The Futility of the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Discussion in 'Science' started by ChemEngineer, Jun 25, 2017.

  1. Ernest T.

    Ernest T. Newly Registered

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    I'm thinking that despite the immense size of the universe, the astronomical odds of life emerging from chemicals is greater.

    I think a planet, in addition to being in the "habitable zone" must have an oxygenated atmosphere. A moon to keep its rotation and tilt constant. A molten core to generate a magnetic field. Plate tectonics.

    Liquid water, of course. The complexity of the informational structure of the DNA molecule.

    Forget who said it, but "The chances of complex life spontaneously generating are that of a whirlwind sweeping through a junkyard, and the result being a functioning 747."
     
  2. HereWeGoAgain

    HereWeGoAgain Banned

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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI_Institute

    What is the use of debate when you present a false premise?
     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2019
  3. ChemEngineer

    ChemEngineer Banned

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    Well stated, Ernest. That was Fred Hoyle. Thousands of polypeptides, arranged so perfectly are statistically insuperable from naturalistic means.

    1/20 to the 34,350th power for Titin alone, the largest protein in the human body. What does that probability work out to? Anyone, anyone? Anyone?

    And as Douglas Axe has determined, only 1 in 10 to the 77th power polypeptides functions in any random sequence of a 150 amino acid long protein.
    1 in 10 to the 50th power is impossible. Need I explain why?
     
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  4. yguy

    yguy Well-Known Member

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    Statistics my ass, God puts life where He wants it. As of now it looks like He only put it on Terra Firma, but if He wants life on Pluto, or in the core of the Sun, or in the center of a black hole, He can presumably make it so.
     
    Last edited: Oct 29, 2019
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  5. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That's a really dumb fallacy, as nobody ever claimed proteins just randomly popped into existence.

    if you want to argue against evolution, you should try not to be so completely ignorant of what it says. That only make you look bad.
     
  6. roorooroo

    roorooroo Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    [​IMG]

    Been working on this for almost 2 years, have finally deciphered the message:

    "The Houston Astros will win the 2019 World Series in seven games."

    I guess we will find out tonight whether this extraterrestrial life is intelligent, or whether they don't have a clue like the rest of us.
     
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  7. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This is the same mistake we humans have committed since we began to think...Human centric reality. We once believed the Earth was the center of everything then found out otherwise. Now some think life must conform to our circumstances even after finding life right here that has no sunlight, no oxygen, no water....nothing we would need and in fact would kill us instantly. If life can thrive in nuclear waste, under miles of Ice, at ocean bottoms or at the edge of space....all bets are off. Considering that the basics of life are virtually EVERYWHERE in space and on moons/planets and Quadrllions of interactions take place every second of billions of years, the odds of something NOT happening are almost nil.
     
    Last edited: Oct 30, 2019
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  8. RoccoR

    RoccoR Well-Known Member Donor

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    RE: The Futility of the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence
    ⁜→ "ChemEngineer, et al,

    With each decade, our scientific research capabilities increase. We cannot judge what we don't know today in the light of what we can do in the future.

    (COMMENT)

    We America went to the Moon, the Apollo Guidance Computer [AGC measuring a total of 24 × 12.5 × 6.5 in (61 × 32 × 17 cm)] had 36KB ROM and 2KB RAM. Today, the Apple Series 3 (S3) Wristwatch (less than a cubic inch in size) has a System in Package" [SiP (GPS + Cellular)] that contains 768 MB of DRAM and 16 GB flash memory. Many of us have more computing power on our wrist than the Apollo Capsule that went to the Moon.

    To say that we cannot do something in the future simply because we cannot do it today is a very unenlightened view of man.

    The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) currently costs about $2.5M/yr.. One Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor Raptor cost ≈ $377M + ≈ $34k/per flight hour. The USAF has ≈ 100 Raptors flying. For the price of 1 Raptor, the SETI could be funded for the next quarter-century.
    ....... [​IMG]
    Most Respectfully,
    R
     
  9. politicalcenter

    politicalcenter Well-Known Member

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    The odds of there being a civilization nearby that is advanced enough to even recognize us is astronomical. But that should not keep us from looking. It would be like mankind keeping his ear to the ground. Someone or some thing may have left clues even if the culture has long since passed. Prime numbers could be a possibility.
     
    Last edited: Oct 30, 2019
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  10. Spim

    Spim Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I do enjoy all the movies, but I prefer the kinder gentler version such as from Contact than the Predator version.

    I prefer if we keep looking, honestly we know so little about the universe, although we do pretend to know a lot but maybe that is a discussion for another time, another thread.
     
    Last edited: Oct 30, 2019
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  11. Spim

    Spim Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    yes, I just did a NASA tour this past weekend, they preserved the original control room, its quite amazing what they accomplished with technology that is probably worse than a flip phone. We got to sit in the viewing room while they replayed the lunar landing in real time, it was a bit boring but interesting to see & hear what tech they were using at the time.
     
