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Post by Data Cable on Aug 18, 2007 17:25:25 GMT -4
But if you throw a few tens of billions of quarters off the top of the Empire state building, the odds are one will land inside the shot glass. But it is almost impossible that two will. Care to show your math behind that calculation?
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Post by Bill Thompson on Sept 6, 2007 1:03:27 GMT -4
But if you throw a few tens of billions of quarters off the top of the Empire state building, the odds are one will land inside the shot glass. But it is almost impossible that two will. Care to show your math behind that calculation? The default belief in science is that something is NOT real -- that something does NOT exist (like ETI), the position of science is NOT to hope that something IS real. By observation, and not by wishful thinking, we can see that we are a kind of a rarity. We are a rare exception that got by the Catch 22 that the other random throws of the dice. We have complex elements that were born in a huge dense star that is no longer around -- and if it was around, there would be too much radiation to allow life to arise. I was using an analogy to paint a picture. We are physically in a sweet spot. Not only are we in the right place away from our sun but we are in the right space in our galaxy and we were born from the right kind of star that gave birth to our sun and us. On top of being here i67.photobucket.com/albums/h292/Athono/GHZ.pngwe have lots of other things in our favor that only are multiples to the Drake Equation that make us a very small fraction of a percent. I have updated the links I have on gelsana.com for the SETI institute write up on Fermi's Paradox at the bottom of www.gelsana.com/work.html as well as the Scientific American Article.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Sept 6, 2007 1:26:05 GMT -4
The default belief in science is that something is NOT real -- that something does NOT exist (like ETI), the position of science is NOT to hope that something IS real. No, the default position in science is neutrality. Until you can prove something one way or another you have to remain open to all possibilities.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Sept 6, 2007 2:06:24 GMT -4
But if you throw a few tens of billions of quarters off the top of the Empire state building, the odds are one will land inside the shot glass. But it is almost impossible that two will. Care to show your math behind that calculation? I think there is about 2 billion stars in the GHZ and that estimate is very generous. I think among these -- at the most -- about one fourth are not in a binary system and that estimate is also very generous and hopeful. Among these, about one tenth are the right size and are not too big and violent and are not too small and week. Among these, lets say one percent has escaped the Catch 22 and are reborn from a huge star's explosion so they have the come complex materials and elements. Among these, lets be generous and say ten percent have all the right stuff necessary for life. Now, there is the problem of having the right planetary system where there is a safe zone that is not bombarded -- like we have with our huge giant planets. In Cosmos, there was several pages that had a theory for what sort of planetary systems evolve. About one fifth had the right design. So we take one fifth of what we have calculated so far. Now there comes to the heavy metal core that we have. This is crucial. Without this, we have no magnetic field. Without this we are either bombarded by radiation or the solar wind rips away our atmosphere. I know this is just speculation and supposition, but I cannot honestly imagine that this falls into place a lot. So much metal all at the right spot like this. I would have to say that it would be generous to say one percent of what we have narrowed down thus far. Now, this is already more requirements than people thought 100 years ago that were required for life to exist. And as time goes on, more and more statistical road blocks are found that narrow the likelihood even more. But I am not done yet. Life evolving from something more than microbial is very unlikely. We have our own example to show how unlikely an event this was. If life on earth was condensed into one 24 hour period as an illustration, then from the stroke of midnight, all the way to sunrise and then all throughout the daylight hours, there would be nothing but microbial life on Earth. But then something unlikely happened. Microbes stringed together to form colonies. Now, in this analogy human beings did not come about until a few seconds before the end of the 24 hours. So even with every thing else going just right for life to exist, intelligent life arising is probably still one in a billion.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 6, 2007 2:08:34 GMT -4
The default belief in science is that something is NOT real -- that something does NOT exist (like ETI), the position of science is NOT to hope that something IS real. By observation, and not by wishful thinking
I guess that those looking for gravitrons and Higgs Boson particles aren't involved in real science then
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Post by Data Cable on Sept 6, 2007 2:42:09 GMT -4
The default belief in science is that something is NOT real -- that something does NOT exist Therefore, according to (your projection upon) science, as recently as 20 years ago, extrasolar planets did not exist. And yet, scientists expended a great deal of time and energy searching for something which science had already dictated did not exist. Observation which is severely limited by our technological limitations. And I have already stipulated to the potential rarity of life in the cosmos. I merely reject the claim that it is a uniquely exclusive Terran phenomenon based on the evidence produced thus far. So in other words, no, you cannot mathematically support your claim that out of a few tens of billions of quarters thrown off the top of the Empire State Building, odds favor that one and only one will land in a shot glass placed randomly on the sidewalk. Thank you for clearing that up. I will keep this in mind whenever you make future claims involving odds and probabilities. And you have yet to produce any reason which would preclude other planets from inhabiting similar sweet spots elsewhere Until we have reliable, representative statistics to plug into the Drake Equation, or something similar with the many more variables you propose, such formulae remain nothing more than means to quantify our ignorance.
