Voyager 1 Approaches Boundary of Interstellar Space

[Godmachine]

There is...a lot wrong with this argument.

First off, the odds of any alien species being DNA-based is...well, basically nonexistent. Sure, somewhere out there, maybe, life may have, indeed, evolved EXACTLY as it did on Earth. But the odds of us meeting those 'evolved identically to us' races are pretty much nill.

So any race we run into will...sure...have diseases and such. But they will almost certainly be totally genetically incompatible with us and not be able to make heads or tails of our genetic structure so as to infect us. Their equivalent of 'viruses', anyway, will be absolutely and totally harmless to us. Their bacteria? Sure, maybe a risk...maybe. Wash your hands, though, you'll be fine.

As to water...where did that come from? Of course they won't be here for that.

However, you'll note we do have a planet in the right distance from the sun whereby water is liquid. Venus, arguably (maybe, with sufficient terraforming) and Mars also COULD hold liquid water. So that's really the issue. Territory! Same as North America to the Europeans...wasn't the water they came for. Or the food. Or the view. It was land.

And that's the problem. What can Earth hold, 10 billion inhabitants? 20 billion, if uncomplaining? Presumably, across our solar system (Venus, Mars, a few moons maybe) 100 billion total? That seems a pretty big chunk of 'habitable space' that you only need to get rid of this one backwards, trivial, hairless-monkey-race to have all for yourself...

Your taking a lot of liberties and using many assumptions and not using a lot of grounded science. Again as I've stated , its very unlikely even considering our planet's butter zone. We have no idea how rare our planet may be because we've only survey'd around 2,000+ exoplanets. You do realize that we've founded planets around every type of star configuration just about and that would mean if even there were 2-3 planets for each star that would equal nearly half a trillion planets alone in our galaxy..

As far as your odds of a "alien" species having a similar base code like DNA , why is that so unlikely? The most common elements in the entire Universe are what we are made of .. right off the top 5 , that would mathematically speaking the odds of an alien race having a similar genetic structure are VERY likely. I don't think we're going to find configurations using much of the remaining elements that are common through the Universe. How do I come to this conclusion? Because instead of relying on pure fantasy to guide the possibilities I'm hedging my bets on what science seems to point towards as Universal Evolution.

Right now our knowledge of exoplanets is what really is guiding us and we've only surveyed around 2,200 and cataloged all of them. That's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the total number of planets that exist in this galaxy alone. Making broad assumptions that the big scary aliens are coming to stomp us out of existence for a little bit of water and semi-stable atmosphere is more fantasy and less grounded science. Now is science always correct? No its not , science is ONLY best guess and that's all its ever been. Based on that theory I do not think Earth is so incredibly special with its conditions , I personally believe that we will find another Earth with liquid water and all sooner rather than later and even after we do , there will still be hundreds of billions of more planets to keep checking out.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

While it is laughable due to the complexity and vastness of the the universe, the Fermi paradox makes a great point. Personally I can't see humans being the only sentient life forms. I think we have "an age problem", our time to search in a cosmic perspective is just unfathomably short.

This bothers me too. If anyone in the Milky Way achieved sentience 300 million years ago or earlier then they should be here by now. If a civilization can build a spacecraft capable of traveling 10% the speed of light and can construct a new ship from raw materials at the destination star system then they would be capable of exploring the entire galaxy in a few hundred million years.

My personal favorite possibility is that advanced civilizations may tend to discover something about physics which makes interstellar spaceflight unnecessary.

 

[jihadjoe]

no, no I don't

Thousands upon thousands of planets out there, SETI crunching untold terabytes of RF intercepts for decades and we hear... ...nothing.

Common sense tells me that the universe should be awash with coherent signals, but its not.

Makes you wonder.

We evolved from unencerypted transmissions to 802.11ac in just a scant handful of decades. Common sense says any alien race will do the same, so the time frame for the universe to be "awash" with unencrypted, coherent signals is really brief.

SETI would have to look at signals, realize they aren't just random noise and crack the alien's encoding (assuming their natural language doesn't already look like random noise to us). That project was doomed from the start.

 

[jihadjoe]

Imagine if there were no mass extinctions on Earth, we as a life form on this planet would be so much more advanced than what we are now. Of course we might not be homo sapiens, but sentient nonetheless.
The vastness of space and time does not play well with our chances of finding others out there. There could be civilizations that have gone extinct and others that are just starting out.
Reminds me of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_of_an_Eye_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)

Now that would be awesome!
We'd most likely be smart, gigantic dinosaurs with razor sharp teeth and super strong hide and muscles! Who knows some of us may even breath fire.

