Do you think there is another planet with life similar to human beings in complexity?

From our observations of our own solar system, it seems clear that life is rare. But, the universe is such a big place.

Almost certainly. However self replicating DNA and millions of years of evolution seem far more likely than the technology required for communication with that planet.

Seems probable.

I also figure there are life forms in other planes of existence beyond ours of time, space, matter, and energy.

For all we know nebulae are life forms.

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> For all we know nebulae are life forms.


Yes, Dr Suess wrote about them.

I really don't know. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility; in fact, it seems fairly likely. But the odds of us ever being able to verify it are, at this point, slim.

Well, if the universe is really never ending and has bajillions of planets, at least one should have life on it, and chances are there's one with similar life to ours.

Sure, why not?

Of course. Any other answer is simply foolish

Yes I do. The universe is a massive place.
I'm sceptical we will ever meet though.

Really? I'm a big Seuss fan and don't specifically recall that one. I even have my Art of Suess book out now as inspiration for trippy art-noveau coffee funnel jewelry design

There are one of a kind things on Earth. Life could be just as rare in the universe. If it's supposed to evolve by accident with some reasonable odds, how come we haven't even been able to create it in a test tube yet?

I'm not being biblical, I'm just saying 15 billion stars may not provide enough chances. That we could be alone is actually kind of wild if one hasn't considered the possibility before.

I think it was a movie "Horton hears a who" There was a whole world living on the top of a flower. (They weren't nebulae, that just made me think of this)

> Seems probable.
>
> I also figure there are life forms in other planes of existence beyond
> ours of time, space, matter, and energy.
>
> For all we know nebulae are life forms.

Have you read "From the corner of his eye" by Dean Koonz? Excellent story about a boy who can go to different planes of existence. Now I have to go dig it out so I can read it again

> There are one of a kind things on Earth. Life could be just as rare
> in the universe. If it's supposed to evolve by accident with some
> reasonable odds, how come we haven't even been able to create it in
> a test tube yet?
>
> I'm not being biblical, I'm just saying 15 billion stars may not provide
> enough chances. That we could be alone is actually kind of wild if
> one hasn't considered the possibility before.

I don't think we evolved from some reasonable odds. More like remarkably low times a million. If the whole process was started again from scratch, the odds on homo sapiens sapiens would be next to nil.

I have no idea

Ah yes, in a dandelion or something. That book/show was influential.

No, haven't read much sci-fi in years. I was fond of Voyage to Arcturus (about transcendant morphing), Riverworld (clones of Earth's famous people resurrected on a single river planet), lots of Michael Moorcock, AI stuff, and C.S. Lewis's space trilogy.

Who's the author of riverworld? That sounds like it would be good.

Philip Jose Farmer perhaps? The main character was the swordsman Cyrano De Bergerac.

Actually, I put yes. I am pretty sure human beings are not unique in the Universe.

Yeah and there's probably another planet out there with life similar to human beings in stupidity.

I don't know (like anyone else does) and I don't care!

I suspect that this is the case, but I wouldn't be overly surprised if someone were to establish that it was not. (I would be surprised that they managed to come up with a method to prove it though!)

Proving there is life out there is trillions of times simpler than proving there isn't.

Exactly - which is why I would be surprised if someone managed it.

I think you'd have to prove the universe was just a dream and no real universe could exist.

A simple proof, like how could one come up with time and space from nothing.
On the othe hand, we have no evidence it was ever nothing either.

> A simple proof, like how could one come up with time and space from
> nothing.
> On the othe hand, we have no evidence it was ever nothing either.

I like to think about the circumstances surrounding the Big Bang. I read one book in which a physicist illustrated the Big Bang as a smoke ring emanating from the singularity which started the whole thing. I wondered, "Why a ring or torus? Shouldn't it be a sphere?" Then I wondered what if the Big Bang was not unique? What if every few billions of years this same singularity belches out another Universe? Then we have a series of concentric spheres of previous and later Universes racing out from this epicenter..

