Actually, that isn't true at all. The only person making glaringly false and erroneous assertions is you.
As I've pointed out in other threads, our universe is over 13 billions years old. There are at least 200 billion galaxies with an average of about 200 billion stars in each galaxy. What I stated in this thread is even if only one advanced species arose 1 billion years ahead of us in our galaxy (bear in mind there are over 200 billion stars in our galaxy and likely over 5 billion worlds that can support life like our own), they would have visited every world in our galaxy by now. Your response was the unreasonable assertion that due to the huge volume of our galaxy in parsecs, they couldn't possibly have gone everywhere. However, there is a glaring error with your assertion. It assumes a lack of intelligence and that they would just randomly explore everywhere in our galaxy which is mostly empty space. That would be absurd.
Your next assertion was they couldn't economically afford the resources to explore that far. However, that would require they advance no further than ourselves in technology. Another unsupported and completely unreasonable assertion.
You then proceeded on to your next unsupported assertion that we (and every advanced civilization) would destroy itself before it got that advanced. However, you have no evidence for that. Even our own species has been living with nuclear weapons and the capacity to destroy ourselves for some time and we have failed to destroy ourselves so far.
Given the likely existence of advanced civilizations in our own galaxy and given the times scales involved, they should have easily arrived here and done so long ago. But to contradict that you assert that since we aren't aware of them, that they don't exist (or haven't come this far). However, that makes another vacuous assertion that we are sufficiently advanced to know if these beings have been here. However, as I've pointed out, that isn't likely because of how vastly different the technology level would be between our species and the time scales involved. For example, they could have arrived here millions of years ago and we would have no idea they were here. They could also have a relatively close monitoring station a few light days away from us and we would have no idea they were even there.
So I've provided plenty of good reasons to support my argument. And to that you have replied with plenty of vacant assertions.
Of course, your last fall back is there is no evidence of advanced life. My reply is there is no evidence of advanced life YET and the belief (and effort to find that life) is supported by some VERY GOOD reasons.
UFOs
-
_Tobin
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8417
- Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:01 pm
Re: UFOs
"You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night.... Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom
-
_Brackite
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 6382
- Joined: Wed Oct 25, 2006 8:12 am
Re: UFOs
I Posted this Article about two months ago here. It reminded me of Tobin and I would like to get his opinion about it.
Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies
The most far-seeing search ever performed for “Dyson spheres” and other artifacts of “astroengineering” comes up empty. Where is everybody?
...
Astrobiology—the study of extraterrestrial life—has made great strides since its 1960s origins, when the evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson derided it as “a science without a subject.” Today it is booming as never before, driven by perennially high public interest and steadily growing scientific respectability.
In a press conference last week two senior NASA officials—Ellen Stofan, the agency’s chief scientist, and John Grunsfeld, the former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s science programs—predicted that astrobiologists would at last find their elusive alien subjects within only a decade or two. Not long ago the prediction would have been bold but now it seems almost passé, as more evidence mounts that the warm, wet conditions for life as we know it prevail throughout the cosmos. Surely simple, single-celled life should be common out there, waiting to be found by a rover in subsurface brines on Mars or by a mission sent to probe the oceans of the icy moons Europa or even via space telescopes gazing at Earth-like planets orbiting faraway stars. NASA generously funds all these efforts.
The possible existence of intelligent aliens and extraterrestrial civilizations, on the other hand, remains much more controversial and is scarcely funded at all. Even so, for more than a half-century a small, scattered contingent of astronomers has gone against the grain, engaging in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). SETI chiefly looks for chatty cosmic cultures that might be beaming messages around our region of the galaxy using radio waves or laser pulses. But its interstellar eavesdropping has yet to detect any signals that withstand close scrutiny. Even if brimming with life, to us, the galaxy seems to be a very quiet, rather lonely place.
Now, new results suggest this loneliness may extend out into the universe far beyond our galaxy or, instead, that some of our preconceptions about the behaviors of alien civilizations are deeply flawed. After examining some 100,000 nearby large galaxies a team of researchers lead by The Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright has concluded that none of them contain any obvious signs of highly advanced technological civilizations. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, it is by far the largest of study of its kind to date—earlier research had only cursorily investigated about a hundred galaxies.
