Interstellar

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If we did develop the technology to visit the nearer few hundred stars, what do you think we would find?

Personally, I suspect we'd find a lot of lifeless worlds, and a few worlds with elementary life, and a tiny number with civilizations of intelligent creatures. On the other hand, if they're out there, why have decades of searching the skies with radio telescopes (SETI) come up empty handed? If we did find evidence of life beyond the Earth, how would it affect mankind? What do people believe about this?

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Type: Question • Score: 13 • Views: 8,172 • Replies: 43

[+3] - Setanta - 06/16/2014By the way, there is enough variation in our star system to suggest that we cannot extrapolate from it to other star systems. Venus' day is longer than its year. Tow of the gas giants appear to...

@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

If we did develop the technology to visit the nearer few hundred stars,
what do you think we would find?

Personally, I suspect we'd find a lot of lifeless worlds,
and a few worlds with elementary life

That 's what I think.

We 'd be safer, if we r alone in the universe,
but its not likely that we r so lucky.

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@Brandon9000,

Quote:

What do people believe about this?

Recent estimates suggesting more planets than stars intuitively, Bran, says the Universe is teeming with humanoids. With only one such planet in each galaxy there must still be more than 1 quintillion of us

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Actually, isn't the estimate of the number of galaxies about a hundred billion? I'm not sure of the details of this.

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Question for anyone - who has the power to change the general, not "my tags," tags on a forum, and are such tags anonymous? Can anyone do it, or is it only administrators?

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

Question for anyone - who has the power to change the general, not "my tags," tags on a forum, and are such tags anonymous? Can anyone do it, or is it only administrators?

I think its the Belgians.

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@Brandon9000,

The tags will appear on the basis of how frequently they are used. Tags are not anonymous, a member's tags are displayed in the member's profile. I don't believe that tags can be changed once they used to tag a thread.

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OK, i just tagged this thread "Science," and it now shows, for me at least, as the number one tag. That's because that tag has been used so often. The "Zzzzz" tag disappeared, for me at least, when i tagged it "Science."

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Thanks. I appreciate it.

However, I have noticed for some time, that tags are sometimes being used on A2K for editorial, rather than valid classification purposes. It seems kind of like the crank phone calls that used to exist before caller ID in the sense of being anonymous harassment. This seems to occur even on perfectly legitimate, polite threads. It is being used just because somebody doesn't like that poster or agree with him politically, as opposed to actually posting the disagreement in the thread.

I don't quite understand the tagging system here. Whenever I try to tag a thread other than one I personally created very recently, my tag goes under "my tags" rather than as a general thread tag. I was wondering if this was a power reserved to administrators. Maybe you have answered this, but I still don't understand. I have looked for an explanation of the system, but so far not found one.

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@Brandon9000,

Quote:

Actually, isn't the estimate of the number of galaxies about a hundred billion?

Bran I've read 100-200 b

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@Brandon9000,

Unless your tag is so commonly used that it is among the top five tags for a thread, you are the only one who will see it. In fact, when i tagged this thread Science, it was the first time that i had ever used that tag. However, i knew it was such a commonly used tag, that it would supercede almost all other tags. So your tags would only overtake the other tags for a thread if you had used them so commonly that they were more frequently used than the other tags which had been applied. For example, when i see the pro-Russian or anti-whoever the Russians consider enemies threads, i tag them "Russian Propaganda." I've tagged do many threads with that tag, that it usually becomes the number tag for such a thread.

How commonly a tag has been used throughout the history of the site is the criterion which establishes whether or not it becomes one of the top five tags for that particular thread. If it does become one of the top five tags, everyone will see it.

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I'd intended to respond to some of your questions in the OP, but i've been busy. I'll try to get around to that today or tomorrow.

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

If we did develop the technology to visit the nearer few hundred stars, what do you think we would find?

In the nearest few hundred stars I think we might find find a few with some level of microbial life somewhere in their solar systems (including moons around planets). I don't think we would be likely to find intelligent life as I think that's probably exceedingly rare, maybe only a few hundred stars in a galaxy of billions.

I have no idea why we don't see any other sign of intelligent life anywhere. About the only guess I can come up with is that Electro-Magnetic communication (radio) is not a long term popular solution for many races. Otherwise I think we would be detecting some signals.

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Following.

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

I don't quite understand the tagging system here. Whenever I try to tag a thread other than one I personally created very recently, my tag goes under "my tags" rather than as a general thread tag. I was wondering if this was a power reserved to administrators. Maybe you have answered this, but I still don't understand. I have looked for an explanation of the system, but so far not found one.

Anyone can add as many tags as they want to a thread.

The five tags that happen to have been added by the most people to that thread, show up to classify that thread.

Among tags that have the same number of "votes" in a given thread, precedence seems to be given to tags that are frequently used across a2k, and to tags that are added by the person who created the thread.

Everyone has a "my tags" page, which shows what tags they have added to what threads. This can be used to determine if a given ID is using tags to vandalize threads.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
I don't quite understand the tagging system here. Whenever I try to tag a thread other than one I personally created very recently, my tag goes under "my tags" rather than as a general thread tag. I was wondering if this was a power reserved to administrators. Maybe you have answered this, but I still don't understand. I have looked for an explanation of the system, but so far not found one.

Anyone can add as many tags as they want to a thread.

The five tags that happen to have been added by the most people to that thread, show up to classify that thread.

Among tags that have the same number of "votes" in a given thread, precedence seems to be given to tags that are frequently used across a2k, and to tags that are added by the person who created the thread.

Everyone has a "my tags" page, which shows what tags they have added to what threads.

This can be used to determine if a given ID is using tags to vandalize threads.

Then thay can be confronted with rational argument.

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@Brandon9000,

Chemistry is all the same, the universe over. Im fairly positive of that because we don't see any huge differences in spectra from all the many thousands of light years that weve penetrated. O if chemistry is sorta the same, I thinkwd find some of the same compounds.

Weve seen about 3 of the 4 nucleotides and 5 of the 22 amino acids (20 in DNA and and additional 2 in RNA) according to an article I saw in the evolution journal

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@Setanta,

That's clear. Thank you.

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One thing to bear in mind about aliens coming here is that on Earth when an advanced civilization contacts a primitive civilization, even with the very best of intentions, the primitive civilization is usually severely disrupted, e.g. anthropologists making contact with a stone age culture on an island somewhere.

1 Reply

@Brandon9000,

unless the aliens have a "Prime Directive"

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