Galaxy may be full of 'Earths', alien life.

You inviting some of these aliens to become Chewers?

As we speak, Kang and his sister Kodos, are reading this and laughing their asses off.

Please tell me one of them has a red sun.

Interesting article, but yeah, this has squat-all to do with Chewers.

I for one welcome our alien neighbors, if in fact they do not actually do anal probing.

Well, some of us do have stock in CHOAM and the Spacing Guild - might be a new source of Melange on one of these worlds. Spice must flow, and all that.

500 quatloos on the Earth man Booth.

1000 quatloos that the Earth man, Booth will have to be destroyed...

:: insert Dolph Lundgren quote here ::

The research is appealing, but the hypothesis isn't testable. They might as well claim there are three billion Easter bunnies circling the galaxy. Moreover, knowing the number of intelligent species dotted about the firmament is incidental next to the thorny question of what we would do if we discovered one.

How would we communicate with it? Language is a product of experience and experience is subjective. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a fascinating paper titled “What is it like to be a bat?”, the central point of which is that there is a subjective character of experience – something that it is to *be* a particular organism, something it is *like* for the organism – that is never captured in reductionism.

An aliens' form of perception would be completely unlike any sense that we possess, so it is reasonable to suppose that it is subjectively completely unlike anything we are able to experience. In effect, there are experiences that we as humans could never experience, even in principle; there are facts about experience whose exact nature is quite beyond our comprehension.

The standard retort to the above is mathematics, which is held to be a universal language. But there are many skeptics who argue that even it is a human construct and that mathematical thinking is at root a matter of convention: in the end there is consensus, not discovery; proof, not truth.

For anyone interested, there are two excellent SF novels which deal with this very subject. The first is Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic (the source text for Andre Tarkovsky's masterpiece – Stalker) in which humans attempt to understand (sometimes lethal) artifacts left behind by alien visitors. Are they weapons, communications devices, sentient devices or merely garbage left behind after the book's title? The second is Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco where humans visit an alien planet and spend months attempting to communicate with a species that hasn't the faintest idea what they are talking about.

Even if we did discover an alien civilization and managed to overcome the colossal hurdle of FTL travel, it's not like we could just fly on down and shake hands with the little grey men. Human beings, like all species, are products of their own 'biological soup'. The annihilation of twenty million native Americans after the smallpox virus crossed the Atlantic with Cortez stands as grim testament to the dangers of environmental cross-contamination.

Unless the bacteria/virus is familiar with like organisms similar to us, the chances of something like this happening are very very slim.

Here's a little bit more info on this.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...-the-worlds-em

I used smallpox as a historical example of cross-contamination. But I don't mean it is likely to threaten an alien civilization. Much depends on the biological building process driving the aliens' evolution. An RNA/DNA mechanism would obviously be more susceptible to an outside agent, whereas an unknown one is likely to repel the same.

The problem is we're not just talking about a few virus fragments or bacteria, it's likely to be billions. And when so many biological interactions are taking place it's wise to remember an oft-repeated maxim – Danger: Here Be Random Variables!

And, of course, it's not just at the microscopic level that danger exists. The accidental introduction of rabbits and foxes to Australia, signal crayfish to European waters via the bilges of ships etc. have all wreaked untold damage in their new environments.

Following on Geoff's thought, I remember a sci-fi novel many years ago built partially around the premise that one of space-faring humanity's golden rules was to avoid at all costs contact with other sentient life forms, owing to the fact that at some point prior to the events in the novel an entire alien race had committed suicide shortly after first contact with humans.

Always thought that was an interesting premise (more interesting than the novel proper, IIRC).

if I had just met the human race for the first time. I know I would want to off myself.

Star Trek already solved all these problems. they have the Prime Directive AND the Universal Translater.

Both of which ended up being damn near completely useless since everybody in the galaxy spoke contemporary english anyway.

Jesus, don't any of you people pay attention?

By the way, has anybody firgured out how many of them are 'Old West' planets?

If I had just met the Republican party for the first time I'd want to kill myself.

ZING!

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a beautiful as well as haunting examination of the disastrous effects of an alien species' (humans) intrusion into another civilization.

When are our new alien overlords arriving? I want to make sure my Quisling ass is fully prepared to serve them in the enslavement of the rest of you bi-pedal meatsacks.

In The Dog Said Bow-Wow, Swanwick has a story about an astronaut on Europa? or some alien moon... The whole ocean beneath the ice surface is a single sentient being. It cannot handle her presence since she is an individual. Realizing that individuality is possible, this sentient being kills itself in portions of varying sizes. It's existence for millenia has been rendered obsolete.

Embarrasingly enough I still haven't read much Bradbury, but it's on my list.

Not shit.

Of course it's possible

We don't know what the fuck is out there.

He's one of the finest American writers of this century with a masterful understanding of metaphor (Something Wicked This Way Comes is a peerless piece of horror fiction, which was clearly a massive influence on Stephen King).

Sounds like a great book. I think on my list of all possible places to explore in this Solar System of ours, the most intriguing has to be Europa. If there's a place that holds the possiblity of extra terristrial life in this solar system, it's there.

