lo posted:

levoydpage posted:

cars posted:
Didn't tears also admit to being AI in another thread? Didn't really strike me as weird...

that was me actually

Forgive me, lo.

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.

Good.

Edited by aerdil (Dec. 18, 2017 22:13:11)

shriekingviolet posted:

Just as Roswell was not aliens but in fact clandestine testing of captured Soviet craft, I'd bet my boots the half of all these "unexplainable" sightings that actually happened come from testing of illicitly obtained Chinese hardware etc and the program was defunded because the people with sufficient clearance to know it were worried the right hand would accidentally expose what the left was doing.

I thought the UFO rumours were started because it was less embarrassing to pretend to be testing stolen alien technology than to have anyone realise they were actually building dumb shit designed by nazi rocket men

Are We Alone in This Vast Universe?
Ernst Mayer

Humans have asked this question for more than 2,000 years, speculating where some other worlds might be, and the question is still alive. At this moment there are a number of devices in operation listening for signals from extraterrestrials on other planets. This activity is referred to as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). To simplify the discussion, I refer to those who believe in the existence of extraterrestrials and who attempt to communicate with them as Setians. Most Setians are physicists or astronomers. The speculations of biologists are more modest. With a few exceptions, they do not ask “are there other humanlike creatures on other worlds?” but simply “is there other life somewhere in the universe?”. Setians have been running radio telescopes for more than twenty years, not discouraged by the absence of any indications in their recordings that could be interpreted as signals from extraterrestrials. Their opponents believe the evidence opposed to the possibility of success in this endeavor is overwhelming and that it is no longer reasonable to continue the SETI.

What is the reason for the longevity of the argument between the Setians and their opponents? When reading through the voluminous literature, I was suddenly struck by the realization that two rather different questions were consistently confounded in the controversy:

(1) What is the probability of life elsewhere in the universe?
(2) What is the chance of communicating with extraterrestrials?

What is the probability of life elsewhere in the universe?

The answer to the first question depends on a number of conditions. First of all, we must define what we mean by “life.” When laypersons speak of life in the universe, they usually mean human-like extraterrestrials. The late distinguished Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel amused himself with making drawings of the life we might encounter on Mars. All were versions of the human species but some were green, some had some additional extremities, etc. By contrast, when biologists speak of life they think of molecular complexes. This of course involves deciding what life is. I accept a broad definition; life must be able to replicate itself and make use of energy either from the sun or from certain available molecules, like sulfides in the deep sea vents. Such life would consist of bacteria or even simpler molecular aggregates. Biologists who are specialists in this field tend to think that the repeated origin of such life on planets throughout the universe is highly probable. Indeed there are quite a few suggestions in the literature about how a combination of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a few other elements that are widely available in the universe could produce life spontaneously under the proper environmental conditions (temperature, pressure, etc.).

How suitable is the universe for life?

Setians and their opponents agree that conditions suitable for the origin of life and intelligent life can be found only on planets. Indeed, among the nine solar planets, not only the Earth, but also two other planets (Venus and Mars) have at some stage of their development most likely been suitable for life, presumably a bacteria-like kind of life. If there are billions of planets and a fifth of them (plus or minus) have conditions suitable for life, then surely an availability of planets will not be a problem for the origin of life. And, thus, early Setians took an availability of abundant suitable planets for granted. However, recent studies indicate that the solar planets may be quite exceptional. In all calculations of the probability of life in the universe, it is now necessary to consider the rarity of planets in the universe suitable for life (Burger 2002). Indeed, there are apparently scores of difficult steps between the Big Bang and the origin of a suitable planet.

How difficult would have been the origin of life on earth?

Probably not too difficult, considering the abundance of the necessary molecules on the early earth. This conclusion is confirmed by the rapidity with which life appeared on earth after it had become habitable. The proper conditions for life on earth are inferred to have been reached around 3.8 billion years ago. The first fossil bacteria are found in deposits that are 3.5 billion years old. If one postulates that it may have taken about 300 million years for the evolution of modern bacteria from the first origin of life, it would mean that life originated very soon after the earth had become inhabitable.

One might conclude that the origin of life on earth was rather easy because it happened so fast. However, if it were so easy, why did not all sorts of life originate, answering the broad definition of life we have accepted, but only one is found? The genetic code of all organisms now living on earth, down to the simplest bacteria, is, with a few exceptions, identical and this, owing to the arbitrary nature of the code, is convincing evidence that all life now existing on earth had a single origin.

Considering the facility with which life apparently originated on earth, one would postulate that life originated on millions of planets. If so, how does this other life differ from that now found on earth? Did any of it have the potential to develop high intelligence? I am afraid we will never know. And here I touch the fundamental problem of the search for life in the universe. How are we ever to find out whether there is life, in the broadest sense of the word, anywhere else in the universe if such life does not have an electronic civilization enabling it to communicate with us?

Even so, we can now answer our first question. Yes, there is a high probability for the existence of other life, in the broadest sense, somewhere else in the universe. Alas, as of this moment, we have no means of finding out whether such life actually exists or existed on a planet beyond the solar system.

What I cannot understand is why the Setians are searching for traces of life with such determination. To find it would be a highly improbable accident. Therefore the search presumably will be unsuccessful. This would prove nothing because life might indeed exist somewhere else but be inaccessible to our search. If life, in the form of some bacteria-like organisms, actually were found unexpectedly, this would tell us very little. Yes, living molecular assemblages might originate occasionally. So what? Is it worth hundreds of million dollars, like the ill-fated recent Mars probe? I doubt it. The money could have been spent far more effectively in researching the rapidly dwindling diversity of the tropical rainforests on earth. But that urgent task is neglected in favor of possibly finding some fossil bacteria on Mars. Should we perhaps organize a search for terrestrial intelligence?

