Aliens!

[DredgerMan]

OOpsie!



Sorry, Jericho. I missed the post counter so didn't realise it was your first post on this board.

Welcome!!!!

As for aliens, I am certain they are out there. It's a numbers thing. Very, very, very small chance in a very, very, very big universe.

But will they be looking down on us? I somehow doubt that. Like I said, it's a very, very, very big universe out there and if there are others about, the chance that they'll be close enough for us to notice them or them meeting up with us is very, very, very small again.

On the other hand, what do I know. I can't even start getting me head around string theories and quantum physics.

[Cody]

String theory is easy - it's got two ends, joined by an indeterminate length.

[Smivs]

...it's a very, very, very big universe out there and if there are others about, the chance that they'll be close enough for us to notice them or them meeting up with us is very, very, very small again.

Also remember that time is a factor. The Universe is ancient already and is showing no signs of ending. To meet Aliens not only would we need to be quite close in space, but also in time.

[DredgerMan]

String theory is easy - it's got two ends, joined by an indeterminate length.

That is an easy one, Cody! And I have no problems with that one. It's the Boson one that I struggle with, where you need a 26 dimension space time continuum even though the strings themselves are only one-dimensional by definition. Huh???

To meet Aliens not only would we need to be quite close in space, but also in time.

True, so true, Smivs. And who knows, perhaps they were already here, had a look at the slime in the oceans several billion years ago and only thought: " Yuck, I'm not going to swim in that!"

[Disembodied]

Also remember that time is a factor. The Universe is ancient already and is showing no signs of ending. To meet Aliens not only would we need to be quite close in space, but also in time.

True - but our chances are getting better, as we point more and better telescopes at the sky, and have more and more number-crunching to analyse what we see. Twenty years ago, if someone saw a weasel riding a woodpecker, they'd have a story that nobody would believe. Now, there's a half-decent chance that someone seeing such a thing would have on hand a high-definition video camera. We've only been looking for sigs of what might be alien civilisation for a very short time, and have only been detectable ourselves from radio emissions for a very short time as well (and the stuff we routinely send out is very, very faint: direct spectrographic analysis of our atmosphere might be an easier way for other civilisations to detect us).

Mind you, there might be a little bit of time pressure …
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/vacu ... atastrophe

[DredgerMan]

True - but our chances are getting better, as we point more and better telescopes at the sky, and have more and more number-crunching to analyse what we see.

I agree that we can see further and further out and can extract a lot of knowledge from that data. The problem is though, that the data is ... uhhhhm ... dated. It takes a whopping 60.000 years for light from the center to reach the outer edge of our galaxy.
From Andromeda (our closest galaxy neighbour) it takes about 2.6 million years for light to reach us. So what we 'see' is Andromeda as it was 2.6 million years ago. Any information that we derive from the data that we collect from Andromeda is therefore not current.

We NEED faster than light technology both for travel (I'm pretty sure that I would not be able to remember who we are supposed to meet during a 2.6 million year plus travel ! ) but more importantly faster than light detection.

Edited to state correct distance to Andromeda

[Disembodied]

We NEED faster than light technology

Sadly, I suspect that this is almost certainly a physical impossibility - not just in the way that (some) people in the 19th century claimed heavier-than-air flight was impossible (especially since, y'know, birds ), but genuinely and completely not possible, in a you-can-do-it-but-you-need-infinite-energy-do-you-have-infinite-energy?-well-then-you-can't-do-it sort of way. It's another reason to suspect that the form of life most suited to a spacefaring existence would be machine life. Biology ties us to very narrow environments and time-frames.

[DredgerMan]

We NEED faster than light technology

Sadly, I suspect that this is almost certainly a physical impossibility - not just in the way that (some) people in the 19th century claimed heavier-than-air flight was impossible (especially since, y'know, birds ), but genuinely and completely not possible, in a you-can-do-it-but-you-need-infinite-energy-do-you-have-infinite-energy?-well-then-you-can't-do-it sort of way. It's another reason to suspect that the form of life most suited to a spacefaring existence would be machine life. Biology ties us to very narrow environments and time-frames.

As far as I know, you are most likely right. But I do have hope that Quantum Mechanics can show us a way. That may be, though, because I have no clue how that is supposed to work. I read the articles and look at the formula's and then I think "Huh? What?"

[Alex]

We NEED faster than light technology

Sadly, I suspect that this is almost certainly a physical impossibility - not just in the way that (some) people in the 19th century claimed heavier-than-air flight was impossible (especially since, y'know, birds ), but genuinely and completely not possible, in a you-can-do-it-but-you-need-infinite-energy-do-you-have-infinite-energy?-well-then-you-can't-do-it sort of way. It's another reason to suspect that the form of life most suited to a spacefaring existence would be machine life. Biology ties us to very narrow environments and time-frames.

Loved the comment about birds.
Ya know I've never once considered birds when thinking about heavier than air flight!
As for FTL travel..

Rasberies party pooper..

I want my TARDIS and I want it yesterday at 3.36pm GMT!

[Disembodied]

Either stars are strange, or there are 234 aliens trying to contact us

To sum it all up, the two astronomers have found a tiny number of stars, very similar to our own Sun, that seem to be the source of pulsed signals. These signals are the same as predicted if a technological society was using powerful lasers to communicate with distant stars.

With the usual caveats - it could be a natural process, or an artefact of the equipment, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc.

[Cody]

I ploughed through the .pdf at arXiv.org, but couldn't find any mention of distances to those 234 stars.

[Disembodied]

One of the comments in the article suggests that the right ascension and declination of the stars indicate that they're probably very far apart from each other, which could maybe add a strike against them being part of a common culture. With the usual caveats that, if this is aliens and they're doing some high-tech thing, we might not have a hope of grasping what the point of it all is. We just need to keep our eyes open and our brains engaged …

[Astrobe]

With literally hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone, no wonder if a bunch of them exhibits unusual or remarkable behaviour.

We don't even know our solar system well: there may be a ninth planet, scientists find unexpected results when probes reach the limit of the heliosphere, Pioneer going slower than expected... And outside of it, just recently they discovered there might be more galaxies than they thought. Almost every week I read a headline like that.

That's why when I hear about dark energy and dark matter - theories that in every way look like the famous theory of Aether from the nineteenth century - I am extremely sceptical.

[Disembodied]

Tabby's Star has dimmed again:

https://astronomynow.com/2017/05/24/the ... ims-again/

[Cody]

Fascinating, ain't it - the WTF star!