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  12. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Hoyle got a lot of things WRONG, too. He coined the term "big bang" to make his disrespect for the idea of our universe as having a beginning. He postulated that our universe was in a steady state, with new galaxies materializing as the distances between galaxies increased! All this was total nonsense and he even denied the implications of the cosmic background radiation.

    He also strongly supported the idea that flu epidemcs were related to sun spot activity and that fossils of archyaeopteryx were man made fakes. The Hoyle "whirlwind creating a 747" quote is another case in point. It's a statment designed to be quoted, but that postulates odds of evolution without actually recognizing the process.

    He is known to have stated that he'd rather be interesting and wrong than be boring and right!

    His fame came from his progress in nuclear reactions, not biology or cosmology.


    One major problem with guessing at the odds of life is that we don't know the process. So, any estimate of the odds of this unknown process happening is sure to be little more than a wild guess.

    So, what are the odds of finding life somewhere else in this universe? I don't believe we know. It does seem unlikely that what happened here has never happened anywhere else in this universe at any time ovr the last billions of years.

    That's a huge amount of time in a huge number of "labs".
     
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  13. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    Cool!!

    I'm sure the people of the time put in a LOTof effort to keep the process "boring"!
     
  14. Spim

    Spim Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yeah it was just kind of dry and in my opinion it was neat but not worth the hour of time I invested. Probably because I seen so many movies on the subject that this was just kind of like the real life replay of something I've seen five times
     
  15. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    I believe that for sure. The real life version doesn't get to be edited by the story tellers, film editors, etc.
     
  16. ChemEngineer

    ChemEngineer Banned

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    Some say that intelligent design doesn’t make predictions but it does. It predicts that scientists will continue to find design in biological systems. In 1998, Bill Dembski predicted the demise of junk DNA:

    “…Thus on an evolutionary view, we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function.”


    … In September 2012, four hundred and fifty scientists … “were able to assign biochemical functions for 80% of the genome. It’s likely that 80% will go to 100 percent.” – Counting to God, by Douglas Ell, p 155
     
  17. roorooroo

    roorooroo Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    ET ain't got a clue.
     
  18. One Mind

    One Mind Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That is an opinion that has some really big odds against it. But if it happens so easily should we not be able to manipulate matter and create a self replicating molecule that then can be manipulated into a single cell organism with the ability to evolve into a mammal or fish?

    That what was created by randomness and chance by the use of intellegence be replicated.

    This is a sticking point for even some notable mathmaticians.
     
  19. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Given a Billion years we certainly would...ask again in 100 years as we are almost doing it already, after less than a century.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sc...ratory-sparking-debate-about-playing-god.html
     
  20. ToddWB

    ToddWB Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Have we heard from ET? Nah.. I didn't think so.. if ET are out there.. they are very far away..

    now interdimensional beings? Might be something to those.
     
  21. One Mind

    One Mind Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  22. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Ah...I see now that you are one of those.

    Have A Nice Day:)
     
  23. ChemEngineer

    ChemEngineer Banned

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    No there isn't. Hundreds of biologists, biochemists, and other trained experts have attempted to demonstrate abiogenesis and speciation for decades.
    The famous Miller-Urey Experiment, long heralded as a breakthrough in the formation of life from the primordial ooze has been discredited. The assumptions they made about earth's early atmosphere and conditions were wildly wrong. So there's that.


    Have you heard the acronym, GIGO? It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out.
    It is more than fitting for statistics. A great many people go for such nonsense as the 50/50 scam. Either it did or it didn't. 50/50.
    Then there's the card scam. "Every hand is equally probable." Most hands are random garbage, nothing like four aces or four kings.
    The most popular scam is pretending that millions of years make everything come out just fine. Sorry, but probabilities don't change if you do them slower.
    Flip a coin every second or once in 10,000 years, it's .50 chance of heads. The same is true of polypeptide synthesis. Adding one more amino acid to the sequence is less than 1 chance in 20. Have you any idea of the space of Titin, with 34,350 amino acid residues? Simply take 20 to the 34,350th power.

    Who was Galileo hitting up for donations again? That's right. Nobody. The Church asked him to study astronomy since the Bible tells us to seek wisdom and understanding. America's Ivy League Colleges all have Christian charters. So much for the atheist pretension of Christianity is anti-science.
     
  24. One Mind

    One Mind Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  25. Dutch

    Dutch Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Nice tread to revive...

    There was not a space sci-fi book that I haven’t read by the time I was sixteen, The Foundation Series and Rama Series being my favorites... I still reread them every decade or so.

    But of course we’re not along in the universe. Just axe Asimov and Clarke, they’ll tell you.
     
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2019
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