What is the chance of communicating with extraterrestrials?

In virtually all the published books and papers on life in the universe the authors begin with a very simple question: Is there life outside of the earth? But then it soon becomes very clear that these Setians could not care less whether some bacteria-like very primitive organisms exist on other planets. What they really want to know is whether there are extraterrestrial organisms with whom we could communicate. But this is of course a very different question from whether life simply exists elsewhere.

The project to get in touch with such organisms, SETI, is primarily supported by physical scientists. Deterministic thinking is quite common in their sciences, in which laws play such an important role. These Setians seem to assume that once life has originated somewhere, in due time it will inexorably evolve into intelligent life. Biologists are not willing to make such a jump. This is why only a few superoptimistic biologists are willing to support the SETI project.

The Setians are up against a formidable problem. How can they determine whether there is life on a far distant planet? They soon realized that, for the time being, there is only one possibility. It is that such life has produced higher organisms that are rather human-like and have developed an electronic civilization. If they have the same urge as we have, to find out whether there is life elsewhere in the universe, they will send out electronic signals to get in touch with us. If we set up large radio telescopes and carefully register all seeming “noises” recorded by this instrumentation, it will by necessity also include whatever signals the extraterrestrials have sent. This search, of course, would discover among the billions of possible forms of life only highly intelligent members of an electronic civilization.

The reasoning of the Setians is based on the assumption that in many places where life originated, it eventually would have led to high intelligence. They assume that natural selection would place such a high premium on intelligence that it would produce it in lots of places in the universe. Carl Sagan said, “Smarter is better.” Well, is it really? About 1 billion species of organisms have originated on the earth since the origin of life (Mayr 2001). If Sagan had been right, millions of them should have high intelligence. However, as we know, this faculty emerged on earth only once. Every evolutionist knows how successful natural selection is in producing needed adaptations. Photoreceptor structures (eyes) were acquired independently at least forty times in the animal kingdom.Or to give another example, bioluminescence evidently also contributes much to fitness. As a result, it has independently originated twenty-six times in the living world. We must conclude that if high intelligence had as high a fitness value as eyes or bioluminescence, it would have emerged in numerous lineages of the animal kingdom. Actually it happened only in a single one of the millions of lineages, the hominid line. All other mammals with some amount of intelligence have relatively large brains but not anywhere near the kind of intelligence that would permit such organisms to develop a civilization.

There are numerous ways to demonstrate how utterly improbable the acquisition of high intelligence is. Evolution is branching. Each branch of the evolutionary tree splits into a number of twigs and each of these has the option to produce high intelligence among its offspring. This begins with the hundreds or thousands of species of bacteria, followed bythe most primitive early eukaryote organisms that have a nucleus, but most of them are unicellular. From eighty to a hundred phyla of such unicellular eukaryotes (protists) exist, all of them in principle having the option eventually to produce high intelligence. But only a single one actually did. The higher eukaryotes consist of the three kingdoms of plants, fungi, and animals, again all potentially having the choice of Producing a lineage with high intelligence, according to Sagan’s principle of “smarter is better.” But only one of the fifty to eighty phyla of animals produced the vertebrates, hominids, and ultimately Homo sapiens. There is not anything deterministic about evolution and the production
of high intelligence. Life originated on earth about 3.8 billion years ago. The hominid lineage developed about 300 million years after the origin of life and high intelligence developed less than 300,000 years ago. This shows how infinitesimal the chance was for this ever to happen.

Similar calculations by Diamond (1992) lead to the same finding of an incredibly low probability for the origin of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Would the extraterrestrials be able to send signals?

Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that the totally improbable really happened and a large brained human-like organism evolved on some planet. What would be the chance we could communicate with these extraterrestrials? To achieve success, a number of conditions would have to be met. First of all, they would have to have sense organs similar to ours. If their civilization were based on olfactory stimuli or acoustic ones, they would never think of sending electronic messages. This would at once disqualify most of life on earth. Here on earth for several million years we have had troops of highly intelligent hunter-gatherers, but they never would have built radio telescopes because this requires the existence of an electronic civilization. Rudiments of intelligence are found on earth among birds (ravens, parrots) and in a number of orders of mammals (primates, dolphins, elephants, carnivores), but in no case was the intelligence sufficiently highly developed to found civilizations.

Still, we can ask, is every civilization capable of extraterrestrial communication? The answer is clearly no. On earth, since the origin of Homo sapiens, we have had already about twenty civilizations, beginning with the Indus and Sumerian civilizations, several others in the near East, the Greek and Roman civilizations, since the fall of Rome the European Civilizations, the three American civilizations, and a number of Chinese and Indian civilizations. They came and they went without producing electronic civilizations. What is particularly characteristic for civilizations is their short life expectancy. Many of them lasted fewer than 1,000 years and none of them has survived several thousand years. If there had been planets with electronic civilizations and these had sent, before 1900, signals to the earth during their short existence, let us say around 1,000, or 1,500, or 1,900 years, no one on earth would have been aware of their signals, because it was before the start of our electronic civilization.

Conclusion

I have here discussed a whole series of factors, each of which makes the possibility of communication with extraterrestrial beings highly improbable. And when one multiplies all these improbabilities with each other, one finds an improbability of astronomical dimensions. The radio telescopes of the Setians reach only a small fraction of the solar galaxy with a limited number of planets. It is for us irrelevant whether there might be life, even intelligent life, somewhere in the infinite universe where it is not accessible to us. And let us always keep in mind that “life in the universe” does not mean humanoids with human intelligence and an electronic civilization, but anything covered by the definition of “life.”