Billions Of Them! ...

[Mitch Cronin]

.... Earth-like planets, orbiting stars much like our own, within the solar system's 'habitable' zone, within our galaxy alone!

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/billions-of-earth-like-planets-in-milky-way-study-1.2356237

(I used exclamation points above just for those of you who are still startled by such thoughts. )

Is there anyone left alive who still thinks we're alone in the universe?

[deicer]

And the proof that they are far more intelligent than us is the fact that they refuse to make contact

[Don Hudson]

Mitch - Carl Sagan once made the argument that our notion of "visitors" from another place was not sustainable in the face of both probability and, interestingly, the universe's "resources". He wrote, (I think in Broca's Brain) that while "life" elsewhere almost certainly exists given the billions of opportunities for replicating molecules to exist, the size of the universe and Carl's "billions and billions" of galaxies with "billions and billions" of earth-like planets were still so vanishingly far-away and therefore sparse, that there wasn't sufficient material in the universe to build sufficient spacecraft (were such travel possible), that would raise the possibility, (let alone the probability) of a chance "close encounter" with our pale blue dot, (we're certainly making best efforts to let every life form known that we're here, although the thought of some of what we see on television, ...nevermind). Put simply, the concept of flying saucers exhausts the universe's physical resources! We think about "time travel" and "worm-holes" and light tunnels and molecular transport systems but none of that is yet more than science fiction, ....for us.

deicer...your observation reminds me of Gary Larson's work...

[Mitch Cronin]

Don, it's been a long time since I've tried to allow my thoughts to flow to the keyboard as I want them to right now... I'll do my best...

I have at least two separate rivers to follow here, the first one to hit my mind is the following:

If we agree intelligent life elsewhere is probable, then I think we'd have to also agree that some of those life forms may have evolved to our level of intelligence and beyond, millions, or billions of years ago. When you consider how far we've come in terms of our general (let alone specialized!) knowledge, in only a few thousand years... It's clear we're unable to even imagine what our world will look like in another mere thousand years, so trying, at any point in time, to say something like "we'll never be able to _____ " puts us in the boat with the flat Earth, fake moon-landing, 6000 yr old earth, etc... folks.

We don't yet have anything close to a thorough understanding of how things work in the universe. Gravity has us baffled. ... we know gravity can warp space-time. ... we know that quantum realities show us things we thought impossible actually do happen... somehow... we know all of our best physics are blown to smithereens at a black hole - including our understanding of time and space. ...and we also know that every model of the universe ever yet theorized has eventually been scrapped as new data is gathered. Which is of course how science works, and we have no reason to think that will stop any time soon. [lol]

So I think it's far too premature (with apologies to Dr. Sagan - who didn't know what we know now) to say visitors couldn't exist. Who's to say someone hasn't figured out gravity so well, that they can manipulate it at will, to change their local space-time to their liking? But yes, of course it's in the realm of sci-fi, for now.

And if we don't have visitors, it could just be that we're quite boring compared to other places in the universe? ... or maybe we're too dangerous? That one I could believe.

Interestingly, given what we know, and what we know we don't know, many sorts of speculation are no longer able to be legitimately slotted directly into the Ridiculous! cubby hole.

.....now I'll see if I can find that other river. I may have to post this and come back?... or not. lol

[Mitch Cronin]

Ahh! I know what it was... :

I lost an argument the other day with a couple friends, over our treatment of animals. ...At one point, I had tried to ask what it would look like to us, if an alien race came to earth and began rounding us up and slaughtering us, for food. What would we think of those creatures? Would we consider them to be within their rights to do so? ... Well... if it hadn't been my own place they would have thrown me out for invoking aliens. My argument was [cough]declared invalid and I was stuck.

Then two things occurred that have me thinking I'll have another go at the buggers....

-- an email from NASA announcing: NASA Kepler Results Usher in a New Era of Astronomy ( http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/november/nasa-kepler-results-usher-in-a-new-era-of-astronomy/#.Unkwd6VOjHM )

-- I watched some more "Whale Wars" on Netflix and found a clip of Paul Watson asking the same question in reverse!

So, Here's the question I'll ask now: If we were to find some aquatic world -- and for the sake of the question, lets imagine we could visit it -- and within that world we found an abundance of an aquatic life-form that was highly intelligent, and highly social, would we think we had any right to harvest them for food?

[conehead]

Gravy on fish? Ewww...

[deicer]

Would bacon help? Bacon is the food they wrap other foods in to make them taste better

[Don Hudson]

Hi Mitch - great posts! - very stimulating.

Agree with your views on Sagan and the historical physical material argument, etc. I tried to work-around that by including the notions of time-travel, "tunnels", worm-holes etc as a means of getting to some place tens of parsecs away "instantly" - in a quantum-sort-of-way!

