[K.I.L.E.R]

We all know what folding is and we all know what SETI@home is, so I'll get straight to the point.

Give up folding and search for aliens.

Benefits of finding aliens:
We will never get sick again.
We will have warp technology. (The Vulcans might share with us)
New and improved ways of hiding WMD.
We may evolve.

These are the reasons you seriously need to stop folding. Stop dreaming with the fodling junk. Once we find aliens we will have all the help we need. We'll be spoon fed and never need to fold again.

[Humus]

Reasons SETI should be ditched:
We won't find alien. Why? Well, scanning radio data from cosmos are unlikely to ever find anything but cosmic noise. First of all, what is the likelyhood that aliens would be using radiowaves? Will even humans use radiowaves in 100 years? Once we have control over the quantum effects we can use that to communicate instead. If we can do it cheap, radiowaves may be ditched forever, and it may happend in just a century or two. If there are so much more evolved civilisations out there, chances are that they have ditched radiowaves long long time ago.
Secondly, even if they would still be using radiowaves, the distances in space would make communication unfeasible.
Thirdly, even if we could communicate in a reasonable way, there's nothing saying that we would benefit from it, not to talk about the risks involved. How do we know that they are friendly?

[K.I.L.E.R]

Oh come on, with all the aliens advanced technology they could detect radio waves from probably 9 trillion light years.

Of course they'll spoon feed us. Look how pathetic the human race is.

Maybe they'll see that we know PI up to 100 decimal places and they might take pity on us. :P

[DemoCoder]

Fourth, there is no reason that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, let alone simple life.

Fifth, the Fermi Paradox. Even if such life exists, it is unlikely that they exist at similar stages of development (ala Star Trek) where communcation is even reasonable. Either their civilization isn't advanced enough yet, or is so advanced that communication is irrelevent.

And if they are so advanced, why don't we see them already? It is unlikey we both arrived at the industrial revolution at the same time, more likely, they got a million or even billion year head start on us (let say, they had no dinosaur extinction and got luckly and developed intelligence on the first try)

Take the human race and extrapolate from 2003 1 million years forward. Won't we have gobbled up a big visible chunk of this galaxy by now? Won't an uncountable number of interesting emissions be coming from our galaxy? So why can't we see these other races?

No, it is very likely that we are unique in the universe. It took billions of years before the first life could develop, and in an expanding universe, size == age, therefore, the universe is super huge, but it is empty of life.


Imagine you are driving down the road playing poker. Every hour, you deal a hand trying to get a royal flush. After 100,000 hours, your first royal flush appears. You've driven 8 million miles by the time this happens, and you look back along the highway and say "woah, the road is so long and it took so long, there must be lots of royal flushes that were dealt along this road!"

But the fact is, in all of the other cars driving along the highway, no royal flushes have been dealt yet. The highway is that long simply because it has to be that big for the first royal flush to appear.

[Deepak]

We don't even know about our own planet, first lets search and explore it.

BTW, humas, interesting....I was thinking that even if in future we are able to travel long distances in galaxies, how will we communicate....radio waves travels ONLY as fast as light. May be we will find something else which can reach anywhere in the UNIVERSE in a second????

[K.I.L.E.R]

So, this universe is infinite and yet you expect no life other than ourselves in it? That's a very narrow view.

[Deepak]

DC, I disagree on this, I firmly believe there is life in this universe, and there is intelligent life somewhere, simply considering the no of galaxies, stars and even more planets.....and if there is even .0000000000000000000000000000001 % of finding life, there will still be millions of potential life forms. Why no one has contacted us?..may be we are the most developed race out there!!! Or may be they use some other form of communation which we can't tap??

[Humus]

Originally Posted by Deepak

We don't even know about our own planet, first lets search and explore it.

BTW, humas, interesting....I was thinking that even if in future we are able to travel long distances in galaxies, how will we communicate....radio waves travels ONLY as fast as light. May be we will find something else which can reach anywhere in the UNIVERSE in a second????

Well, I think it might be possible that in a very distant future that we may have something like a translocator clouds in UT. You walk into it and instantly appear at another location. But that's just another reason to not believe that there are any other advanced civilisations out there. If they would be out there, and perhaps could translocate themselves to any point in space, why aren't they doing it? Why aren't we seeing them popping up on earth? Either they don't exist, don't know we exist, or just aren't interested in going here. If they would be all that advanced I would think they would know our existence however, so it's rather they either don't exist or just aren't interested in going here. And if they aren't interested in us, then what are they chances that our tries to communicate with them would lead to any benefit?