 

[Sly]

The general conceit is that, if it takes more than 50 years to send a ship to a location you are interested in...don't bother. Within 25 years, you'll have a ship that could get there in half the time, so the total trip from time of discovery would still be shorter than if you'd sent the 50-year-ship on the mission in the first place (and you'll have several-decades-newer scientific equipment and several-decades-better-informed crew on board, as well).

Theoretically, a ship that's designed purely for carrying supplies can be sent ahead without the excess baggage that comes with human passengers. Ex: Powerplants tuned for max performance without worrying about radiation levels, minimal shielding, no heating, etc. It may take another 50 years to make a ship that will go as fast with humans in it.

 

[BBA]

My vote is that the massively increased cosmic radiation will destroy it in a matter of a few years. Lots of people believe this is likely to happen because of our 64,000 year cycle in and out of the galaxy's magnetic blanket.

If it survives than awesome. We really don't know what lays outside our Heliosphere exactly either , should be an interesting 13 years.

People really think that? I bet they haven't realized it already carries 280,000 Curies of Plutonium as it's power source (thats 50 Pounds of Plutonium).

 

[BBA]

Clarification: What I meant in the above post is the craft is already so radioactive it would take a massive amount of external 'background' space radiation to even come close to reaching it's own emmission. My thought is there is no likely 'background' radiation that will cause more damage to the spacecraft than it's own power source.

 

[BBA]

We evolved from unencerypted transmissions to 802.11ac in just a scant handful of decades. Common sense says any alien race will do the same, so the time frame for the universe to be "awash" with unencrypted, coherent signals is really brief.

SETI would have to look at signals, realize they aren't just random noise and crack the alien's encoding (assuming their natural language doesn't already look like random noise to us). That project was doomed from the start.

802.11ac is not advanced. Our military encryption of radio signals from the 80's and newer has much better protection.

This might lend to your point though...

 

[BBA]

This bothers me too. If anyone in the Milky Way achieved sentience 300 million years ago or earlier then they should be here by now. If a civilization can build a spacecraft capable of traveling 10% the speed of light and can construct a new ship from raw materials at the destination star system then they would be capable of exploring the entire galaxy in a few hundred million years.

LOL...300 million years? Really? We don't even know how many stars are in our galaxy but the latest says close to 300 BILLION, the closest being 4 light years away. At 10% of light speed, it would likely require magnitudes more time than 300 million years.

And that's just our one galaxy... it might take multiple galaxy searches to find another similar environment that supports life.

 

[Godmachine]

Clarification: What I meant in the above post is the craft is already so radioactive it would take a massive amount of external 'background' space radiation to even come close to reaching it's own emmission. My thought is there is no likely 'background' radiation that will cause more damage to the spacecraft than it's own power source.

The problem is "likely" should be replaced with "we have no possible clue". We simply don't know exactly what lies beyond the terminal shock in terms of radiation. I'm guessing that the amount of cosmic radiation will increase drastically since the craft will be completely beyond the sun's own magnetic field and influence.

For instance crafts traveling towards Jupiter have to be reinforced against radiation because of Jupiter's incredibly strong magnetic field which has actually fried equipment before.

I personally think the craft will die before 2025.

 

[Dekoth-E-]

While it is laughable due to the complexity and vastness of the the universe, the Fermi paradox makes a great point. Personally I can't see humans being the only sentient life forms. I think we have "an age problem", our time to search in a cosmic perspective is just unfathomably short.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Also in that link a few good reasons why we might not have seen/heard another extraterrestrial civilization yet?

Cyclical extinction events surely are part of the natural mechanics of the universe on all levels; changing states or structures for instance. The inherent dynamic nature of physics, not much is static if at all, for a very long time. This does not necessarily mean doom for a civilization but given faster than light travel has not been invented on a large scale, super novae etc. could present some "problems".

This I would agree with. There are tons of arguments as to why we haven't discovered it yet, or why they haven't discovered/contacted us yet. All of those arguments are perfectly reasonable, logical and make sense when you look at the scale of the universe and the fact that we are still discovering things about it that just a decade ago we were oblivious too. For all intents and purposes our "technology" is still extremely primitive.

 

[TechLarry]

Just think, in 300 years, it'll come back to Earth inside a giganitc robot machine and James Kirk will save everyone from certain doom.

Yep. Vger will return !

