Tag Archives: aliens

Superconductors and aliens

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What a crazy bit of news out the last couple days! Ambient temperature and pressure superconductors could change the world and so too could the admission that we are not alone in the universe. Both of these are things that deserve scrutiny and further evidence. That said, what an exciting time to be alive.

Room temperature superconductivity has been a physics Nobel Prize waiting to happen. So much of the energy we use is lost in transmission. Furthermore, this invention will make nuclear fusion containable, without significant cost and dangers of a breach because superconductors used for plasma containment won’t need to sustain unbelievably cold temperatures next to an extremely hot process. In other words, energy is about to get a lot easier to produce and share.

As for aliens, I think there is enough evidence to say that there are flying vehicles that do things human-made vehicles can’t. Whether aliens are in these vehicles or if they are run remotely (they pull some high g-force moves that would destroy a human), they are definitely not human made. So what are they, and who/what made them?

I’m mixing my enthusiasm with a dose of scepticism, but unlike most other news stories, these are two I’m going to be watching!

Not a question of first or rare or distant

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When thinking about whether we are alone in the universe or not, it seems to me that it isn’t a question of whether we (intelligent life) are rare? Or are we first/early compared to other intelligent life? Or are we simply too far away? But rather a question of enduring. Are intelligent civilizations enduring enough to travel beyond their solar system or galaxy?

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Scientists today are looking for life in our very own solar system. It’s possible, in our vast universe, that our quest for life beyond earth may be as close as Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It would probably b\e microbes, too small to see without a microscope, but that would still suggest that life is way more abundant than even most scientists would have imagined just a few years ago.

But I’m more a believer that the reason we don’t see alien life is for two reasons, the first being distance. Quite simply, even the nearest galaxy to our Milky way is astronomically far away.  “The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (25,000 light years) from the Sun. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is the next closest , at 662,000,000,000,000,000 km (70,000 light years) from the Sun.” If intelligent life started sending messages to us from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy 10,000 years ago, it would still take 15,000 years to reach us if they could do the unlikely task of sending that message at the speed of light… and the crazy thing is, why would they send a message our way? 10,000 years ago there was no evidence coming from earth that we are a worthy planet to send a message to!

And the second reason we don’t see any intelligent life ‘out there’ in the universe is The Great Filter. Either it is extremely rare and difficult to get beyond simple, unintelligent multicellular life, or civilizations themselves getting to multi solar system travel capabilities are extremely rare. This second point is my belief. Civilizations are not enduring enough. It took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to become a scientifically intelligent life form that attempted to leave our planet and explore our solar system. During this time, we’ve been brutal to each other. We’ve created weapons of mass destruction and quite literally drawn lines in the sand to keep us separate from our brothers and sisters.

We’ve created religions that don’t like each other and think all other Gods are unworthy of following. We’ve created borders that keep ‘others’ out. We’ve created governments that are more interested in power than in caring for fellow humans. We’ve created corporations that worry more about profit than about caring for our planet. All the while we also create technologies that threaten the longevity of humanity. As technological innovations occur, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to terrorize larger groups. It becomes easier for a single unstable person to threaten larger and larger populations around our planet.

What happens 50 years from now when a kid can create a devastating bomb or virus in their basement with readily available resources? Is that a world where we continue to advance technologically? Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. In other words, we will destroy ourselves and become far more primitive, much less advanced. Imagine our world with no power grid, and no internet. How long would it take to get back to where we are now? What if the next pandemic is far more deadly and has us living like subsistence farmers, keeping ourselves in tiny communities, afraid of outsiders. How many hundreds of years would we be set back, and would we be trying to explore the cosmos when survival is our greatest concern?

I tend to be an optimist, and I’m excited about the future ahead of us. I think my kids have the potential to live healthy, productive, and cognitively sound lives past 100 years of age. I think there will be universal basic income for every human alive, and that things like childhood starvation and extreme poverty could come to an end. Technological advances could make us live healthier, longer, more fulfilling and creative lives. But I also fear that greed, power, and beliefs in bad ideas could corrupt us, and undermine our potential. Are we 50, 100, or 1,000 years away from ravaging our planet or at least the human race? Or are we a species that will populate other parts of our galaxy?

