Do You Believe?

This is for discussions about news, politics, sports, other games, culture, philosophy etc.

Your thoughts on aliens closest resemble which of the following?

I do not believe in aliens
8
17%
I think aliens are out there but we have not met them yet
25
54%
I think we have found evidence of aliens on earth and it is being covered up.
8
17%
Other
5
11%
 
Total votes: 46

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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

It's just a definition by biology to take out stuff like self replicating machines out of the equation to simplify what is and what is not life. I dont think it's a relevant definition for this question.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by gustavusadolphus »

momuuu wrote:It's just a definition by biology to take out stuff like self replicating machines out of the equation to simplify what is and what is not life. I dont think it's a relevant definition for this question.


Now if we found a group of seldreplicating machines that where not made by humans as far as we know could they be called aliens even though they dont fit the biological definition of life.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

gustavusadolphus wrote:
momuuu wrote:It's just a definition by biology to take out stuff like self replicating machines out of the equation to simplify what is and what is not life. I dont think it's a relevant definition for this question.


Now if we found a group of seldreplicating machines that where not made by humans as far as we know could they be called aliens even though they dont fit the biological definition of life.

The cell requirement is mostly silly. Also, why is replication a condition for live, what if life pops up that is selfsustaining instead. Maybe a hivemind that, instead of replicating itself, just grows itself.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by gustavusadolphus »

momuuu wrote:
gustavusadolphus wrote:
momuuu wrote:It's just a definition by biology to take out stuff like self replicating machines out of the equation to simplify what is and what is not life. I dont think it's a relevant definition for this question.


Now if we found a group of seldreplicating machines that where not made by humans as far as we know could they be called aliens even though they dont fit the biological definition of life.

The cell requirement is mostly silly. Also, why is replication a condition for live, what if life pops up that is selfsustaining instead. Maybe a hivemind that, instead of replicating itself, just grows itself.


Possibly like a continually molting snake.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by godzillaking »

n0el wrote:@Gendarme if you assume evolution occurs at the same rate, and if we are later in the timeline for life around the universe then I’d expect other life forms to have evolved to the point where their tech allows them to have a presence in the universe.

Although I see your point with regards to scale


I think a good topic of discussion would also be if evolution has a goal. I don't think evolution necessarily means lifeforms get smarter and better. The only thing that matters is their fitness and ability to reproduce. There could be older aliens than us, but not as advanced.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by godzillaking »

Garja wrote:Considering the fact that the universe keeps expanding it is infinitely small.


I'm curious to see the math behind that statement.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

Im actually pretty sure the expansion of the universe doesnt increase the amount of matter in the universe and thus the amount of planets. And even if it did, the chance would only become infinitely small when the ellapsed time too approaches infinite.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by TheInvincibleJannisary »

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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by gamevideo113 »

Well perhaps i didn't phrase my point appropriately. I guess that in theory you could have something similar to life that doesn't meet all of those criteria, but practically i think it would be inappropriate to define it life. A self replicating robot is something you can theorize about, but i don't think its existence is actually possible. Artificial creations are only as smart as their creator makes them, which implies that they can't really evolve and adapt that much.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by evilcheadar »

Yesh, evolution has no goal. It has directionality where populations of species tend to accrue mutations that cause increased fecundity. There is some nuance to this, however. There can be adaptations that manifest at the population level that prevent a population from growing out of control causing everyone in the population to die from lack of resources.

I think the popular image of aliens being these advanced beings would be the exception in the actual universe.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by gustavusadolphus »

evilcheadar wrote:Yesh, evolution has no goal. It has directionality where populations of species tend to accrue mutations that cause increased fecundity. There is some nuance to this, however. There can be adaptations that manifest at the population level that prevent a population from growing out of control causing everyone in the population to die from lack of resources.

I think the popular image of aliens being these advanced beings would be the exception in the actual universe.


Would you consider us advanced beings?
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by gibson »

Advanced relative to what?
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by gustavusadolphus »

gibson wrote:Advanced relative to what?


Not sure, but if we found if he beings that had similar technology to us would we consider them advanced?
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by evilcheadar »

gustavusadolphus wrote:
evilcheadar wrote:Yesh, evolution has no goal. It has directionality where populations of species tend to accrue mutations that cause increased fecundity. There is some nuance to this, however. There can be adaptations that manifest at the population level that prevent a population from growing out of control causing everyone in the population to die from lack of resources.

I think the popular image of aliens being these advanced beings would be the exception in the actual universe.


Would you consider us advanced beings?

I was referring to a pop culture flying saucer alien type, but there is of course subjectivity with how advanced beings could be defined.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by dietschlander »

gustavusadolphus wrote:
evilcheadar wrote:Yesh, evolution has no goal. It has directionality where populations of species tend to accrue mutations that cause increased fecundity. There is some nuance to this, however. There can be adaptations that manifest at the population level that prevent a population from growing out of control causing everyone in the population to die from lack of resources.

I think the popular image of aliens being these advanced beings would be the exception in the actual universe.


Would you consider us advanced beings?


Extremely advanced
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by Garja »

momuuu wrote:
Garja wrote:Considering the fact that the universe keeps expanding it is infinitely small.