 

[DeathFromBelow]

LOL...300 million years? Really? We don't even know how many stars are in our galaxy but the latest says close to 300 BILLION, the closest being 4 light years away. At 10% of light speed, it would likely require magnitudes more time than 300 million years.

Yes, really. Each ship builds a copy (or multiple copies) of itself when it arrives at a new star system. With the number of probes growing exponentially you could send a ship to every star in a few hundred million years. The Milky Way galaxy is ~100,000 light years across, so at 10% the speed of light you could fly from one end to the other in ~1 million years

 

[SkribbelKat]

You know, now that I think about it, James Kirk might just negotiate a better flight and hotel rate for V'ger's stay on Earth.

But it's totally possible he might kidnap V'ger and stuff it in the back of a van.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

no, no I don't

Thousands upon thousands of planets out there, SETI crunching untold terabytes of RF intercepts for decades and we hear... ...nothing.

Common sense tells me that the universe should be awash with coherent signals, but its not.

Makes you wonder.

Well, think of it this way.

Let's assume for a moment that if there is intelligent life on other planets, their intelligent life started at about the same time ours did, and evolved at about the same rate ours did. (There is no guarantee to this at all, just a simple assumption).

While radio was invented in the late 1800's on our planet, it wasn't in common broadcasting use until ~1915 or so. That gives about a history of 100 years of radio.

Again, assuming that other planets with intelligent life have formed at the same time evolved at the same rate as we have, they would have started radio transmissions about 100 years ago.

Radio signals travel at the speed of light, like all EM radiation. So this little fact limits us to a distance of 100 light years. This is a insignificantly small portion of space in general. Whose to say that intelligent life exists so close to us? And that's even assuming that early radio transmissions are powerful enough to even reach 100 light years and still be detectable. Considering that transmissions fall of in strength by the square of the distance, it's questionable to me that we'd even be able to pick up early radio signals even if they emanated from within our own solar system, let alone 100 light years away...

So, the lack of success of the SETI program really is not that significant IMHO. It does not disprove that there is intelligent life out there.

I for one believe that somewhere out there there has to be intelligent life. the chances of the conditions being right on any given planet for life to arise are so tiny that they are pretty much negligible, but at the same time the universe is SO HUGE that it has to have happened somewhere else. I just personally feel that the chances of this somewhere else being close enough for us to communicate with it are rather tiny. At least not for a long, long time.

Fully behaviorally and physically developed modern man has only been around for 50,000 years or so. Maybe in another 50,000 (if we haven't killed ourselves first) we will have achieved sufficient technological advances that we will be able to reach out far enough into space and communicate with other intelligent life forms. I just don't think it is likely to happen any time even remotely soon, just based on the vast distances of space we are dealing with.

 

[Burticus]

All fabrications by the Matrix anyway. Now get back to your "real" job sewing up latex clothes for the cyber-goths.

 

[Outamyhead]

Just think, in 300 years, it'll come back to Earth inside a giganitc robot machine and James Kirk will save everyone from certain doom.

It will also call itself vyger, and want to fornicate with a science nerd (red shirt may be required).

 

[Ruoh]

This bothers me too. If anyone in the Milky Way achieved sentience 300 million years ago or earlier then they should be here by now.

Who's to say they haven't? Not only that, but if they had, for some reason, shown up in the last couple hundred years, I'm sure they rolled their eyes (The equivalent, of course) and left.

I mean, would YOU really want to make contact with a species hell bent on self destruction?

 

[Azhar]

Who's to say they haven't? Not only that, but if they had, for some reason, shown up in the last couple hundred years, I'm sure they rolled their eyes (The equivalent, of course) and left.

I mean, would YOU really want to make contact with a species hell bent on self destruction?

Nah, the alien species are merely observing the Prime Directive. We don't have warp travel yet.

 

[VRMan]

They're just waiting for us to kill ourselves off so they can take over the planet. Won't be long now with all the poisoning of our air and land we are doing. All because some people can have more paper than others. Go Humans!

 

[c4v3man]

Nah, the alien species are merely observing the Prime Directive. We don't have warp travel yet.

Imagine how quickly you could bomb the other side of Earth if you had warp travel! The possibilities for world domination are endless!

 

[Drawmonster]

We are a pretty shitty race. I'd kill us if I was them.

 

[MrGuvernment]

35 years, and still humming along on its original energy source, even communicating across the distance of the solar system.

The universe is full of untold galaxies, solar systems and planets.

The likelihood of life arising on any given one of them, like it did on earth is probably miniscule.

