Intelligent life out there

You should know, you're my alt.

ROFL!!!! hehe

Then you must have a dual personality too!!!

Dual? I have a whole society in there.

Erm... I mean in here.

Yeah, they can't even agree with one another, I can see.

That's just not funny - my alt would never reside in L.A.

Actually, Garoad, I hate to tell you, but the math people have been here from near the beginning.

What you fail to realise is that mathematics is such a gentle, perfect, artistic subject that its devotees are really, really kind. Too kind to say or do anything to reduce your happiness, or to undermine your little triumph.

This is a strange thing for me to write. Could it be that something beyond me is attempting some sort of disguised communication ?

Could it...could it...be.......related to the........topic of the thread ?????

What was the topic again?

Oh...and what are you talking about?

Hehe, no, seriously, I want someone to check my "math". lol

What is the population of the universe...damnit!!!?

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L

You were right first time, Garoad. It's 1.
(Though you got it right by chance, because your reasoning was pure crap.)
Its Ye, and also Mou.

Except it is a 1 that is also 0. That happens in maths too.

You've identified my speciality, but how you knew I was feeding Garoad the answers is a mystery.

It depends... If you consider humans intellegent, then yes. (although evidence of this is tough to find) With that in mind, if it happened here, then chances are that it has or will happen somewere else in the universe. Life as we know it, however takes a very special sort of circumstances, and it is not likely to be very common.

so:

Probability that there is intellegent life somewhere else in the universe: High

Probability that they are here, flying around in saucers, turning cows inside out and sticking probes up people's butts: Extremely Low

I recommend to anyone interested in this and other nerdy sciency stuff... this book. It's a very good and easy read, and touches on the "intelligent life out there" thing a little bit.

Well i admit i always liked that Hitchiker's Mock Logic on that Infiity problem.


I guess tho the real thing is Space is NOT inifite. It is Equal only to the size that matter has traveled since the Big Bang.

Of course the number of inhabitants cant be inifinate either. It would as Admas says is a finite number.

The Average population for the Universe though should be approximately Zero since the size of Space divided by the number of inhabitants even in our own Solar System is quite small.

Though with the enormity of Space it does arue that we are not alone.

Now then, that being said , its entirely possibly the human race will be extinct long before any Alien Species travels close enough to us for us to know about them.

If aliens were to visit this Solar system I would think the sheer resources required to get here would argue against the whole alien abduction, crop circle phenomena. I think with certainty they would attempt to contact us. We would highly likely be the first Alien Species from their point of veiw they had ever encountered.

If I put aside my own strange views about the nature of reality, which can from a certain viewpoint render such discussion meaningless, I would say:

To form a view on alien intelligences we need to consider many factors, not least among them being : The probability estimates we are beginning to compile, the time it has taken us to evolve relative to the cosmic timescale, and the unlikelihood that we have accidentally already reached a genuine end stop in travel technology, or that other intelligences must operate on the same sort of time and size scale as ourselves.

Taking all these into account, coupled with the fact that no-one has turned up to cleanse the universe of our presence, my personal conclusion is one of the following:

Either we are in a protected reserve, to preserve our right of growth to the point where we are worthy of membership of a galactic, or even pan-galactic community.

Or we are such a trivial, commonplace and under-endowed little speck of nothing that we are not even worth bothering to plunder.

We cannot simply be unnoticed, or at least remain so, because of the gigantic stream of radio and tv signals with which we have rather incontinently been broadcasting our presence for the last century or so. The content of which, on sufficiently intelligent analysis, may not put our level of development, and respect for other species and for each other, in a terribly good light. Everyone within at least a 100 light-year-radius sphere, capable of and interested in listening, knows we are here. Its not a very big sphere, but it's growing, and we can never get the signals back.

I am not joking, and I have a post-graduate science/maths degree. There are some less pleasant elaborations/combinations of these two options, but you can probably work them out for yourselves.