More heat than light
Unlike traditional SETI surveys, Wright and his team did not seek messages from the stars. Instead, they looked for the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonization, based on an idea put forth in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson postulated that a growing technological culture would ultimately be limited by access to energy, and that advanced, energy-hungry civilizations would be driven to harvest all the available light from their stars. To do that, they might dismantle a planet or two as feedstock for building star-enveloping swarms of solar collectors. A star’s light would fade as it was encased in such a “Dyson sphere,” but Dyson noted the constructions could be detected by the mid-infrared glow of their radiated waste heat—essentially the same phenomenon that causes your computer to warm up when it’s running. In 1963 the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev extended these ideas by developing a tripartite classification system for a civilization’s energy use. A “type 1” civilization would harness all the energy of its home planet whereas a type 2 uses all the energy of its star, perhaps by building a Dyson sphere around it. A type 3 civilization would be capable of using all the energy of its galaxy, presumably by encasing all its stars in Dyson spheres.
Unable to secure funding from standard sources such as NASA or the National Science Foundation, Wright’s group instead turned to the Templeton Foundation, a private organization with a history of supporting controversial and speculative research. With that funding the team searched for type 3 civilizations in an all-sky catalogue from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). They looked for objects that were optically dim but bright in the mid-infrared—the expected signature of a galaxy filled with starlight-absorbing, heat-emitting Dyson spheres. After using software to automatically sift through some 100 million objects in the WISE catalogue, Wright’s student Roger Griffith examined the remaining candidates by hand, culling those that weren’t galaxies or that were obvious instrumental artifacts.
The result was about 100,000 galaxies, with about 50 in particular that emitted much more heat than light. Jessica Maldonado, a student at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, then scoured the astronomical literature to determine what was already known about those top candidates. Many of them were well studied, and can be explained as pairs of galaxies in the process of merging or as isolated “starburst” galaxies—two processes that can heat galactic quantities of light-blocking dust to generate powerful infrared glows. According to the researchers, an additional 90 galaxies with less extreme heat-to-light ratios warrant further study but, by and large, the results are null. “On Kardashev’s scale, a type 3 civilization uses energy equal to all the starlight produced by one galaxy,” Wright says. That would equate to an infrared-bright galaxy seemingly bereft of stars. “We looked at the nearest, largest 100,000 galaxies we could find in the WISE catalogue and we never saw that. One hundred thousand galaxies and not one had that signature. We didn’t find any type 3s in our sample because there aren’t any.”
Even if advanced civilizations do not build Dyson spheres, Wright’s null result also applies to any other energy-intensive “astroengineering” taking place at galactic scales. “Looking for the absence of light as well as the waste heat like Wright and his colleagues have done is really cool,” says James Annis, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who in the late 1990s used different methods to survey more than a hundred nearby galaxies for type 3s. “In some sense it doesn’t matter how a galactic civilization gets or uses its power because the second law of thermodynamics makes energy use hard to hide. They could construct Dyson spheres, they could get power from rotating black holes, they could build giant computer networks in the cold outskirts of galaxies, and all of that would produce waste heat. Wright’s team went right to the peak of the curve for where you’d expect to see any sort of waste heat, and they’re just not seeing anything obvious.”
...
Read more at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... arby-galax
Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies
The most far-seeing search ever performed for “Dyson spheres” and other artifacts of “astroengineering” comes up empty. Where is everybody?
...
Astrobiology—the study of extraterrestrial life—has made great strides since its 1960s origins, when the evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson derided it as “a science without a subject.” Today it is booming as never before, driven by perennially high public interest and steadily growing scientific respectability.
In a press conference last week two senior NASA officials—Ellen Stofan, the agency’s chief scientist, and John Grunsfeld, the former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s science programs—predicted that astrobiologists would at last find their elusive alien subjects within only a decade or two. Not long ago the prediction would have been bold but now it seems almost passé, as more evidence mounts that the warm, wet conditions for life as we know it prevail throughout the cosmos. Surely simple, single-celled life should be common out there, waiting to be found by a rover in subsurface brines on Mars or by a mission sent to probe the oceans of the icy moons Europa or even via space telescopes gazing at Earth-like planets orbiting faraway stars. NASA generously funds all these efforts.
The possible existence of intelligent aliens and extraterrestrial civilizations, on the other hand, remains much more controversial and is scarcely funded at all. Even so, for more than a half-century a small, scattered contingent of astronomers has gone against the grain, engaging in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). SETI chiefly looks for chatty cosmic cultures that might be beaming messages around our region of the galaxy using radio waves or laser pulses. But its interstellar eavesdropping has yet to detect any signals that withstand close scrutiny. Even if brimming with life, to us, the galaxy seems to be a very quiet, rather lonely place.
Now, new results suggest this loneliness may extend out into the universe far beyond our galaxy or, instead, that some of our preconceptions about the behaviors of alien civilizations are deeply flawed. After examining some 100,000 nearby large galaxies a team of researchers lead by The Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright has concluded that none of them contain any obvious signs of highly advanced technological civilizations. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, it is by far the largest of study of its kind to date—earlier research had only cursorily investigated about a hundred galaxies.