It stands to reason that there may be some other planets with life on them somewhere, but whose to say it evolved with the same kind of intelligence as ours? It may just be bacterial, plant form, or something else.

To me, humans encountering intelligent alien life is the stuff of science fiction and movies, and unlikely to happen now, or in the next 10,000 years.

I'm not only not concerned, but if serious, I'm amused that there are others on these forums who are

To think humans are intelligent worries me, if we are so smart... why are we destroying our selves...

I would think we are the less intelligent life form in this universe, why no one has contacted us... no reaso to.

 

[jadams]

Honestly, it's more like "common sense". Or maybe "paying attention in school".

I mean, how many times has a superior (technological) civilization encountered a more primitive one in human history? Or, heck, even extend that to ANY species busy evolving away on the planet. More advanced runs into less advanced.

Dozens?

Hundreds, maybe?

What happens to the less-advanced civilization? Oh, yeah, that's right, wiped out with almost no trace left of them. So why would we ever assume any more technologically advanced race than us would be any different?

Exactly why I'm not thrilled about finding ET.

 

[schizrade]

God speed Voyager.

From a time when we were still doing things that we knew might fail, but did them anyway.

 

[schizrade]

I would think we are the less intelligent life form in this universe, why no one has contacted us... no reaso to.

Or the more likely scenario, the distances are so great and the area so vast, it is much harder to cross than we might believe.

 

[jojo69]

00000010101010000000000 00101000001010000000100 10001000100010010110010 10101010101010100100100 00000000000000000000000 00000000000011000000000 00000000001101000000000 00000000001101000000000 00000000010101000000000 00000000011111000000000 00000000000000000000000 11000011100011000011000 10000000000000110010000 11010001100011000011010 11111011111011111011111 00000000000000000000000 00010000000000000000010 00000000000000000000000 00001000000000000000001 11111000000000000011111 00000000000000000000000 11000011000011100011000 10000000100000000010000 11010000110001110011010 11111011111011111011111 00000000000000000000000 00010000001100000000010 00000000001100000000000 00001000001100000000001 11111000001100000011111 00000000001100000000000 00100000000100000000100 00010000001100000001000 00001100001100000010000 00000011000100001100000 00000000001100110000000 00000011000100001100000 00001100001100000010000 00010000001000000001000 00100000001100000000100 01000000001100000000100 01000000000100000001000 00100000001000000010000 00010000000000001100000 00001100000000110000000 00100011101011000000000 00100000001000000000000 00100000111110000000000 00100001011101001011011 00000010011100100111111 10111000011100000110111 00000000010100000111011 00100000010100000111111 00100000010100000110000 00100000110110000000000 00000000000000000000000 00111000001000000000000 00111010100010101010101 00111000000000101010100 00000000000000101000000 00000000111110000000000 00000011111111100000000 00001110000000111000000 00011000000000001100000 00110100000000010110000 01100110000000110011000 01000101000001010001000 01000100100010010001000 00000100010100010000000 00000100001000010000000 00000100000000010000000 00000001001010000000000 01111001111101001111000

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

00000010101010000000000 00101000001010000000100 10001000100010010110010 10101010101010100100100 00000000000000000000000 00000000000011000000000 00000000001101000000000 00000000001101000000000 00000000010101000000000 00000000011111000000000 00000000000000000000000 11000011100011000011000 10000000000000110010000 11010001100011000011010 11111011111011111011111 00000000000000000000000 00010000000000000000010 00000000000000000000000 00001000000000000000001 11111000000000000011111 00000000000000000000000 11000011000011100011000 10000000100000000010000 11010000110001110011010 11111011111011111011111 00000000000000000000000 00010000001100000000010 00000000001100000000000 00001000001100000000001 11111000001100000011111 00000000001100000000000 00100000000100000000100 00010000001100000001000 00001100001100000010000 00000011000100001100000 00000000001100110000000 00000011000100001100000 00001100001100000010000 00010000001000000001000 00100000001100000000100 01000000001100000000100 01000000000100000001000 00100000001000000010000 00010000000000001100000 00001100000000110000000 00100011101011000000000 00100000001000000000000 00100000111110000000000 00100001011101001011011 00000010011100100111111 10111000011100000110111 00000000010100000111011 00100000010100000111111 00100000010100000110000 00100000110110000000000 00000000000000000000000 00111000001000000000000 00111010100010101010101 00111000000000101010100 00000000000000101000000 00000000111110000000000 00000011111111100000000 00001110000000111000000 00011000000000001100000 00110100000000010110000 01100110000000110011000 01000101000001010001000 01000100100010010001000 00000100010100010000000 00000100001000010000000 00000100000000010000000 00000001001010000000000 01111001111101001111000

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[naninani]

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[Zarathustra[H]]

01010000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101100 01100101 01101101 00111111 00100000 00111010 01110100 01110010 01101111 01101100 01101100 01100110 01100001 01100011 01100101 00111010

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[3dfx_zombie]

While it is laughable due to the complexity and vastness of the the universe, the Fermi paradox makes a great point. Personally I can't see humans being the only sentient life forms. I think we have "an age problem", our time to search in a cosmic perspective is just unfathomably short.