Language plays a huge role. We are the only creature with the necessary physical equipment and arrangements to be able to speak sounds which attend enormously complex notions. That doesn't mean animals don't communicate - they do, of course. But in nature, there are no such things as "opinions" or "priorities" - those constructs are uniquely human and are the result, first, of our physical equipment and arrangement of mouth-teeth-tongue-throat-voicebox-epiglotus-windpipe and our capacity for imagination and memory.

Under the heading of our language "using us", (rather than the usual, "we use language"), I'm always tempted to ask the question, "What is the understanding that understands?" By that I only mean, The "way" we understand something is as important as "what" we understand - in fact, philosophically the two are the sides of one coin, so to speak. When we use language to describe something, we are invoking the understandings that are familiar to us in the language we use. All this is fine and it works well, but the assumption is that we are describing "the" understanding, when in fact we are describing "an" understanding (among many ways of understanding!).

I don't mean to be obscure here - there is really something to this and there is a lot written about these notions - in fact I think they are what will mark our present century in terms of understanding what it is to be human and it began with a guy called Jaques Derrida, who challenged Plato's notion of the "Ideal", saying there is no ideal, there is just the language-to-come, (nothing in behind the nouns...just our memory and imagination).

The best example I can come up with is the emergence of the notions of quantum physics. There was a time after the 14th/15th Centuries, after Descartes when the world was thoroughly "Cartesian"...mechanically-understood...a time when brass gears and levers explained our universe - when Cartesian "logic" was apparent to our senses and so the world was mechanistically-apprehended and physically "predictable", (and so we went through an "revolution", (in thought), that we call "industrial" in nature, and we built machines according to "newly-discovered" physical principles, (and we built an economy around such things, and, using "scientific principles" tried to predict it as we could predict the physical world as it was known in the 18th Century).

When quantum understandings emerged during the early 20th Century, our "models" of the world, reflected in how we use language, (the understanding that understands), profoundly changed and we altered our acceptances of what was describeable and therefore possible. Also, we "lost our place" in the universe and are still re-building it!

So in terms of understanding how the universe "works" is not possible except through our language capabilities because it is only one way of understanding - as such it is neither "right" nor "wrong"...it just "is". What is the understanding that understands becomes a key question when discussing our current models of the universe. We have gone from a mechanistic, "Kepler-like" model to those notions expressed, quite eloquently, by Brian Greene and others - most certainly not a mechanistic world and not even so "if we just dig more deeply": Quantum realities are not Cartesian realities - at least in language.

So our intuitive sense of the world and "us-in-the-world" is always and already "on-the-move". It always was, but until understandings of language and how we use language to construct (our pyschic) reality (not the reality beyond us - which cannot be apprehended), it was possible to consider that we understood "The" world, and not "A" world.

This is akin to the notion that we construct our reality "socially" - that the "social construction of reality" is a language and therefore human phenomenon, not in the sense that the world doesn't exist if we don't construct it mentally - of course it does, but our understanding of what we invisibly take as reality is "not the name". The map is not the territory is one phrase that approaches this notion; "I'll see it when I believe it", is another that seems to get at this idea but it doesn't go far enough.

So when we speak of aliens, we first of all must recognize that "Aliens 'r Us" even though amongst ourselves, we are "normal" and familiar to one another as a species, (sorta...most of the time, I mean)! Our nature is to eat to survive and so do all the animals - once in a while it is the indiscriminate shark or bear for whom we are...well...it is in their nature to eat and they are "the aliens", for the moment.

I think your question was wonderfully apropos to the conversation you were having but as you've found out, wandering in such areas can elicit some very personal "responses", (but not at all like those elicited by political or religious discussions!), because, just like all this stuff above, it can be upsetting to remove signposts of our reality - it can be very "disorienting", (but for that to occur, one must be always and already "strictly oriented"!). We see the world as "normal" and that notion only exists in language. So a visit from "aliens" would be enlightening in terms of how their world is constructed.

I really like your last sentence!, (the reference to an aquatic world...).

edit:

PS, I wanted to include something about the primates and speech but didn't want to complicate matters. But it's sooo interesting! The ability to make complex utterances is obviously the difference between us-as-animals and the primates with whom we share most of our DNA, (along with a number of other species including pigs and horses, but...sadly, not dogs). Our mouth, voice, lungs, epiglottus are all "ennervated", (lots of nerves) and so seem specialized for such utterances. "Success" does the rest and we are wildly successful in terms of capacity, (where such capacity is like auto-immunity - it can keep us healthy and thriving, or be the end of us, equally). On the ability to speak, Wiki is good, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech

[conehead]

Would bacon help? Bacon is the food they wrap other foods in to make them taste better

You're right. I could eat them with bacon.