More heat than light
Unlike traditional SETI surveys, Wright and his team did not seek messages from the stars. Instead, they looked for the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonization, based on an idea put forth in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson postulated that a growing technological culture would ultimately be limited by access to energy, and that advanced, energy-hungry civilizations would be driven to harvest all the available light from their stars. To do that, they might dismantle a planet or two as feedstock for building star-enveloping swarms of solar collectors. A star’s light would fade as it was encased in such a “Dyson sphere,” but Dyson noted the constructions could be detected by the mid-infrared glow of their radiated waste heat—essentially the same phenomenon that causes your computer to warm up when it’s running. In 1963 the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev extended these ideas by developing a tripartite classification system for a civilization’s energy use. A “type 1” civilization would harness all the energy of its home planet whereas a type 2 uses all the energy of its star, perhaps by building a Dyson sphere around it. A type 3 civilization would be capable of using all the energy of its galaxy, presumably by encasing all its stars in Dyson spheres.
Unable to secure funding from standard sources such as NASA or the National Science Foundation, Wright’s group instead turned to the Templeton Foundation, a private organization with a history of supporting controversial and speculative research. With that funding the team searched for type 3 civilizations in an all-sky catalogue from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). They looked for objects that were optically dim but bright in the mid-infrared—the expected signature of a galaxy filled with starlight-absorbing, heat-emitting Dyson spheres. After using software to automatically sift through some 100 million objects in the WISE catalogue, Wright’s student Roger Griffith examined the remaining candidates by hand, culling those that weren’t galaxies or that were obvious instrumental artifacts.
The result was about 100,000 galaxies, with about 50 in particular that emitted much more heat than light. Jessica Maldonado, a student at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, then scoured the astronomical literature to determine what was already known about those top candidates. Many of them were well studied, and can be explained as pairs of galaxies in the process of merging or as isolated “starburst” galaxies—two processes that can heat galactic quantities of light-blocking dust to generate powerful infrared glows. According to the researchers, an additional 90 galaxies with less extreme heat-to-light ratios warrant further study but, by and large, the results are null. “On Kardashev’s scale, a type 3 civilization uses energy equal to all the starlight produced by one galaxy,” Wright says. That would equate to an infrared-bright galaxy seemingly bereft of stars. “We looked at the nearest, largest 100,000 galaxies we could find in the WISE catalogue and we never saw that. One hundred thousand galaxies and not one had that signature. We didn’t find any type 3s in our sample because there aren’t any.”
Even if advanced civilizations do not build Dyson spheres, Wright’s null result also applies to any other energy-intensive “astroengineering” taking place at galactic scales. “Looking for the absence of light as well as the waste heat like Wright and his colleagues have done is really cool,” says James Annis, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who in the late 1990s used different methods to survey more than a hundred nearby galaxies for type 3s. “In some sense it doesn’t matter how a galactic civilization gets or uses its power because the second law of thermodynamics makes energy use hard to hide. They could construct Dyson spheres, they could get power from rotating black holes, they could build giant computer networks in the cold outskirts of galaxies, and all of that would produce waste heat. Wright’s team went right to the peak of the curve for where you’d expect to see any sort of waste heat, and they’re just not seeing anything obvious.”
...
Read more at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... arby-galax
"And I've said it before, you want to know what Joseph Smith looked like in Nauvoo, just look at Trump." - Fence Sitter
-
_Tobin
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8417
- Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:01 pm
Re: UFOs
Brackite,
I was aware of what they were doing. The problem I have with SETI and other efforts to identify Dyson spheres by the infrared signatures is there may be some flawed assumptions underneath.
1) Why would an intergalactic civilization communicate using radio waves or lasers? It would seem that would be too slow a means of communicating for such a civilization.
2) Why would an intergalactic civilization, hungry for energy, construct one or more Dyson spheres and allow usable energy to escape like infrared light? I would expect they would have a high degree of technology and energy collection efficiency. What assumptions we might make about a highly technical civilization and the conservation of energy in their devices may be very flawed.
I was aware of what they were doing. The problem I have with SETI and other efforts to identify Dyson spheres by the infrared signatures is there may be some flawed assumptions underneath.
1) Why would an intergalactic civilization communicate using radio waves or lasers? It would seem that would be too slow a means of communicating for such a civilization.
2) Why would an intergalactic civilization, hungry for energy, construct one or more Dyson spheres and allow usable energy to escape like infrared light? I would expect they would have a high degree of technology and energy collection efficiency. What assumptions we might make about a highly technical civilization and the conservation of energy in their devices may be very flawed.
