equation right now though - it's just wild guesses.
We may only have a sample size of 1 in terms of planets with life that we can study, but we have millions of species on earth that we can study and none of them come even remotely close to our level of intelligence.
I'm not disagreeing with you, or even saying that I think we are the smartest civilization out there, I'm just adding more to the discussion.
In terms of the overall discussion, just want to mention that the idea that there are no species approaching our intelligence is highly debatable and given a few hundred thousand years of evolution you might see intelligence evolve among a number of species ranging from avian (ravens,crows) through aquatic mammals (dolphins primarily), other primates (although this one seems less likely as we occupy that niche) and even cephalapods (octopi). Such evolution would likely depend on a number of factors including competition and environmental pressures, but given how long it took human intelligence to evolve, I think a few hundred thousand or even a few million years is meaningless in the grand scheme. To the extent that there are a number of species that have even what we might call 'proto-intelligence at this stage, suggests that if you have an environment in which intelligence is a selective trait, it seems likely that it will evolve somewhere to a greater or lesser degree if you have complex multi-cellular life.
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Last edited by onetwo_threefour; 09-21-2012 at 10:16 AM.
In terms of the overall discussion, just want to mention that the idea that there are no species approaching our intelligence is highly debatable and given a few hundred thousand years of evolution you might see intelligence evolve among a number of species ranging from avian (ravens,crows) through aquatic mammals (dolphins primarily), other primates (although this one seems less likely as we occupy that niche) and even cephalapods (octopi). Such evolution would likely depend on a number of factors including competition and environmental pressures, but given how long it took human intelligence to evolve, I think a few hundred thousand or even a few million years is meaningless in the grand scheme. To the extent that there are a number of species that have even what we might call 'proto-intelligence at this stage, suggests that if you have an environment in which intelligence is a selective trait, it seems likely that it will evolve somewhere to a greater or lesser degree if you have complex multi-cellular life.
The author David Brin has some things to say about that.
Brin doesn't buy either of these sentiments. "In all my research I have concluded that cetaceans, primates, corvids (crows), parrots, pinnipeds (sea lions), and many other species on Earth appear to be stuck under a firm glass ceiling," he told us, "roughly the same level of thinking, problem-solving, linguistic ability, and evolution seems stingy about letting any of them crash through."
His uplift series, while not science, is an interesting thought experiment involving just that subject.
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I like the news that the original formula called for power greater than the mass of the universe, then greater than 10 times the mass of the sun and now, only the mass of Jupiter.
His uplift series, while not science, is an interesting thought experiment involving just that subject.
Sounds interesting, I'll have to pick that up. My fundamental point was that the statement that there are no other species on earth that even approach human intelligence is hyperbole at best.
I do have my own background in this, admittedly undergrad, but I keep up pretty closely with developments in the evolution of intelligence and I would suggest that Brin's viewpoint is one way of looking at it, but it's not the only way. I grant you that in their current ecosystems many species probably aren't currently driven by an adaptive need to develop the kind of self-aware intelligence we possess, but environmental changes could certainly change that.
Octopi are known to have a "color language" and communicate with each other through skin patterns, while also demonstrating tool use. Other animals demonstrate communication and rudimentary self-awareness. Cultural learning and abstract reasoning is displayed among primate and non primate animals alike. As such, many of the elements of what makes up the totality of human intelligence are found throughout the animal kingdom and while the combination that creates intelligence seems rare, the fact that the traits of intelligence, what I called proto-intelligence in my earlier post, seem to be common adaptive traits would suggest that the adaptiveness of these traits is likely universal. That was the basic point of my argument. If that is the case than one might suspect that the combination of these traits might be a feature of other complex ecosystems on other planets.
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