On the other hand, this does not concern me personally, because I consider the "real", material world which this describes, to be, at the deepest level, a fiction. A beautiful, precious, fun fiction, but a fiction nevertheless. And disposable.

And even those of you who believe in the "hedgehog" theory of existence need hardly get worked up about it anyway, because the likelihood of any change in this situation, whatever it is, (interventions etc) in our lifetime or our childrens, is vanishingly small.

Note: The "Hedgehog Theory of Existence" results from looking at a dead hedgehog squashed very, very flat on the highway, to which it is firmly stuck. It looks like what ever it was experiencing has been permanently stopped in its tracks. If you think that squashed thing is all the hedgehog was, and all you potentially are yourself, then you are a subscriber to the theory.

If there are any radio astronomers out there, could you help me with some numbers?

Anyway, because our radio broadcast signals are spreading out spherically, they will decrease in intensity as 1/r^2. I'm not sure what the ambient background level is for radio waves, but even barring that, the intensity will quickly decrease to an almost undetectable level pretty quickly. Add to that the fact that any listener would have to point their recievers at us rather than at another part of the sky means that it could be pretty likely that we get missed.

Anyone with experience in this care to give estimates of: minimum detectable intensity, Background level, source strength, and maximum detectable distance?

All of it really depends on how common intellegent civilizations are in our galaxy (detecting farther than that would *really* be tough)

Damn, and I copied it exactly too!

And wtf.... infinity over infinity is 1 yes? So what's crappy about that?? lol

There was a time I could have done made a respectable shot at that calculation for you, Zuzu, but not now. What I can tell you is that it depends very heavily on the narrowness of the "beam" of the antenna with which you are being watched. In the ludicrous limit, if they could focus exactly on our planet, so that none of the space background was included in the "picture", then the radio noise, arising from sources you dont want to look at, could be hugely reduced compared with a less detailed picture including, say, the whole solar syatem. The lower the noise, the weaker the signal you can pick out of it.

There will be other limiting factors, of course, like interstellar dust attenuating the signal and actually radiating noise into the path, and factors damaging the perfection of the beam geometry, including presumably diffraction effects, and even gravity bending.

So for really long distance listening, you need a very narrow, perfect beam. To get a very narrow beam, you need a very big focussed antenna in relation to the wavelength of the signal.

Our own seti project uses a very large antenna (synthesized I believe from numerous smaller ones), and the calculations justify a search of nearby stars which give us I believe at least millions of candidates for possible earth-type transmissions from afar. Since the physics is the same in the reverse direction, this alone shows that we are in range of millions of potential observers.

Since our TV signals are at wavelengths (at a guess) 1000 times longer than those used by SETI, maybe for the same beamwidth our listening friends would need antennae 1000 times bigger than our SETI ones. I don't know what radiant power SETI assumes, so this argument is not very precise.

But certainly we have no reason to believe that antenna arrays hugely bigger than these would not be routine for at least some cultures, and they might well be laid out in space, rather than on a planetary surface.

A predatory culture waiting for silly little victims to pipe up and reveal their location might have a very significant detection system. And of course, analysis, to learn as much as possible about them. What would you think of us through our television ? Particularly if the ideas of "entertainment" and "fiction" were foreign to you.

Equally watchful, of course might be a benevolent culture looking for innocents to protect and help.

I believe it is now generally accepted in the SETI community that, given a second shot, it might have been better to have listened first till we know what is going on, keeping our own presence shielded from sight for the time being.

Not much of an answer there as far as actual figures, but maybe you might feel it is enough to "reassure" you that lots of them are indeed potentially able to hear our ramblings.

There must be at least three or four SETI related books which would give you all the detail you could want. Come back and tell us if you do get some figures. Show me how wrong my crude guessing was.

Unless we have a genuine up-to-date radio astronomer or space comms guy here to put us straight ?

I must say again, please don't be disturbed by any of this silly talk. Nothing could ever come of it until hundreds of years in the future.