What Is With The Upswing In Flying Saucer Related News? Psyop or real?
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We actually do have an equation for calculating the likelihood of alien life elsewhere in the universe. Each variable represents individual aspects of the universe (like how many stars are there). The likelihood of there being a non-earth based life form changes with the rest of the variables. Given the life-time of the universe, as well as the number of planets and moons we have, life elsewhere in the universe is virtually certain. But so common that we could interact with that life? That remains to be seen.
Abiogenesis experiments are done, and it is possible, but it is very difficult. More than anything, it's clear that life is more likely to reproduce and evolve than emerge from non-life. The concept of "life" that we are familiar with already is quite different from the earliest 'living' objects that we know of, since they don't conform to the normal classifications we have for life today.
That being said, the odds being 0%, simply isn't enough to dismiss it given the size and lifetime of the universe. If the odds were 0.000001% that life could emerge from non-life; that would effectively guarantee the emergence of life in the universe at some point. The chances are simply too probable, even at such a "rare" scale.
That equation is a theory, a theory that sounds reasonable, but again one that doesn't have any real data for the most important parameter: emergence of life. It is all nearly random guesswork dressed in a lab coat. Abiogenesis experiments are a pipedream, amino acids are not life.
Life was either supernaturally started, in which case it could be actual 0% (or not), or there isn't a supernatural God or gods kickstarting the process of life, which means there is some chance of life naturally emerging from an explosion. However, even then odds are simply unknown; it could be the relatively great odds of 1/1000000, or it could be something insurmountably low like 1/10^100, making our very existence itself a miracle.
The scale of the universe shows how paltry the sample size is, not how inevitable life is. I'm not saying there certainly isn't some alien life form out there, just that it is beyond the scope of what can be known, even out of the scope of a ballpark guess.
You don't expect to evolve, even a basic life form, in the timeframe of any normal experiment, do you?
This is why you have to take experiments one step at a time.
Here's the problem with that. You're not treating the scale and time of the universe with enough respect.
If X has a chance of occurring that is 1/10^100. In an infinite spacetime frame, the probability of X occurring is not only 1... but the probability of infinitely many X's occurring is 1.
The scope of the universe is ultra-massive. The fact that it's possible that the conditions of life could form on other planets or moons in our own solar system basically eliminates the idea that there is no other life in the universe. It's effectively a guarantee that, somewhere, at some point, no matter how brief, life existed outside of Earth. Sapience is a much harder calculation that needs more data.
The earliest fossils we have of primordial life forms on Earth date back nearly 4.3 billion years, almost immediately after the Earth formed. As far as the chances go of finding life on other planets, that's pretty encouraging. It may even have happened more than once in our solar system.
But we're not just looking for life. We're looking for civilizations, and here's the flip-side: If there was ever life on Mars or Venus, it's not there now.
We live on a perfect planet in a perfect orbit around a perfect sun. If we were slightly closer to the sun than we are, we probably wouldn't be here. If we were any further away than we are, we probably wouldn't be here. If we didn't have plate tectonics, there would be no water cycle and we would have a runaway greenhouse effect that would have long since turned the Earth into Venus. If the Earth was much smaller than it is, then our mantle would be narrower and would already have cooled and solidified, which would mean no magnetic field and solar radiation would have blasted away most of the atmosphere and turned the Earth into a frozen desert, like Mars.
If our sun were a red dwarf, like 80-85% of the stars that exist, then it would be so much smaller that we and every other planet in orbit would be tidally locked, meaning one hemisphere would always be facing the sun, being perpetually baked and fried, and the other hemisphere would be a permanent night side, eternally dark and frozen. Most red dwarves are also flare stars, prone to wild and unpredictable variations in light and heat output. If our sun suddenly got twice as bright and twice as hot and stayed that way for several hours, we'd be fucked. If it did that every few days or weeks at random and unpredictable intervals, there would be no stable climate on any planet in the solar system. Almost no red dwarf produces enough consistent UV radiation to kick start organic chemistry at all, and these are the vast majority of stars that exist. If we were around a much brighter and more massive star than our sun, then it would have burned through all of its hydrogen and gone nova eons ago, and taken us out with it.
If we were in a binary or a trinary star system, like most star systems are, then the orbits of all of the planets would be erratic and wobbly, also creating hugely unstable climates, likely incapable of sustaining liquid water on the surface. We also live in a relative void in the interstellar medium. It's extremely rare to have a star whose nearest stellar neighbour is more than four light years away. It we were in a denser stellar neightborhood, closer to the center of the galaxy than we are, we probably wouldn't be here. If we were further out than we are, then there's another whole set of factors counting against us and we probably wouldn't be here. If we were too close to a black hole, or a neutron star or a starbirth region with supergiants going nova every couple million years, or a gamma ray buster, then we wouldn't be here.
If we didn't have Jupiter in the outer solar system, with its huge gravity eating up all the rocks careening around all over the place that want to come crashing into us, then we wouldn't be here. Even as it is, one of them occasionally gets through. The likelihood of a planet the size of Jupiter forming around a star the size of our sun is actually quite low.
We have all of these factors working in our favour, and yet even here, on this perfect planet in its perfect orbit around a perfect star, in a relatively quiet corner of a relatively stable galaxy; even here, it has taken 4.3 billion years, a third of the age of the universe, for those first organisms to reach stage that we're at now, and no evidence exists that it happened earlier.
Of course it's possible for it to have happened somewhere else, but if it has then it's almost certainly so rare and so distant that we will never meet them. For all practical purposes of the word, we are alone, and we almost certainly always will be.
That's the optimistic analysis. It's more likely a billion years after Earth formed.
It's better than that. It's almost certain that there was life on Mars, and there may yet be life on Mars right now. ... may...
That still remains to be seen. I don't expect there to be even 1 alien encounter per civilization; but just under 1 per species? Hmmm. Maybe. Yes, sure we have our specific issues. But there may still be life on Mars, and there may still be life on Io, and there may have been life on other moons and planets in our system. Life surviving is pretty tough, but clearly, life is an aggressive sumbitch that exploits any and all available opportunities it encounters. I never thought any human in my lifetime would see an interstellar object enter our solar system, but that's already happened. The coincidence is like building two gravitational space telescopes and discovering the "blip" of two black holes colliding over 2 billion years ago, 2 weeks after you finish building them.
Space has a nasty habit of making the obviously, totally, impossible seem utterly mundane.
The Cambrian explosion the led to the development of multicellular life on Earth only happened less than 600 million years ago. Regardless of how early we carbon date stromatolite fossils, that still tells us that life on Earth was constrained to single-celled organisms for billions of years. Just as it would be in the extremely unlikely event that it does still exist anywhere else in the solar system.
Again, I would argue that this counts significantly against the possibility of multi-celled organisms eventually evolving into civilizations with any kind of regularity.
The point is "regularity".
We're so far outside the bounds of that word already that it's use doesn't make sense here.