The people who pick fruit and landscape our buildings are the survivors of 99.9% of the early waves of invaders of the New World. Mixed in with the survivors of 100% of the people who lived here before that but at like a 95% invader/5% native ratio. We're the second wave of invaders. It's a cookbook. It's that simple.
False. We know it took that long HERE. We have no idea how long it would take anywhere else. For all we know we evolved far slower than any other planet that supports life. There is no way to know this until/unless we make contact with other life. Not necessarily. Not even counting what I mentioned above, these numbers are assuming that the galaxy where life evolved is far away. Really though, there are 40 galaxies within 5 light years of us, so who's to say the life didn't come from one of those? I agree, but it can't be proclaimed with the certainty that you seem to have. Just because it doesn't exist here doesn't mean it can't exist. It could be that a photosynthesis-like process developed in animal-like life somewhere else. Or that they have developed technology that makes them less dependent on external resources.
Life of this sort certainly could exist somewhere else. Until we see it though it's a much safer assumption that the littlest organisms get eaten by the next biggest, get eaten by the next biggest, ad nauseum. The food chain is an observable phenomenon that seems to have no natural break in it to date. The general paradigm seems to be among the most naturally conservative of energy and mass that you could come up with and still have growth. Having growth and development utilize pre-existing resources instead of being reliant on new material seems to be about as conservative of energy and mass as you can get. Short of just having nothing come into existence or grow once it arrived. I'm as big a Star Trek fan as anybody but I still don't think Vulcans are what we're going to discover (or be discovered by) if interstellar contact occurs. The odds are more likely we'll be discovered by something completely out of our frame of reference and in turn be completely out of its frame of reference. About the best we could hope for is that the entities that discover us believe they have a red blob's burden to civilize us to be acceptable facsimiles of a red blob. That would be the "Interstellar civilization is more like us than we thought" scenario. It'd suck though. I always hated strawberry jello as a kid. Trying to be like it is not an appetizing thought at all.
You have the invasion ass backwards but why quibble over details. We can't assume that an advanced civilization developed from a food chain similar to ours. They may be so advanced that knowledge is sustaining them rather than material goods and services. They may well move themselves through space through brain waves. They could be here and everywhere else at the same time? Generally when I travel it's to see something or experience something different. It has very little to do with natural resources, although I usually partake in the local cuisine. Earth could just as easily be a destination resort, the Hawaii of the Universe as it could be a place to mine dilithium crystals for their warp engines? In any event we certainly have enough gun owners to protect us if it ever came down to it.
well i for one have to be convinced that there is NOT a parallel glaxy such as our milky way out there, somewhere. there is no doubt the "building blocks" of sustainable life are there, under the right circumstances, far far away. think about it, the universe is a constant expansion - galaxies evolve, stars evolve, solar systems evolve, life evolves. fascinating stuff if u think and speculate about it.
no, it is FACT. the only life known to exist in the universe took 5 billion years from the beginning of the formation of the solar system it lives in, for its planet to take form, solar bombardment to cease, temperatures to cool, and life to spring forth and evolve to an intelligent form. that doesn't mean it couldn't occur quicker in theory, just that the discussion is mere speculation that has to ignore the only data we have. from a scientific standpoint, the only data to use is 5 billion years, so that is the starting point for the discussion in regards to realistic timetables, not simply speculation. the nearest galaxy to earth is 25,000 light years away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canis_Major_Dwarf_Galaxy obviously. but it can still be voiced with confidence that it is the most likely scenario, even if the possibility that it occurred exists.
That is not a fact. Our star system has existed much longer than 5 billion years. We used to be a binary star system. One of the 2 stars went supernova and a large portion of it was absorbed into the other and the rest of it formed the planets of today. You could say 5 billion for our CURRENT solar system, but who's to say that the supernova isn't a vital key to the formation of life? Heck, without it we wouldn't have any heavy metals on earth, which includes the iron in our blood. If the supernova was required, then it took much longer than 5 billion years to form life. Of course it's all just an appeal to the unknown due to limited sample size. Nobody can state with any degree of certainty the time table for the evolution of life because it strictly follows the environment. With a slightly different environment, or an environment with less radical changes, intelligent life could have evolved in the dinosaur era, or much sooner. It's something that we can't determine without another planet to compare it to.
July 15, 2013 By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said on Monday. Estimated to be about 12 miles in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles from Neptune. Astronomer Mark Showalter, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments circling Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program on a broader part of the sky. "We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, ‘OK, let's just look out further," Showalter told Reuters. "I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there," Showalter said. Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon. Showalter and colleagues are mulling over a name to propose to the International Astronomical Union, which has final say in the matter. "We haven't really gotten far with that. What I can say is that the name will be out of Roman and Greek mythology and it will have to do with characters who are related to Neptune, the god of the oceans," Showalter said. Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was discovered in 1846, just days after the planet itself was found. Nereid, Neptune's third largest moon was found in 1949. Images taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft unveiled the second largest moon, Proteus, and five smaller moons, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea and Larissa. Ground-based telescopes found Halimede, Laomedeia, Sao and Nestor in 2002. Sister moon Psamathe turned up a year later. The newly found moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is located between Larissa and Proteus. It orbits Neptune in 23 hours. A paper on the discovery is pending. Gratuitous Linky
You did not say current, you said solar system. Technically the solar system has been around near 10 billion years, maybe more. If the supernova was critical to the formation of life, you have to include the life of that first star in calculations of the amount of time it takes for life to emerge. Just saying.
that is not correct. our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago. prior to that it was not a solar system it was a molecular cloud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System a solar system is comprised of the sun and its orbiting bodies. prior to the sun being formed from the molecular cloud of gasses, it was not a solar system. the start of the solar system is the start of the discussion, otherwise you could keep stretching it back to the beginning of the universe because the molecular cloud that formed our solar system would not have existed without the preceding event, and so on. but unless we are talking about life that can exist within a molecular cloud without a celestial body to form on, the starting point is the formation of those celestial bodies, also known as the solar system.
Where do you think that cloud came from? Supernova create gas clouds and nebula's when they blow. They also create heavy metal elements which cannot possibly form in any other way. The presence of these elements on earth proves that a supernova was involved. http://sciencenordic.com/different-supernovae-formed-our-early-solar-system This article suggests that it was more than one generation of supernova that helped form that cloud. Maybe 'the universe' show exaggerated that episode with one star absorbing the other, but I could have sworn that was the current model, and the old collapsing cloud model was no longer the leading theory. It seems that newer theories suggest there could have been a supernova in the area, but that the solar system didn't completely come from it. I guess we don't really know the final answer. Now I'm really interested in doing more research on this. Goddamn TV shows exaggerating stuff. The question really boils down to, "Are supernova required for life to form?" Obviously we can't answer that yet, but for our type of life it is because of the iron in our blood. A timetable for the emergence of life is really impossible to predict.
Speaking of clouds, how did a cloud of water vapor get tracked traveling across the face of the moon and not make international news?
Bit of a delay, but I just wanted to clarify that I had meant to type 50 and 5 million light years. I had meant to reply and got distracted, but seeing the thread again for some reason made me have to clarify.