[Humus]

Originally Posted by K.I.L.E.R

So, this universe is infinite and yet you expect no life other than ourselves in it? That's a very narrow view.

The universe is most likely finite.

[Deepak]

I thought came into my mind, considering how large the distances in this universe are, we need to travel a LOT faster than light to be able to reach any other galaxy, BUT if when one travels faster than LIGHT, theoratically it goes into past (it travels back into time)....SO then how can we go faster than light and reach in PRESENT???

Can anyone answer>?

[K.I.L.E.R]

If they would be out there, and perhaps could translocate themselves to any point in space, why aren't they doing it? Why aren't we seeing them popping up on earth?

Universe = infinite.
Nothing is saying they didn't come to Earth before WE came on Earth. Or they might have come on Earth when humans were so young.

Or simply because the universe is infinite and they haven't got this far yet.

The universe is most likely finite.

I wasn't taught that.

theoratically it goes into past (it travels back into time)....SO then how can we go faster than light and reach in PRESENT???

FALSE! If we travel faster than light then we must have a negative mass. Chalnoth has told me tachyons don't exist either.

If you travel faster than light or at the speed of light you will age slower than everything else. This is all in theory however.

[Humus]

Originally Posted by Deepak

DC, I disagree on this, I firmly believe there is life in this universe, and there is intelligent life somewhere, simply considering the no of galaxies, stars and even more planets.....and if there is even .0000000000000000000000000000001 % of finding life, there will still be millions of potential life forms. Why no one has contacted us?..may be we are the most developed race out there!!! Or may be they use some other form of communation which we can't tap??

I'm open for the thought that life may exist elsewhere, but I certainly agree with DC that we most likely are unique. If we indeed are the most advanced form of life there is, then SETI is a waste of time. We won't find anything, or if we find something it would be useless for us. If on the other hand we wouldn't be the most advanced civilisation out there, then it's extremely likely that the other civilisations would be so much more advanced that communication is useless. It's like us trying to communication with bacteria. They can't hear us, and they don't even realize we're trying to communcate with them. Again, SETI would be useless. And finally, in the extremely unlikely scenario that there is alien life that is at a very similar level of developement as humans, then there's nothing saying that we could even communicate with them in any sensible way. Would they have eyes and ears? Or would they communicate through other means? Likely so. Even if we could communicate with them, then again, would we actually benefit of such a communication? They may just not be interested in us, or they may not be friendly at all. Would you like to put the humankind at risk by communicating with life forms you have no idea if they are just alien predators or friendly?

[Deepak]

Theoratically it is possible to go faster than light, infact I remember one university did make some sort of rays go faster than light...can't remember..

[Humus]

Originally Posted by Deepak

IBUT if when one travels faster than LIGHT, theoratically it goes into past (it travels back into time)

If you base this on einsteins theories then this is a misconception. Instead of going backwards you have a hard to interpret situation. You don't get a negative number, you get negative number under a square root, which results in an imaginary number. The only sensible conclusion I can draw from that is that it's just impossible to go back in time.

[Humus]

Originally Posted by Deepak

Theoratically it is possible to go faster than light, infact I remember one university did make some sort of rays go faster than light...can't remember..

You can pass waveforms or information at rates higher than speed, but you can't pass matter faster than light.

[Humus]

Originally Posted by K.I.L.E.R

Universe = infinite.
Nothing is saying they didn't come to Earth before WE came on Earth. Or they might have come on Earth when humans were so young.

Or simply because the universe is infinite and they haven't got this far yet.

I wasn't taught that.

Well, then it's time you educate yourself. If the big bang theory is true, then matter does not exist outside a radius of c * t, where t is around 20 billion years or so.
Then if you go into the deeper and slightly philosophical discussion, then our three dimensional universe may indeed only be the surface of a four-dimenional sphere. So if you travel very far in one direction you will sooner or later get back to where you started.

[K.I.L.E.R]

...risk by communicating with life forms you have no idea if they are just alien predators or friendly?

I think that question is answered in Alien.