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Post by Tanalia on Sept 6, 2007 3:50:36 GMT -4
If you blindly throw a quarter off the top of the Empire State Building, the odds are very slim that that quarter will land inside a shot class placed randomly on the sidewalk below. But if you throw a few tens of billions of quarters off the top of the Empire state building, the odds are one will land inside the shot glass. But it is almost impossible that two will. Just juggling a few numbers, assuming 10 billion quarters randomly thrown from 0 up to maybe 50 meters away, the shot glass would not only be full of quarters, it (end everything within that 50 meters) would be buried in roughly 1.3 meters of quarters.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Sept 6, 2007 19:35:49 GMT -4
I have. You have not read. Hostile UniverseEdit: By the way, does anyone know how to convert pdf into html? This must be the reason why I have to keep posting this link. People do not read it. Untrue. Besides, that is faulty logic. Santa Claus is assumed to not exist based on our current technological limitations. ===================== All this is simple. We are just choosing to see it backwards I think mainly because human beings are social beings and the idea of being alone is objectionable to us. Like everything else, it is a numbers game. Mathematics and statistics are the foundation of all sciences. We look at the Universe and find it unthinkable that we can be alone given the number of stars. We see it backwards. The vast number of stars is the statistic cause for us being at all. To say that since we are here there must be the same elsewhere is faulty logic.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Sept 6, 2007 20:30:14 GMT -4
The article doesn't prove that there are no other sweet spots elsewhere. In fact the article makes it clear that most of what is presented is basically speculation. Somewhat educated speculation, true, but speculation. Santa Claus is assumed not to exist because parents know that they are the ones who really put the toys under the tree. And the North Pole has been visited and can be directly observed by satellite. That's several orders of magnitude more than we can do for the rest of the universe. Faulty logic would be to assume that our limited technological means and time period of observing the universe rules out any possibility of other intelligent life.
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Post by Bill Thompson on Sept 6, 2007 22:58:35 GMT -4
Santa Claus is assumed not to exist because parents know that they are the ones who really put the toys under the tree. The same or a simular argument can be said about ETI. We are all conditioned to believe in it since childhood. The media, the schooling, our parents, our culture all tells us to have faith in this and to believe in it and to think otherwise is backwards. You can say that Santa Claus does not exist because we know that our parents put the gifts under the tree. I can say that we know that ETI does not exist because it is hoaxers and Holliwood who make the stories and fake the UFO sightings. And we cannot prove a negative. You can't prove Santa Claus does not exist just as you cannot prove ETI is not in our galaxy. It is a simular thing. The article doesn't prove that there are no other sweet spots elsewhere. In fact the article makes it clear that most of what is presented is basically speculation. Somewhat educated speculation, true, but speculation. What isn't?Only Mathematics requires proof. Even our legal system has "beyond a reasonable doubt". Science is all about the best guesses.That is what I got from Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World".
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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 6, 2007 23:27:53 GMT -4
The same or a simular argument can be said about ETI. We are all conditioned to believe in it since childhood. The media, the schooling, our parents, our culture all tells us to have faith in this and to believe in it and to think otherwise is backwards.
What a load of Baloney. All we can say is that ETBEs have not at this point visited Earth, we can't say that ETBEs do not exist, we can only say that we don't know if they exist or not. We do not have the technology to detect them unless they are right next to us on a cosmic scale, and if they aren't, then as far as all our detection is concerned they might not exist. Since you brought up Quantum physics before. ETBEs are like Schodinger's cat. The universe is the box, and until we have a way to actually look in the book we don't know if they exist or not. Just as we can't say if the cat is alive or dead, we can't say if ETBEs exist or if they don't, we just don't have enough information.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 6, 2007 23:30:45 GMT -4
You can say that Santa Claus does not exist because we know that our parents put the gifts under the tree. I can say that we know that ETI does not exist because it is hoaxers and Holliwood who make the stories and fake the UFO sightings.