"You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night.... Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom
-
_Tarski
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3059
- Joined: Thu Oct 26, 2006 7:57 pm
Re: UFOs
Tobin wrote:they would have visited every world in our galaxy by now.
Why?
(Never mind, the practical impossibility. Do you think they just look out into space and say "hey there is a good one lets go there"? If they were looking at us they would see us in the distant past.
Or, per impossible do you think they send a probe to every fraction of a cubic parsec and then wait for hundreds of years for a the probe to painstakingly explore an entire plant and then signal to return, then send actual beings to every one? )
But in any case, why?
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
-
_Tarski
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3059
- Joined: Thu Oct 26, 2006 7:57 pm
Re: UFOs
Tobin wrote:1) Why would an intergalactic civilization communicate using radio waves or lasers? .
Do you know of something faster or are they violating causality?
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
-
_Tobin
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8417
- Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:01 pm
Re: UFOs
Tarski wrote:Tobin wrote:they would have visited every world in our galaxy by now.
Why?
(Never mind, the practical impossibility. Do you think they just look out into space and say "hey there is a good one lets go there"? If they were looking at us they would see us in the distant past.
Or, per impossible do you think they send a probe to every fraction of a cubic parsec and then wait for hundreds of years for a the probe to painstakingly explore an entire plant and then signal to return, then send actual beings to every one? )
But in any case, why?
Because how life evolves on each world is likely unique and interesting.
"You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night.... Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom
-
_Tobin
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8417
- Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:01 pm
Re: UFOs
Tarski wrote:Tobin wrote:1) Why would an intergalactic civilization communicate using radio waves or lasers? .
Do you know of something faster or are they violating causality?
I'm not an advanced being. However, a few hundred years ago I doubt anyone imagined communicating via radio or lasers. I'm sure beings millions or billions of years more advanced might come up with improved means better than what we have found so far. You seem to continually have this myopia concerning what advanced technology might look like.
"You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night.... Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom
-
_Tarski
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 3059
- Joined: Thu Oct 26, 2006 7:57 pm
Re: UFOs
I'm not an advanced being. However, a few hundred years ago I doubt anyone imagined communicating via radio or lasers. I'm sure beings millions or billions of years more advanced might come up with improved means better than what we have found so far. You seem to continually have this myopia concerning what advanced technology might look like.
I don't think it is myopic to say that advanced technology will not violate the laws of thermodynamics or violate Lorenztian causality restrictions (the later on pain of the usual temporal paradoxes). The speed of light is a universal speed limit built into the laws of physics and not a result of poor technology.
Will advanced civilizations also breed squirrels the size of planets or force the square root of 2 to be rational just for a day? Will they precisely determine the momentum and position of an electron simultaneously?
Here is thought for you: Over the next 40 years, you will have no evidence of, or contact with, any aliens. Then you will die. The existence or nonexistence of aliens has no consequence for you but to clutter your imagination and waste your limited time.
when believers want to give their claims more weight, they dress these claims up in scientific terms. When believers want to belittle atheism or secular humanism, they call it a "religion". -Beastie
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
yesterday's Mormon doctrine is today's Mormon folklore.-Buffalo
-
_Tobin
- _Emeritus
- Posts: 8417
- Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:01 pm
Re: UFOs
Tarski wrote:I'm not an advanced being. However, a few hundred years ago I doubt anyone imagined communicating via radio or lasers. I'm sure beings millions or billions of years more advanced might come up with improved means better than what we have found so far. You seem to continually have this myopia concerning what advanced technology might look like.
I don't think it is myopic to say that advanced technology will not violate the laws of thermodynamics or violate Lorenztian causality restrictions (the later on pain of the usual temporal paradoxes). The speed of light is a universal speed limit built into the laws of physics and not a result of poor technology.
Will advanced civilizations also breed squirrels the size of planets or force the square root of 2 to be rational just for a day? Will they precisely determine the momentum and position of an electron simultaneously?
Here is thought for you: Over the next 40 years, you will have no evidence of, or contact with, any aliens. Then you will die. The existence or nonexistence of aliens has no consequence for you but to clutter your imagination and waste your limited time.
You are forgetting that the expansion and contraction of space time itself is not limited by the speed of light. Beings millions or billions of years more advanced than us may know much more about it and how to manipulate it than we do. And there may be other physical laws that they may know a lot more about as well. Your arrogance about how much we supposedly know vs beings that advanced and what is possible for them is petulant and ridiculous.
And here is a thought in return. I've seen one of these beings for myself by happenstance. It is you that is sadly mistaken about their existence.
Last edited by Guest on Wed Jul 01, 2015 9:51 pm, edited 3 times in total.
"You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night.... Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful." -- Judge Doom