Theoratically it is possible to go faster than light, infact I remember one university did make some sort of rays go faster than light...can't remember..

http://www.space-talk.com/ForumE/sho...9&pagenumber=1

There is a therory that using negetive energy you could expand space behind your space craft and contract space in front of your space craft and travel faster than light with out violating general reletivity. This method is called warp drive (evidently the scientist is a star trek fan)the result is that you travel in a bubble of space that is stationary in relation to the space craft but the bubble of space can travel at any speed with out all the infinite energy/mass probelms.

Humus:

Well, then it's time you educate yourself. If the big band theory is true, then matter does not exist outside a radius of c * t, where t is around 20 billion years or so.
Then if you go into the deeper and slightly philosophical discussion, then our three dimensional universe may indeed only be the surface of a four-dimenional sphere. So if you travel very far in one direction you will sooner or later get back to where you started.

That's a big if there Humus.
Scientists are not 100% sure of anything. What would happen if all the current theories of how the universe started were proved false?
What would people say if we lived in a finite universe with infinite realities built into it making the universe infinite?
Sort of like expanding the universe's depth.

[Ilfirin]

Originally Posted by DemoCoder

Take the human race and extrapolate from 2003 1 million years forward. Won't we have gobbled up a big visible chunk of this galaxy by now? Won't an uncountable number of interesting emissions be coming from our galaxy? So why can't we see these other races?

No, it is very likely that we are unique in the universe. It took billions of years before the first life could develop, and in an expanding universe, size == age, therefore, the universe is super huge, but it is empty of life.

You, along with a lot of the SETI people, are missing a very major point though.

First, it is physically impossible to see a very large chunk of the universe simply because it is located more than ~8-15 billion lightyears away and thus none of the light that side of the universe emits has had enough time to even reach Earth. This is one way they determine the age of the universe btw.

Second, Everything we see in the universe is several millions, to several billions of years out of date and thus even if there was extremely intelligent life on those planets, we're still "looking into the past" to way before they were created. They could have colonized virtually all the universe and we'd still not yet even see basic life forming.

To put this in perspective, many of the stars you see at night could very well have died off long before Earth even formed.

The flip side to this, though, is if we somehow detected some microscopic lifeform on some planet, that'd mean the life there would probably be several millions of years ahead of us at the same time as the detection was made (unless it was from one of the nearby solar systems, which isn't likely).

Anyway, problem with SETI is that for a distant lifeform to be intelligent enough to send out radio waves that we would receive anytime within the next million years or so they would have had to formed the most basic life almost immediately (relatively speaking) after the big bang. And there's 0 chance that that happened.

K.I.L.E.R> Re infinite universe: IIRC, out of the various different general-relativity solutions to the universe, physicists now believe that the closed solutions are the most likely and thus the universe is not only not infinite, but if you were to travel in one direction long enough, you'd end up right back where you started. But don't quote me on any of this..

[Nappe1]

remember that, WE could be the side offering high tech to them. Noone can be sure that they really technically a lot more advanced than us. Plus there's a lot things that are related to place we live (eg. lots of stuff are based on facts that can be seen most likely only here: for example, how you define time (days, weeks, years) if you can see more than 1 sun at a time? Even more difficult it gets if the supposed alien planet goes around both suns a syncronously... )


and yes... parody called "Morons From Outer Space" could be true.

[london-boy]

KILER, r u for real?
i don't post here a lot, but god u say a lot of stupid things... which aint a bad thing in itself, mind u...

just listen to Humus and leave science fiction to science fiction threads... otherwise, get a book, read it, then come back.

there are MANY theories about everything, and the theory of a Multiverse (a universe made of an infinite number of universes coexisting in parallel dimensions) is just that, a theory. moreover, that theory is clear about the fact that it would be nearly impossible to communicate between parallel universes. therefore the universe u live in IS finite. the fact that there MIGHT be other universes out there doesn't mean anything. they exists in other realities. and they could be so different that existance there would be impossible for us (think 2D universes, universes without Protons etc).

u really should read some books on this, personally i EAT cosmology books, i'm just hooked. they provide a good deal of information and make u understand that THEORIES are just THEORIES. like i could say men come from Mars (which i think is also an "official" theory). but thats a theory.

[Ilfirin]

Just to reiterate the central point of my first post:

While it is virtually a statistical fact that there's other life out there in the universe, it is just as, or more so, likely that all of humanity will die off and become extinct long before any communication can be made between that life (1-way or not). So it's a bit of an irrelevant question.

