Earth is Probably Unique

[rainbow]

http://www.9news.com.au/technology/2016 ... tudy-finds

Earth unlike all other 700 quintillion planets in the universe, study finds
Read more at http://www.9news.com.au/technology/2016 ... pM2ITPQ.99

[rainbow]

[JimC]

Everything is unique...

[rainbow]

Everything is unique...

...except for nitpickers:

[mistermack]

It's not necessarily the Earth that's unique, it's probably the human species.

What made humans jump from chimpanzee-like intelligence, to human intelligence, over five million years, might be the unique thing that has never happened on other similar planets.

Chimpanzees have hardly evolved at all, in brain-power, over the same time.
The same goes for Orangutans and Gorillas and Bonobos.
Crocodiles haven't got any cleverer in fifty million years.
There's no rule that says that species will keep getting more intelligent.

In any case, even if a species DID get as intelligent as humans, it wouldn't necessarily lead to technology. Not if they didn't communicate the way we do. Nor if they didn't evolve some sort of hands.
You could have super-intelligent dolphins swimming about the ocean, but without speech, books and hands, they're not going to make it off the Earth.

[Rum]

700 quintillion planets and we are unique? Come on. Another case of human-centricity. There may not be exact human counterparts out there but over the life of the universe I bet there are many many species as complex and possibly as 'intelligent'.

[NineBerry]

Every intelligent species is going to self-destruct within 100k years of achieving agriculture. So there.

[Rum]

Not if they are Clangers.

[pErvinalia]

I'm sick of dumb cosmologists. "Why haven't they colonised our galaxy"? How the fuck do you know they haven't?

And if they haven't, maybe it's because the distance between galaxies, let alone one side of the universe to the other, is mind bogglingly large.

Gross speculation posing as intelligent analysis.

[Hermit]

I'm sick of dumb cosmologists. "Why haven't they colonised our galaxy"? How the fuck do you know they haven't?

And if they haven't, maybe it's because the distance between galaxies, let alone one side of the universe to the other, is mind bogglingly large.

Gross speculation posing as intelligent analysis.

Yeah, the dearth of data points to base the guesses on is a bit of a worry. Besides, maybe we had extra-terrestrial visitors, but they could not be bothered to make it known to us, just like we might pass yet another termite mound without feeling the urge to say hello to the termites. After checking out the first 200 they all seem much the same.

[Calilasseia]

As I've said elsewhere on several occasions, there's also another possibility.

Namely that we're the first. As in the first life forms to start systematically exploring space and working to move beyond our home planet.

The observable universe is 13.6 billion years old. According to the data available to us, the dust and gas cloud from which the Sun and the Solar System were to emerge, appeared on the scene around 8 billion years ago. In order for that dust and gas cloud to produce the Solar System we observe today, it had to contain heavy elements, including post-supernova nucleosynthesis products, and in some quantity. As a corollary, the first question that needs to be asked, is whether it would be possible to generate such a dust and gas cloud in less than 8 billion years, because this is what is needed if other intelligent life forms are to beat us to the tape, so to speak. If it transpires that 8 billion years of post-supernova nucleosynthesis is needed, in order to produce dust and gas clouds of the appropriate composition to facilitate a setup resembling ours, then we're either the first on the scene, or pretty close thereto.

As a corollary, if 8 billion years is the minimum time period required for gas and dust clouds to be rich enough in heavier elements, to facilitate the emergence of star systems with planets like ours, and we are therefore part of the universe's "first wave" of spacefarers, then we can't rely upon antecedent civilisations to help us solve our problems, because there are none. At some point, there has to be a first such civilisation emerging, because the processes that generate civilisations composed of intelligent beings take finite time - and a lot of it - to run to completion. If the applicable numbers are such, that said run to completion time is consonant with us being in the "first wave", then far from us having to worry about aliens, it's the later civilisations appearing on the block that will have to worry about us. We're going to be the ones starring as the possible bad guys in their space operas, as and when they reach the point of being able to dream them up.