Eventually, some hundreds of billions of years in the future, supposedly all the energy in our Universe will be exhausted and matter itself will begin to fall apart. Today, physicists are pondering the nature and implications of Dark Matter, which they say comprises most of the mass in the Universe. What if that dark matter is the detritus from previous Universes, what's left when the all the energy in those previous Universes was exhausted and matter just fell apart?

There might be, at the extreme limit of space itself, a vast hollow globe of this dark matter, exerting gravitational forces all around the perimeter of our Universe, which explains why the Universe's expansion seems to be accellerating.

If we are to take the theory of relativity seriously, and treat time and dimension as products of consciousness, then actually all that was required for the big bang was the emergence of consciousness, which, even if you are agnostic, still seems to me easier to chew than the sudden emergence from nothing of energy and matter. If7 you are a mystic and have already interacted with the unifying cosmic consciousness, then trivial abstractions like relativity aren't even required to guess at the nature of creation.

I may be wrong, as I am way underinformed on the subject, but when they say 'torus' I don't think they literally mean a doughnut shape in 3D space, but rather that a torus formula is more convenient for illustrating 4D space.

"What if every few billions of years this same singularity belches out another Universe?" - It would. I gathered this by myself, then later found a book by Hawkings on the subject. Any distributed mass, for instance the universe, has a center of gravity, and that center produces an attractional field of gravitational accelleration (averaged out). If the universe came from a big bang it has momentum, but not accelleration, which will win out in the end. The universe may still be expanding, but will eventually collapse on itself, implode, creating another big bang and thus starting all over again. I would think we have enough data by now to conclude when the next big implosion will occur as well.

If anything ever is or was physically real in time, it isn't going away, so yes, zillions of universes would occupy the same space.

If you're hung up on the notion that future things can't exist yet, well that's only a matter of relative perspective. They exist as much as the past. The only difference between one and the other is the direction of memory. If you have alzheimers and agift of prophecy, then only the future exists, and it's the past which does not. Again, it comes down to consciousness.

The universe exists within one consciousness, and this is what makes astral travel and meditations into the historical experience of the Akashic Records possible. I've encountered Horus before in meditation who is a seasoned pilot in that realm, travelling space and time. I can do it myself, but not to such degree that I can control it or interact with people. I've only found one planet beyond our solar system thus far.

The expansion is accellerating? That doesn't make sense, not unless our relative scale of perspective is actually diminishing.


I was thinking the other night about relative magnitudes of granularity. We can see up three levels, solar, galaxy, universe, and down four levels, molecular, atomic, protonic, subatomic. It occured to me that there may be infinitely zillions of levels of granularity above and below us.

Energy doesn't get spent. No unless it gets sucked into some alternate dimension perhaps. The conservation law says it's always light, energy, or matter somewhere. Add time time and distance as the components of light though, and it could convert to more time and space.

The marvellous thing about the consciousness formula is that it comes down roughly to k = creation/consciousness, or in other words, the smaller the spark of consciousness, so long as it exists at all and doesn't become undefined, the more infinite the universe. In other words, not only is the universe born of conciousness, but it is also born of next to nothing even in that regard.

As I've said before, you can take it from there to determine the physicality of frames of time from the moment of consciousness and such, but that's really trying to calculate physicality from conceptual abstraction. Conceptual trends are possible, but no real conversion factor exists.

If you like the dark matter theory, you should like the anti-matter theory. One explanation for everything being able to exist is that the universe is neutral ground, and for all atomic matter or universe that exists, an equal and opposite one also also exists in place such that if the two cancel each other out, we are back to nothing existing.

In a much more physical nature realm, something like that exists. We have all sorts of enzymes, proteins, and such that have a left spin (hence chemical names like L-Carnesine). We can create things like inverse sugars, right spin, which our body can't digest; the form appears the same but none of our arsenal of body chemicals has the right spin to key into it, tear it apart, and rebuild it. I was thinking it would be fascinating if there were regional plants and animalls based on the R-versions instead. Perhaps that happens on other planets, just like us but opposite in molecular spin. We eat left-spin bananas and they eat right ones. Kitsch as this fantasy theory may be, the evidence to support it's possibility is already within our tangible working experience.