You apparently haven't met many in person have you?

Some scientists believe that if it wasn't for our moon, life today would consist of a big watery soup of single celled organisms. But because of the moon we have tides, an excellent way to have organisms from the water slowly adjust to life on dry land.

So scientists might want to cut down the field of possible inhabitable planets by sorting out the ones with no moons at the right distance.

I'm pretty sure they would have factored the moon's influence into their simulation, as well as the earth's cataclysmic collision with the planet dubbed "Thea", which gave earth the additional mass to retain its atmosphere (and formed the moon in the first place).

I read an interesting piece in some newspaper months ago which claimed that when the moon was much closer to the earth (the moon is slowly moving away from the earth at the rate of a few centimeters a year) the tides were sufficiently large to deluge entire continents each day. As the moon moved into a higher orbit the tides became less violent and life got the chance to begin evolving. Fascinating stuff.

Yes it is. Volatiles in atmospheres of planets too close to their stars for those volatiles not to be boiled off is one hint.

Cool, mind-bendng info, Geoff. Makes you look at the moon differently.

It's a hint, but it doesn't necessarily mean that "the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."

Regarding Europa, there's an interesting experiment the Russians are currently undertaking above Lake Vostok a subglacial lake buried 4km under the Antarctic ice cap. It is estimated that its waters haven't seen the light of day in up to one million years. Researchers are using the kind of technology required for a Europa mission to drill toward its waters. It's unclear what creatures exist down there and great care is being taken to ensure no biological cross-contamination takes place.

Dagon, most likely...

"What's "Godzilla" in Russian?" for $400, Alex.

If most earth-sized planets found are found to be barren rocks, I'd say the claim that most aren't barren rocks has been put to the test.

You're right. My bad. The problem is that it'll be extraordinarily difficult to test this hypothesis. It may indeed boil down to visiting these planets and taking samples. Which would entail a journey so long that our species will have died out or evolved into something non-human, or overcoming the problems associated with FTL travel - which at the moment seem pretty intractable.

They have plans for an orbital array that can see earth size plants, and do a spectral analysis on them. A spectral analysis should be able to tell if a plant is cover in the chemical building blocks of life, and it temperature.

Not being anything like an expert, even if they have accurate means of determining density of Earth-like planets throughout the galaxy, I wonder how they go about determining the probability that life would develop in such a place. It seems to me that we have a sample size of exactly one for such occurrences, which strikes me as a poor basis for determining odds.

Certain elements and molecules are assumed to be necessary for the development of life. Some combination of Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Water, etc, give or take a few not necessarily in the proportions or ratios we have here on earth but something similar simply because of how these elements interact relative to other elements. They form the kinds of bonds that life has required here on earth, and logically would likely require elsewhere.

Now, sure we only have one such instance of life to draw from, however, the fact that we exist implies there is some organizing principle (currently unidentified, and very interesting imo) built into the laws of nature such that when certain conditions are met (the right elements in the right place) molecules will organize in such ways as to form rudimentary life. How exactly that occurs is still a mystery and really I think ought to be at the top of biology/chemistry's list of questions that need answering.

Absolutely, but what I'm saying is that what our existence proves is that given certain conditions, rudimentary life can form. Given our insignificant sample size and inability to recreate the phenomena, it seems to be quite a leap to say that those conditions will necessarily lead to the formation of life. Or that there is a 90% chance, or 50%, or 10%, or .00001%. All we know for sure is that its possible.

If you spin a roulette wheel once, and 0 comes up, it would be erroneous to assume that 0 is the most likely outcome, or even reasonably likely. You need hundreds of spins to deduce that it's actually about 35-1 against it.

I knew that; I was trying to imply that Chewers are rather like life from another world. It was a bad joke that fell flat, not the beating of a dead horse. Anyway, carry on with the worthy intellectual discussion I've once again interrupted.

Oh! Smething someone posted earlier reminded me of a discussion I had with my brother some time back. he was a geology major in college, and I asked him if it were theoretically possivle for elements other than those we have on the periodic table to exist on other planets, where conditions of formation (temperature, pressure, radiation, etc.) were different, or if it's possible there's just different . . . stuff out in some sectors of far removed space, that we just don't see here, so many light yrs away. His answer was kind of noncommittal; I think it was a no. Any of you science types care to weigh in on this?

Considering the periodic table has expanded over time there are probably still elements on our own planet that are yet to be discovered.

-and we've created a few new ones in a laboratory, I'd say it's not too unlikely.

Has anyone even thought of the idea that not all life is carbon based? I remember reading something in college about that..damned if I remember what book it was but I remember it posited that our own scientific hubris as to the nature of biology (i.e. seeking out lifeforms like ourselves) was foolish because intelligent life may have arisen elsewhere dramatically different from how we did. I remember a main point being about silicon and how it could be a buidling block of life in certain conditions.


Am I crazy or has anyone else read something similiar and could point me to what in the hell book that was?

They're made out of meat.

From someone who explained it better than myself: http://www.space.com/searchforlife/s...on_040415.html