If this is indeed the case, and we're the first to step out there, then we're going to be spending a lot of that exploration time in the future, saying hello to lifeless bodies and bodies boasting nothing more advanced than bacteria. Whilst this is going to be a boon for abiogenesis research, which in future will have an increasing number of models to call upon, in order to make the case for Earth's own chemical trajectory more robust, it's going to be pretty boring for those itching to go out and do battle with little green men. Instead, what's likely to happen, if we're the first, is that internecine warfare between our own early colonies, is going to be the biggest source of space-related casualties for our species.

Then, of course, after we've spent millennia making our way around the galaxy, and starting to think about the first intergalactic explorations, we might chance upon some helpless civilisation that's just made it to the level of Classical Greece, only for us to ruin their day when we turn up. Let's face it, we don't have a particularly good track record here even on our own planet - the ones with the technology advantages in the past, tended to be rather less adept at matching those technology advances with ethical advances. Unless we change our ways a lot in the coming millennia, we're going to be the evil alien invaders, that everyone else shits themselves at the prospect of encountering.

It's interesting to note, how civilisations here on Earth that clambered to the top of the greasy pole by shitting on other, lesser civilisations, have been fertile producers of fiction involving big bad bug-eyed aliens coming to shit on them. In the meantime, the numbers revolving around nucleosynthesis of heavier elements could mean that in the future, we are the Klingons, the Romulans, etc, and that it's the other emerging civilisations in the galaxy that develop damn good reasons to wish we'd never turned up. Let's face it, if you were part of an emerging civilisation 1,000 light years from Earth, that had just reached the Classical Greek level of development, and you were happily making your way toward the first faltering steps into a scientifically guided future, would you want to receive a big, scary "trick or treat" call from Putin or Donald Trump? Or find your planet being considered ripe for plunder by a 30th century version of the Koch Brothers?

Worse still, if we don't learn to curtail some of our more martial tendencies, not to mention some of the homicidal xenophobia we've exhibited on an industrial scale in the past here on Earth, a future Earth mission to the stars could bear no relation whatsoever to Star Trek, and instead cast us as the space Nazis from Iron Sky. Now there's a thought that should curdle the blood of anyone with their humanity intact. Do we want our species to be represented by rapacious, piratical individuals, who set out from the word 'go' with an agenda based upon conquest, bloodshed, getting rich quick and getting some creepy brands of sadism out of their systems?

This is something we're going to have to face up to, when we do reach the point of becoming an interstellar exploring species. If we're the first, we're the ones setting the example, and we have a lot of baggage to jettison in this respect.

[JimC]

Earthmen uber alles!

[Feck]

Every single human being is actually unique ......not sure that makes them all special ........ ?

[rainbow]

Every single human being is actually unique ......not sure that makes them all special ........ ?

Didn't your teachers call you "special"?

[mistermack]

The Universe is about 14 billion years old. Heavy elements form in supernova explosions when a big star dies. Our sun is about four billion years old, and will die in about another four billion. But many supernova happen much quicker than that.
The bigger the star, the faster it burns out. And some stars can be very very big, and burn out very very quick.
Stars ten times the size of the sun die in only thirty million years, and the biggest, sixty times the sun, in only three million years.
So there has actually been loads of time, for civilisations to have a chance to evolve.
If the Earth is about four billion years old, the Universe had been going for about ten billion years, before the Earth even cooled.
As the longest lived supernova only took 32 million years to burn out, there is time for thirty such cycles in each billion years.
Of course, they don't happen one after another, or at least, rarely.
But time to make heavy elements is not really the problem.

I think this article is only speculating about the Milky Way, not the entire Universe.
Compared to the entire Universe, the Milky Way is tiny. Even though it's vast compared to us.
Without checking, I think it has about 200 billion stars, which is a huge number.
But the odds might be that high, against life forming which is intelligent enough and technologically advanced enough to travel in space. We could be unique in the Milky Way. My guess is probably not, but we could be.

But when you include the whole Universe, I think it's certain that many other space travelling civilisations have happened. But they're just too far away to detect.