If the universe connects to it's own boders like a ring, say like a clock face, but spherical (curved space), then as the universe rushes from it's midnight origin to 3 and 9, it would then accellerate attracted to itself in the 6 o'clock meeting position (or maybe just a return to midnight).

Another thing to keep in mind, thinking of a closed loop universe, is that space is not necessarily infinite. We think of space as the sea of nothingness, but if it can be measured in dimension, it is something. Space may be floating in no-space.

There has to be intelligent life on other planets somewhere because there is damn Little intelligence here on Earth.

Their telescopes are probably their "microscopes" and they have x-ray technology that can see through the roof. They point and laugh at the way we wipe our asses.

I'll bet they read that post and wonder how I figured it out.

I'll bet they know how I figured it out. They can read minds.

Like laughing at macrophages or rNA replication?

I suppose if our galaxy is part of their blood stream, they might be concerned that we don't wipe our asses correctly and risk evolving to blow our planets up. Doctors have determined that that's the leading cause of low water-planet counts. Low water planets leads to diminished time-porting solar systems, and you know how hard it is to fight off a flu without those.

The reason we have low water plant counts is because our TP is excessively absorbent.

I hope so. maybe they can come visit up and teach these idiots on earth a thing or 2.

I only hope so

> The expansion is accellerating? That doesn't make sense, not unless
> our relative scale of perspective is actually diminishing.
>

Yeah, I know. However, this fact was originally observed by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s. He found the Universe was expanding and further, that the galaxies furthest away from our own were moving away faster than those nearer to us. After this, he went on to father a child who grew up to be a telescope orbiting the Earth...

That may be true, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that those items on the periphery are accellerating. They were probably faster to start with, which explains why they are where they are now. Only actual comparisons of speeds could verify acceleration; something not likely to happen with any accurate measurement or basis of camparison for a couple more centuries.

Plus, there's always something more involved. Something else may affect red shift out on the periphery.
We have a hubble exhibition a few blocks from me in a very ecclectic curious museum. My brother-in-law programs the orbiting telescopes (designs the lens builders). Alas, we don't talk much. He's a wealth of info on topics like holographic interference telescopes. That's where two distant telescopes can combine to create a telescope with a lens diameter of their distance apart.

> That may be true, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that those items
> on the periphery are accellerating. They were probably faster to start
> with, which explains why they are where they are now. Only actual
> comparisons of speeds could verify acceleration; something not likely
> to happen with any accurate measurement or basis of camparison for
> a couple more centuries.

Well, the folks narrating The Universe seem quite certain the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Here is a Wikipedia summary of the acceleration. It does seem quite counter-intuitive though, doesn't it?

> We have a hubble exhibition a few blocks from me in a very ecclectic
> curious museum.

Yeah, I would like to get out there and see it. Hubble worked out of the Mt. Wilson observatory. That is your neighborhood, roughly speaking, isn't it?

> My brother-in-law programs the orbiting telescopes
> (designs the lens builders). Alas, we don't talk much.

I have a cousin who works for NASA in Florida. I have no idea what he does though. He and I haven't really spoken since we were 13. In 1993 we exchanged a couple of emails, but nothing since then. Too bad, we were pretty close as kids.

Mt. Wilson is 43º North of me. It's where all our TV broadcasters are situated. It's across the valley from me, with a hill inbetween, but I still have excellent reception of 93 digital channels using just coathanger whiskers.

The summary proposed (at least that page) proposed explanations, but not evidence to support acceleration in the first place. I suspect that just like in any other theoretical field, that space scientists may get way ahead of themselves theoretically explaining away things which are misunderstandings to begin with, not unlike doctors once imagining that a patient must have unwittingly swallowed a frog or evil spirit. The theory wasn't really all that bad, but viruses are really small frogs.

> He's a wealth
> of info on topics like holographic interference telescopes. That's
> where two distant telescopes can combine to create a telescope with
> a lens diameter of their distance apart.


