Wolf Devil said:
our race is stuck-up, unimaginative and restricted only to what they know for "a fact,"
Well, that'll definately change when we do discover other life in the Universe. Whether it means our end or theirs (Ender's Game?), something's gonna change.
Majin_You said:
I don't think we're unimaginative and stuck-up, but I do agree that we are restricted to what we know. We don't know of any other organic model than carbon chemistry. Since we cannot prove another base for life than carbon, we cannot believe in creatures that can miraculously exist with another element as its base. This CAN change.
Great statement, Majin_You. I get the feeling that lots of people are saying scientists and researchers aren't being imaginative and creative, looking for life under every rock on planets that we've only detected by the wobble they induce on their sun. We have no other model of life, so what else are we supposed to look for? There's infinate other possibilities, science isn't about throwing a dart at a wall and saying "let's look for that one." Our definitions change, and what we believe is possible changes, but not overnight.
For the people who don't believe that there is other life in the Universe,
intelligent life able to communicate across the stars, check out the
Drake Equation. One of the important things about this new discovery is that it increases the value in the Drake Equation, fp, the percent of stars that have planets around them. It's estimated to be from 20% to 50%, and this new discovery pushes more towards 50% than anything before. Perhaps even more than half of the stars in the Universe have planets, and are not mostly binary star systems, incapable of forming planets, as we previously thought. If anyone has wondered what the the table of numbers in my signature is, it's a ranking of my contributions to SETI@home, and a few other projects. SETI@home is a program you install on your computer, and it helps the SETI institute scan radio telescope data in hopes of finding a signal from intelligent, communicating life like ourselves.
The problem with that method, and just about any other method, is the vastness of our Galaxy, and the Universe. Say, for example, tomorrow SETI finally finds their golden signal. A signal that is proven without a doubt to be an interception of an alien signal. They pinpoint it to an identified star 5,000 light years away. If we were to point our telescopes to this star, we would see it there, hanging in the sky. However, we would be receiving the light that emanated from this star 5,000 years ago! The radio signal would be from even longer ago (the speed of radio signals vary, but they're certainly much slower than the speed of light). By the time we're getting these messages, the alien civilizations that sent them could have risen and fallen ten times over.
We've been an intelligent, communication civilization for about 60 years. So if there are any civilizations within that distance listening for radio signals, they'd be receiving radio transmissions of the original War of the Worlds, war reports of WWII, and anything up until now, depending on how far away (if they're in that range) they are from us.
Despite those problems, radio signals has been thought of as the best way to detect (intelligent) life for awhile now. Certainly with these great distances, sending humans is completely impossible. Anyone up for a 3,000 year-long voyage? Cryogenics is an option, but even that doesn't stop aging completely, if I remember correctly. And radio signal detection solves the identity crisis of what intelligent life truly is, which is what some of you have been debating, I see. It doesn't matter what the creatures look like, what their body structure is based upon, or how the radio signals they sent form their language (though that would pose a problem once a signal
is proven to be unnatural and alien in nature), just that they develop any form of radio communication technology.
Atleast with the discovery of new planets, planets like this one, when and if SETI recieves the indisputable signal, we'll be able to pop the coordinates into a computer and go, "Oh, yeah, the second planet from star Gliese 876, we know that one!"