Can you conclusively state that Hoaxers and Hollywood are responsible for all Alien life in the universe? No you can't, because you don't know if it exists elsewhere or not, hence you are talking out a hole in your hat.
And we cannot prove a negative. You can't prove Santa Claus does not exist just as you cannot prove ETI is not in our galaxy.
Of course you can prove it. If we go to every planet and find nothing, we will have proven it, exactly as we can prove that Santa doesn't exist by going to the North Pole and showing that he isn't there.
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Post by Data Cable on Sept 7, 2007 0:47:54 GMT -4
...Holliwood who make the stories... I am rational enough to know that Holl ywood aliens are purely works of fiction. For that matter, I'm rational enough to know that ETI, if it exists, will not even remotely resemble any of Holl ywood's anthro-centric concoctions. Similar, perhaps. Despite your repeated attempts to equate them, the legal system is not science.
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Post by Data Cable on Sept 7, 2007 0:53:39 GMT -4
Then perhaps you could quote where it says in that article that ours is the only possible sweet spot in the entire galaxy.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Sept 7, 2007 12:07:27 GMT -4
Actually, lets look at the places where the article admits that it is speculation: "Even where planets do exist, they may not be fit for complex life-forms." "All this suggests that complex life is rare in the galaxy." "Although Lineweaver's calculations are tentative, they suggest that a metallicity near the sun's may be optimal for the production of Earth-mass planets in stable orbits." "The halo and thick disk tend to contain older, metal-poor stars; it is unlikely that terrestrial planets as large as Earth have formed around them." "Taking into account the disk metallicity gradient and its evolution, we can place rough limits on the GHZ both in space and in time." "This increased metal content may have given life on Earth a head start." "All else being equal, this implies that a terrestrial planet forming today will have a proportionately larger iron core than Earth does." "Perhaps terestrial planets forming today would be single-plate planets like Venus and Mars....But we do not yet understand all the ways a planet's geology depends on its internal heat flow." "Moreover, a planetary system forming out of a metal-rich cloud will probably contain more comets than one forming out of a cloud with less metal. Thus, planetary systems in the inner galaxy should suffer higher comet influxes than the solar system does." "But observations of other galaxies suggest that central black holes occasionally turn on when a star or cluster wanders too close and is pulled to its death." "Not only would the overall radiation levels be high, the stars there would tend to have highly inclined and elliptical orbits that could bring them close to the nucleus or jet." "The threat from gama-ray bursts remains uncertain; astronomers do not know what triggers these gargantuan explosions or how tightly they beam their radiation. We could just be lucky to have avoided such a death ray so far." "The high levels of ultraviolet radiation emitted by the latter erode circumstellar disks around near by stars, reducing their chances of forming giant planets. John Bally of the University of Colorado at Boulder and his colleagues have estimated that only 10 percent of stars avoid this kind of harassment. This could explain why a mere 3 percent of nearby sunlike stars are found to have giant planets." "All these threats imply a fairly broad habitable zone with fuzzy boundaries. But if we include proximity to the corotation circle as another requirement, then the GHZ could be very narrow." "At this stage of our research, we are still some way from filling in the details of the GHZ." "The GHZ appears to be an annulus in the disk at roughly the sun's location. The GHZ is a probalistic concept: not every planet inside the zone is habitable (and not every planet outside is sterile)." "The GHZ concept has important implications for searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. It can, for example, identify the most probable places for complex life to form, so that researchers can direct their searches accordingly." -doesn't sound like the article's authors believe there is no possibility of finding complex life to me. "But if our ideas about the GHZ are correct, we live within an especially comfortable region of the Milky Way." "The sun's relatively high metallicity probably gave us a head start. Therefore, the GHZ concept may provide at least a partial solution to the Fermi Paradox: complex life is so rare and isolated that we are effectively alone." "Because the average metallicity of a galaxy correlates with its luminosity, entire galaxies could be defiicient in Earth-size planets."
That's a lot of "maybes", "coulds", "probablies", and "possiblies".
Edit: Spelling, minor quote correction, and extra emphasis on the line that shows the article's authors don't completely rule out complex life on other planets.
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