That is just so cool, I have been thinking about it for a couple of days. It would be awesome if we could send one telescope out ahead of the Earth and one trailing behind the Earth(but both in the same orbital path as Earth) far enough in each direction so the curvature of the orbit would keep the two telescopes in line-of-sight with each other at a distance of a million miles. This would involve a lot of finicky calculations to synchronize the exchange of information between the two telescopes to compensate for the lag (about 12 seconds, give or take) caused by the speed of light. I wonder if a virtual lens a million miles in diameter could resolve a star into a visible disk?

Line of sight and aimed at each other within less than a light wave accuracy. That's a pretty tall order for moving sattelites. I guess we have more to look forward to a millenia from now.

I was so amazed at the engineering that I didn't give the repurcussions of it's application any thought. Dang. We could look into the back yards of space aliens the way our own sattelites currently look down on us.

> Line of sight and aimed at each other within less than a light wave
> accuracy. That's a pretty tall order for moving sattelites. I guess
> we have more to look forward to a millenia from now.

The beauty of it though is that they would almost stationary with respect to each other and with Earth. I say "almost" because the Earth's orbit is actually elliptical rather than circular and this will cause some variation in both distance from each other and speed of travel. But, those variations would be fairly constant from year to year, so the adjustments in calibration could be largely automated with computers. Do you really think it would take a millenium to accomplish this though? I tend to be a bit more optimistic myself. Perhaps a century. Of course, if no one at NASA (or some private space venture) has the thought, even a million years wouldn't do it.



>
> I was so amazed at the engineering that I didn't give the repurcussions
> of it's application any thought. Dang. We could look into the back
> yards of space aliens the way our own sattelites currently look down
> on us.

I'll take that as a "yes" about resolving a star into a disk.

On aiming those satellites: True, their being in space helps in some respects, no micro earthquakes or continental shifts for instance. Their speed would have to either be precisely synchronized or at least calculated and adjusted for. (It depends on if you want to calculate holographic inteference, or let the light itself be it's own computer). The elliptical thing though, as you bring up, necesitates calculation or at least calculated interpretation of optical results.

I was thinking further on this. We once launched a Mariner probe which had long outlasted it's life expectancy yet was still functional while heading in for another pass at a planet. Of course the thing was out in deep space and could not be further physically modified in contsruction, and yet NASA engineers were able to improve the accuracy of it's camera aiming by uploading it a program in which the gyroscopic spin of it's tape dock reels served as a dampener for more precise use of retro-rocket adjustments. It occurred to me that really precise aiming might entail photons as retro-rockets, and that the software might even have to compensate for the shifts in microgravity as it anticipated the flow of electrons through the chip making such calculations. Gravity of all the planets as a factor in bending the light between satellites would also have to be considered. But yeah, maybe it could be done in 20 years. Half the battle is knowing what needs done.

I think I just covered the isues in how to accurately aim, so the next question is knowing if you are accurately aimed or not. Possibly a sight glass approach could be used for this involving bouncing a photon through a hall of mirrors to emulate a longer sight-glass. As one sat is sending a light projection to the other anyhow, this may be unnecessary, as the other could have a reference spot. Perpendicular alignment would still be required though, and couldn't be off by a fraction of a nanometer. With some clever thought it may not even be as complex a this. I have a NASA spec book for the '64 mariner and it's a marvel of the most primitive technology used for measuring proton flux and such, kind of like building a working super-computer from a few rocks and sticks.

In a similar yet scary vein, the guidance system input for early ICBMs consisted primarily of four photo transistors monitoring the horizon. Likewise the cameras of most space probes have a single pixel monochrome resolution and operate by timing the spinning of the craft and swapping camera filters and lenses.

So yeah, such a telescope is becoming more plausable. There is one more difficulty which comes to mind though. The computer may have to be faster than light, or at least as fast a light, which suggests that we will have to wait for photon computers. We are getting close on that front too though. They are being developed as amplifiers for global optical networks.