What if humanity is the most advanced species in the galaxy?

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March 4th, 2016 at 2:19:32 PM permalink
Nareed
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
Threads: 346
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Quote: rxwine
Oh, I wasn't intending it as a "life energy" force. Much more mundane. Just a force that organizes the right conditions for life in only certain areas of the universe.


that seems even more unlikely. almost, I dare say, bordering on religion :)

There may be an organizing principle, though.

Elements are synthesized in the hearts of stars up to a certain atomic number. Past that they form in supernovas. Eventually they spread over the universe and coalesce to form stars, planets and lesser objects. The distribution of elements is not uniform, nor does it mean common elements are common everywhere. For instance, Helium is rare on Earth, and forms exclusively from radioactive decay of heavier elements like Uranium.

One more thing. Asimov came up with the notion that the presence of the Moon made the Earth's crust more radioactive due to the actions of tides (I'd add also by the manner in which the Moon formed, assuming the impact notion is correct). Judging by the rocky worlds in the Solar system, a risky proposition given what we know of extra-Solar systems, rocky planets tend to lack moons or have tiny ones (Pluto is not a planet anymore).

If increased radioactivity is solely due to the Moon, and if it does cause a more frequent rate of mutation, which makes evolution faster and more diverse, and if moons are rare on rocky worlds, and if it's even rarer for a rocky world to have a large Moon (IF!!!), then life, and intelligent life in particular, must be rather sparse.
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March 4th, 2016 at 2:40:55 PM permalink
rxwine
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
Threads: 188
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Quote: Nareed
that seems even more unlikely. almost, I dare say, bordering on religion :)


HEY!

I didn't say the organizing force has to be a sign of a creator. That's why I used that magnet picture. Nice and uniform, but no intelligence. (at least not in the magnets I ever used.)

One might also note, even though life exists on Earth now, special conditions that created the initial life may no longer be all present on Earth. I think that's kind of interesting as well. Just because life can currently keep surviving the initial spark conditions may no longer be present.
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March 4th, 2016 at 3:09:03 PM permalink
Nareed
Member since: Oct 24, 2012
Threads: 346
Posts: 12545
Quote: rxwine
HEY!


<shrug>


Quote:
One might also note, even though life exists on Earth now, special conditions that created the initial life may no longer be all present on Earth.


Oh, no question. For one thing the pre-biotic Earth had little or no free oxygen. What changed conditions so that life couldn't form non-living molecules anymore was life itself (free oxygen is a waste product of photosynthesis). a bit like how a fertilized egg won't let more sperm re-fertilize it (usually).
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March 4th, 2016 at 4:15:53 PM permalink
petroglyph
Member since: Aug 3, 2014
Threads: 25
Posts: 6227
Quote: rxwine
Thought of another "What if" for this.

What if the Universe is in balance of some sort where the only stable points for life occur at points farthest from each other?

If you were going to illustrate, you could put dots representing life forms on a balloon, all equidistant from each other.

Due to energy fields (dark energy?) conditions only become just right in specific areas for life. The field is uniform (I could only think of an image of magnet to demonstrate an invisible uniform field)

So, the point is, this would make the ability to discover other life more difficult or perhaps even impossible because we would potentially be very far from the nearest alien life form..



Another way to imagine the problem is to note, the two place we have conditions perfect for ice caps are at the opposite end of our planet. Something like that.


It's not just "where" this life exists, but also when. I think space/where is interchangeable with time.

Teliot posted a link once, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Lots of links within referencing weak and strong principles. Fun read.

" A puzzling aspect of this was that some of the relations hold only at the present epoch in the Earth's history, so we appear, coincidentally, to be living at a very special time (give or take a few million years!). This was later explained, by Carter and Dicke, by the fact that this epoch coincided with the lifetime of what are called main-sequence stars, such as the Sun. At any other epoch, so the argument ran, there would be no intelligent life around in order to measure the physical constants in question — so the coincidence had to hold, simply because there would be intelligent life around only at the particular time that the coincidence did hold!

— The Emperor's New Mind, Chapter 10" What I get out of it, is we exist here and now because do to the aging of our universe, this is the only time that we could exist. Like a bubble in space time?

I don't think that time passes. In the magnetic picture, replace bce with ad. Same same, time is constantly folding in on itself. To me it explains infinity.
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March 4th, 2016 at 7:47:32 PM permalink
Dalex64
Member since: Mar 8, 2014
Threads: 3
Posts: 3687
We might as well be the only ones.

Time and space is so huge, and we occupy such a tiny part of spacetime.

Other intelligent life-forms may have come and gone, we might be the first, others may exist but are so far away their signals haven't reached us yet or can't be detected by us.

Even if we find a signal, there is nothing we can really do about it.

Summary: space-time is big. We are tiny.
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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