Considering the fact that the universe is finite right now, and will always stay finite, it is finitely small garja.

Is it? Anyway it still is incedibly small despite all tge combination of factors.
The scale of the universe is just too big to be any probable that there is just one planet with life.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

Garja wrote:
momuuu wrote:
Garja wrote:Considering the fact that the universe keeps expanding it is infinitely small.

Considering the fact that the universe is finite right now, and will always stay finite, it is finitely small garja.

Is it? Anyway it still is incedibly small despite all tge combination of factors.
The scale of the universe is just too big to be any probable that there is just one planet with life.

Yes its finite.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by Garja »

I'm frankly rather ignorant to this (never been too interested) but why they say it keeps expanding then?
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by fightinfrenchman »

Garja wrote:I'm frankly rather ignorant to this (never been too interested) but why they say it keeps expanding then?


As far as I understand it, the space is expanding, but not the stuff in it. A good metaphor is imagine a deflated balloon, then you put a bunch of dots on it. As you inflate the balloon, the dots get further and further from each other as the space between them expands, but no more dots are actually added.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

Garja wrote:I'm frankly rather ignorant to this (never been too interested) but why they say it keeps expanding then?

I don't actually know the exact details about how some things work, but in the end the amount of mass stays the same (and this, as the volume of the universe increases, the mass sensity scales with 1/a^3) while this dark energy increases (or actually, the density of this energy stays constant as the size of the universe increases). On a side note, due to the energy of radiation also depending on frequency and thus length, the energy density of radiation scales with a^4 and that density has become much smaller than the energy density of mass in the current universe. Right now, I think dark energy makes up almost 70% of the universe. Basically, 70% of the universe's energy is made up of some inherent attribute of space, but the nature of that energy is pretty much completely unknown, and the only reasonable clue (vacuum energy as proposed by quantum mechanics, basically the energy of space) doesn't at all fit the data (theoretical estimates of this value are waaay too high).

One could easily say that dark energy is just us not understanding some things about the universe, just some poor fluke that was poorly patched up and this was honestly sortof my attitude when I first started studying some of cosmology. But as it turns out, there actually is very reasonable support for this dark energy. Einstein's general relativity allows for the universe to have what is called "curvature". Curvature of space is hard to imagine, but it's like a curved plane except in 3d. The peculiar thing is that there appears to actually be no curvature or close to no curvature at all (this can be explained by inflation, which is actually also poorly understood). If we take Einstein's general relativity, and plug in the decent estimates for the energy density of radiation and matter, we find that this only amounts to about 30% of the critical energy density that would cause no curvature. Einstein's theories otherwise have been rather succesful, yet seem to fail immensely at this level. That is, his calculations do allow for a constant term to pop up, one that doesn't scale with the size of the universe, often referred to as the cosmological constant. So in fact, mathematically speaking, there's room for a constant that fixes the problems. The only issue is that we don't know that constant.

Now theres more that this implies. Basically, the rest of cosmology is about determining the fate of the universe. Imagine throw up a ball on earth: There are two possibilities, either you throw it up, its velocity reaches zero due to earth's gravity and then falls back again, or you throw it with a speed larger than the escape speed and it manages to escape earth's gravitational field, deccelerating along the way but never reaching a velocity of zero. The seeming reality of dark energy forces us to look at another scenario: In this case, dark energy would make it so that you throw up the ball and if it is the dominant term, instead of deccelerating the ball actually accelerates! Then take the big bang model, which is basically analogous to throwing up a ball, and notice that there are three posibilities: The big crunch (ball falling back to earth), a deccelerated expansion and an accelerated expansion. Based on observations, it seems that the universe is expanding in an accelerated fashion at the moment.

This is just interesting stuff, the bottom line is that the space is expanding in an accelerated fashion but the matter density is decreasing accordingly. Thus this acceleration doesn't really cause an increase is potentially habitable planets.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by HUMMAN »

Cosmology 101 by Jerom :)
Also i heard one possibility is the stagnant universe where entropy at max, no move.. Cold death.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

HUMMAN wrote:Cosmology 101 by Jerom :)
Also i heard one possibility is the stagnant universe where entropy at max, no move.. Cold death.

iirc if it doesn't crunch back to one point, it always ends in wha'ts often referred to as the big chill.

also just wrote a bit of stuff, cosmology has so far been my favorite subject in uni by a long shot.
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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by lejend »

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Re: Do You Believe?

Post by momuuu »

lejend wrote:There is no evidence for aliens other than, "the universe is big", which is pretty poor as evidence. Most of the bases for belief in aliens can be applied to supernatural beings. "The universe is huge so Zeus must exist." "The universe can theoretically be habitable for Poseidon so he probably exists." "It's arrogant to believe that only natural beings exist in this vast universe." etc. No empirical science. Just metaphysics and speculation.

Actually, the thing is that the size of the universe and the amount of planets that are comparable to earth is so extremely large, and life on earth came into being so fast relatively, that it'd be an insane coincidence that we are alone. You can't prove that there's alien life right now, but it's overwhelmingly likely. The reason why it might appear to you as metaphysics is because you're simply unable to fully grasp how huge the universe is.
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Re: Do You Believe?

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