I suppose it's likely there are other 'sentient" species, but as long as we don't know exactly how life got started here, we can't calculate the number of civilizations out there.
The odds of life starting on a planet might even be as low as 1:n. Where n is the number of planets in the entire universe.

On top of that, I seriously doubt our own "technological" civilization will last very long. Our tech requires energy, and we've consumed almost all fossil fuels in less than 200 years. Nuclear-fusion powerplants are still a dream 50+ years in the future. Give it another 300 years and we're back to horses and candles if we don't think of alternatives very soon.

So, technological civilizations may not last more than 1000 years, and considering the age of the universe ( 13000000000 years ), the chance of two civilizations being able to communicate at the same time might be minuscule.

 

[schizrade]

On top of that, I seriously doubt our own "technological" civilization will last very long. Our tech requires energy, and we've consumed almost all fossil fuels in less than 200 years. Nuclear-fusion powerplants are still a dream 50+ years in the future. Give it another 300 years and we're back to horses and candles if we don't think of alternatives very soon.

You do not give us much credit as a species. We will not go "dark". Stop buying into the hysteria. We are nowhere close to depleting oil and natural gas reserves. Our FF consumption is dropping in developed nations and we are using more and more efficient tech. If the rest of the developing world can catch up and raise their net wealth we may get somewhere in the next 100 years.

 

[wgm3446]

All I'm saying about this thread...

 

[schizrade]

All I'm saying about this thread...

LMAO. Nice.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

You do not give us much credit as a species. We will not go "dark". Stop buying into the hysteria. We are nowhere close to depleting oil and natural gas reserves. Our FF consumption is dropping in developed nations and we are using more and more efficient tech. If the rest of the developing world can catch up and raise their net wealth we may get somewhere in the next 100 years.

We may have to scale back from our wasteful ways a bit, but going dark, is an exaggeration of epic proportions.

 

[maboblivion]

wow can't believe there is a binary to text conversion was able to read zee binary....

0101011101100101001000000110000101110010011001010010000001101100011001010110011101101001011011110110111000100001

 

[kamxam]

Just a pet theory, but I've always thought if we went from cavemen to a fairly technological civilization in only 50,000 years, and the earth is supposedly billions of years old, then it could be entirely possible to have had numerous advanced civilizations rise and fall imho and be mostly erased by the vastness of time in the past few million years.
May just explain some of the mysteries that pop up now and then...lol

As for alien life, i like the Calvin and Hobbes explanation:

"The surest sign of intelligent life out there is that none of them have tried to contact us"

 

[Blakestr]

Great, Voyagers wakes up the reapers and we are all screwed. No Shepard for us, maybe Jack Ryan and Chuck Norris can drum up some space marines for us.

What has always interested me is, what would happen to humanity if we actually made contact with an alien civilization. Would that lead us to see ourselves as a species and unite to some global federation? There are always people who think we are going to hell in a handbasket but I think we are headed somewhere positive. We are in a constant state of two steps forward one step backwards...

 

[Sly]

Great, Voyagers wakes up the reapers and we are all screwed. No Shepard for us, maybe Jack Ryan and Chuck Norris can drum up some space marines for us.

What has always interested me is, what would happen to humanity if we actually made contact with an alien civilization. Would that lead us to see ourselves as a species and unite to some global federation? There are always people who think we are going to hell in a handbasket but I think we are headed somewhere positive. We are in a constant state of two steps forward one step backwards...

The day we all unite is the day we embrace the philosophies of communism.

 

[3dfx_zombie]

Just a pet theory, but I've always thought if we went from cavemen to a fairly technological civilization in only 50,000 years, and the earth is supposedly billions of years old, then it could be entirely possible to have had numerous advanced civilizations rise and fall imho and be mostly erased by the vastness of time in the past few million years.
May just explain some of the mysteries that pop up now and then...lol

You should read Larry Niven's short-story "The Green Marauder". Same idea.