Ask HN: Is there any credible evidence for ET intelligent life?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17458036

by dosy • 8 years ago

11 19 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

splodge• 8 years ago

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA16204.jpg

blocked_again2• 8 years ago

What is the story with this image?

chralie66• 8 years ago

"UFO buffs zeroed in on a portion of a panoramic photo taken by NASA's Curiosity rover in September 2012. These viewers spotted an object that looked like a rat lying between two rocks. While it's a creative idea, the "Mars rat" is unlikely, scientists have said. The Red Planet has extremely cold temperatures, is baked in radiation and lacks a thick, protective atmosphere like Earth's, making it an extremely hostile environment for life." [1]

Doesn't seem legitimate.

1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/media/mars-myths-6-red-planet-hoaxes...

wuunderbar• 8 years ago

And what exactly am I looking at here?

willmeyers• 8 years ago

Just for clarification (since OP didn't give any insight to the picture he/she posted), it's a picture of the "Mars Rat"[1]. It's just a funny looking rock.

[1] https://www.space.com/21455-mars-rat-curiosity-rover-drive.h...

blocked_again2• 8 years ago

Yup. Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidences.

dosy4• 8 years ago

I think that the parameter space of "all possible rock shapes" X all possible camera angles / perspectives is so large that you are abound to get rocks that look like all sorts of things. Plus humans like to/evolved to find faces/creatures in patterns (see clouds). So that's pretty weak evidence.

hprotagonist• 8 years ago

i do not believe that we have any such evidence.

I’m open to the possibility that extraterrestrial life exists. I suspect that it’s mostly prokaryotic — and i don’t think there’s any credible evidence for advanced alien civilizations or the like, to date.

gmuslera• 8 years ago

Not that I'm aware of. And maybe we will never have one, by far most of the universe is out of our reach and (detailed enough) sight. We might eventually have evidence of ET intelligent life in some point of the future, but never will have of the lack of it.

But the size and age of the universe makes the odds of us being an unique case very improbable.

staunch• 8 years ago

AFAIK the closest thing we have is the very recently released USS Nimitz incident:

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

And even this example is very very far from being enough evidence to believe extraterrestrial intelligent life has visited Earth.

ndethore• 8 years ago

It depends on your definition of "intelligent life", but if you're talking about a life form that we, humans could observe and interact with using our few senses then I'm afraid that the answer is "no". Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord recently published a paper that demonstrate a substantial probability that we're alone our galaxy and perhaps observable universe: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

Can you guys hear the cosmic crickets too? lol

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

And the HN discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302924

BTW, "Cosmic Crickets" is the name of my next rockabilly revival band. ;-)

dosy4• 8 years ago

If we're really alone, does what we do / not do, have any real value? More anecdotal evidence for them could be said to exist than for God and if there are no ETs/God/higher powers, and we're just alone does any of it really matter? Isn't all morality / law just whatever elites/leaders have determined is the best way to control us / let them maintain their power? If there is no karma (bad people prosper, while the meek/good often perish) why not just go full-Machiavellian? Is the only meaning in this world the pursuit of biological urges / or money-status? If we're alone, what's the point?

By the same logic that priests having the power to channel / control the believers access to God have wielded tremendous power, the State would probably love if ETs were real, since it could then co-opt ETs into a mechanism for control. Or maybe the ETs can't be co-opted...

taxicabjesus• 8 years ago

A better question might be, "if there was incontrovertible evidence of the existence of ET intelligent life, how would the conditions of human civilization on planet Earth be different?"

Suppose that Planet Earth is actually being visited regularly by ETs with technology vastly more advanced than our own. Our transportation technology runs on the laws of thermodynamics, while theirs would presumably be powered by the more-fundamental laws that govern "dark energy" (superseding thermodynamics, just like Einstein > Newton).

I don't have any evidence either way, but I think it's hubris to make a case that ours is the only planet with life anything like our own, and that equivalents to humanity's 1st generation space technologies (radios, rockets, etc) would still be used by more advanced civilizations.

dosy4• 8 years ago

Yep, or our 1st-gen comms tech (EMF, observable radio waves, unencrypted). But if earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the universe 3x that and 200 x 10^9 other stars in Milky Way, and 100x10^9 other galaxies in universe, and in our own planet/history many traits (eyes, etc) evolved independently many times over, and there's nothing "special" about Earth chemistry ( these elements are all produced by stars, everywhere ), and nothing special about Earth in the "habitable" zone around a star, --> why would we be the only life here?

And what's that Pentagon video of some super fast object? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog...

I think if ET was real most people would still care about the same things (because consider that 2000 years ago we are warlike, violent, superstitious, gullible, flawed, selfish, kind, etc, and 2000 years later, after organized religion, industrial revolution, international travel, internet, long lifespans, mobile phones, we are still the same). Maybe 10 - 20% of the population would adopt ETs as some sort of "god" / higher power (but there are ppl who do this anyway, even now). I don't think much would change, but ppl would try holding their governments to more accountability ( why don't we have that tech, why have you kept it secret ), but like most protest movements recently, it will probably be pretty ineffective. I use to think there will be large scale civil unrest, but now I think, people really won't care.

But if there is that tech on Earth, then our military has to make it a priority to obtain it (because what if someone else also has it), so there's that consideration, which could justify keeping everything secret (what if everyone had a UFO and could fly anywhere they wanted at 20,000 km/h? probably chaos, an upending of the order ~ but maybe not. We thought individuals having access to all information, and a publishing platform, would make individuals vastly more powerful, but that hasn't really upended the order. If anything, the State has become more powerful because of the internet.)

But UFO travel would sure beat 15 hours across the pacific in an uncomfortable aluminium tube.

krapp3• 8 years ago

But if earth is 4.5 billion years old, (...) why would we be the only life here?

As far as we know, there's no way to get around the lightspeed limit, which implies no matter how advanced a civilization gets, they would be constrained by physics and available resources - so no warp drives, no stargates, nothing but rockets and things that work like rockets, and generations of travel between the stars.

If that's the case, it any form of space travel, much less long term interstellar travel, might be an exception rather than the rule for intelligent species. We only assume that expansion out into the stars is a natural consequence of progress due to biases we have regarding biological and societal evolution, but space isn't just a bigger ocean.

We can't really extrapolate the likelihood of visitation by extraterrestrials from the historical tendency of cultures to encounter one another on our own planet. Given the vast size of the observable universe and the unremarkable nature of the Earth (from which we've only been broadcasting signals for a fraction of an instant, relatively speaking) it's not at all surprising that we wouldn't see anyone or that no one would see us, much less stop by for a visit.

Ask HN: Is there any credible evidence for ET intelligent life?

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