[edit]Which brings up another interesting point: If SETI were to ever receive a radio wave from an alien species, by the time we received that wave it is most likely that the race which sent it would already be dead.

[Natoma]

Originally Posted by Humus

You can pass waveforms or information at rates higher than speed, but you can't pass matter faster than light.

If there's one thing science has taught us through the centuries, never, ever, say can't.

Theoretically it is possible to accelerate matter faster than the speed of light. Not by directly accelerating the matter itself, but by warping the surrounding space, which has no mass, and accelerating that, while letting the ship ride that warped space like a surf board.

And we haven't even discussed other "FTL" travel mechanisms such as wormholes which are theoretically possible as well.

[Natoma]

Ceasing the search for life simply because the odds that life at roughly the same level of development, intelligence, and communications ability exists in the universe, within communicable distance, are slim, is a bad reason to do so. Even if we receive a signal and that life is now extinguished, the point remains that we'd have proof that intelligent life has existed elsewhere in this universe.

I'd liken it to finding dinosaur bones in the ground. Sure they have no "purpose" today, but they expand our knowledge and enrich our species, even if we can't communicate with them.

Anyways, there is life on other planets. Life, even on our own planet, has shown itself quite capable of sustaining itself in every conceivable condition. There are life forms that metabolise iron and sulphur in the deepest depths of the ocean near volcanic fissures. There are life forms that live in the coldest regions of antarctica, or the hottest regions of the sahara. Life forms that never see the sun, yet synthesize chemicals such as methane and create entire food chains based off that.

Frankly I have high hopes for the exploration of Europa. A vast ocean warmed and cooled by Jupiter's powerful magnetic field could be a veritable cornucopia of life. Even if it isn't "intelligent" by our standards, the fact that it exists would be a strong enough push to get us deeper into space imo, which is where we're going to need to be anyways in order to sustain our ever growing population.

[Ilfirin]

Originally Posted by Natoma

Anyways, there is life on other planets. Life, even on our own planet, has shown itself quite capable of sustaining itself in every conceivable condition. There are life forms that metabolise iron and sulphur in the deepest depths of the ocean near volcanic fissures. There are life forms that live in the coldest regions of antarctica, or the hottest regions of the sahara. Life forms that never see the sun, yet synthesize chemicals such as methane and create entire food chains based off that.

Yes, but none of that even remotely compares to having your entire planet destroyed, or your, along with all those nearby, solar system being destroyed when its sun dies out. Entire galaxies are destroyed all the time and more are born from the reminants. Our own sun is expected to go in a relatively short amount of time (few million years), taking with it the entire solar system. While it is a very remote possibility that we will manage to find (and, even harder, move all humanity to there) another planet able to sustain human life before we all die, it's quite unlikely. And even then, galaxies don't last forever (nor do universes).

Frankly I have high hopes for the exploration of Europa. A vast ocean warmed and cooled by Jupiter's powerful magnetic field could be a veritable cornucopia of life. Even if it isn't "intelligent" by our standards, the fact that it exists would be a strong enough push to get us deeper into space imo, which is where we're going to need to be anyways in order to sustain our ever growing population.

Just for the record, I never stated we should stop searching, but SETI isn't the way, or at least, Folding@Home is a much more valid usage of our CPU power. If we were to ever find life that was actually still alive, it would have to be pretty damn close (like, in this solar system) and thus the effort should be directed at setting up human outposts all over this solar system to allow full exploration of it.

[pcchen]

Finding ET may be important, but not more important than folding proteins IMHO. I'll give a simple reason behind this:

Finding ET is a very long term project. Even if some alien life forms are found, we still need to find a good way to communicate with them, that takes even more time. On the other hand, if we can put more effort on protein research and make some new drugs one year earlier, we may save thousands or more people's life. Finding an ET one year earlier has no apparent benefit.

Furthermore, the idea about aliens can solve every problem on earth is quite stupid. They don't know us, they don't understand our social structure. You can't solve every problem of the ant nest near your house, so does the alien. And they may be just uninterested with us. Why should they care about some strange lifeforms thousands light years away?

I still think it's important to do space exploration and finding ET, just as Natoma said. However, it shoudn't be more important than protein folding, or other human related research.