If I was an alien who came to explore earth today, I’m not sure I’d report back to my planet the the inhabitants are intelligent? I’m not sure I’d consider humans technologically advanced enough to seek contact? I’d be conveying that earthlings are as likely to destroy themselves as they are to send someone out of their own solar system. I’d send a message home and say, ‘Let’s leave them alone for now and see what they can do in another couple hundred of their earth years?‘

‘Let’s see if this race of humans will endure?‘

Monkey brains

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I remember seeing a video clip where Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about the possibility of alien life. He said that when you consider the intelligence difference between humans and chimpanzee DNA is just 1% (actually closer to 3%, but the point is still valid)… how much smarter could aliens be if they had an even bigger DNA difference to us? It could be possible that alien life forms could be so intelligent that we seem like chimpanzees or even chickens in comparison. ‘Oh look, those human teens are learning simple algebra, how adorable.‘

So aliens might see us as quite simple life forms in comparison to themselves. This could also happen with Artificial Intelligence here on earth. Maybe one day we create an intelligent identity that thinks of us as simple-minded. I shared this idea before that man will never invent artificial intelligence that is ‘as smart as’ humans. The moment an AI is as smart as us, it will instantaneously be smarter than us. When we get to that threshold, the AI will instantly be a lot smarter. It will be as smart as us but also faster at mathematical calculations, faster at solving puzzles, and could also be stronger than us, see better than us, and would definitely have a better vocabulary than us.

We are amazing creatures. We are at the pinnacle of intelligence on planet earth. We are also still quite barbaric. We fight over land, we don’t feed everyone despite having enough food. We take unnecessary risks with our lives, and we even kill one another. We live tribal lives, and while we use tools and technology in ways that far exceeds what any other living thing can do on this planet, our achievements could be minor on a cosmic scale.

We have no way of visiting a distant planet in a single lifespan. We act like parasites on earth, spreading wildly, and killing the planet as we overpopulate large parts of both hospitable and even inhospitable land… meanwhile displacing key animals on the food chain. We are slightly intelligent life forms, with monkey brains.

If we ever come across aliens, they will probably be a lot smarter than us. If we ever create as-smart-as-human intelligent life it will instantaneously be smarter-than-human. In both cases we will move from being the smartest of animals to being less intelligent, and maybe less significant, than another intelligent form.

Still, so far we are the smartest monkeys. It’s just too bad that we do so many dumb things.

Intelligent life

What if we were it? What if we were the only intelligent life in the universe? Maybe there could be single cell organisms on a planet or a moon somewhere, but nowhere is there octopus, dog, dolphin, or chimpanzee intelligence, much less human intelligence anywhere beyond our tiny blue planet.

There would not be a single beautiful sunrise; Not a single work of art; Not a single note of music beyond our solar system. With no intelligent observer beauty, creativity, and appreciation of sound would not exist. The universe would still exist, but would anything have meaning? Anything?

Whether or not we are the only ones, we are pretty special… we have consciousness, we have thought. We appreciate beautiful things, and we can laugh, love, contemplate, create, feel, and flourish. We can also hate, harm, anger, embarrass, and injure. But that would be silly when you consider that we really might be the only ones. If there is nothing else intelligent out there, then the sum of human appreciation of everything is what gives the universe its meaning.

I like to think that the universe is actually teaming with intelligent life, but I also think we should live an existence as if we are the only ones… and live with meaning as if what we do as a species is all that matters in the universe.

Deep space

A year and a half ago I wrote, ‘Limits of time, space, and intelligence‘ where I stated,

We are not alone in the universe. Our insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, can’t be the only place intelligent life exists. So where are the aliens? Why haven’t we discovered them or why haven’t they discovered us?

Yesterday breathtakingly beautiful images were released from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The 6-pointed, flared stars are just that: stars. They develop those flares as a byproduct of glare and the design of the telescope. But every other glowing ball or disc is a galaxy. A galaxy with billions of stars inside of it. That’s so hard to fathom. Furthermore, the first of the 3 images above is a section of the sky that, if you held a single grain of rice at arm’s length away, the rice would cover the area of sky that image is looking at.

Some of the distant blurs are actually galaxies that formed near the start of the universe. The light we see is not just millions, but billions of years old… almost 10 billion years before our solar system was even formed. Many of these really distant sources of light might no longer exist, but it would take another billion plus years for us to even know, because the light from the catastrophic end of the galaxy won’t reach our planet until then.

I’m convinced that if so many galaxies exist in one tiny part of the sky, each with billions of stars, some of them must contain intelligent life. Our Milky Way galaxy alone has somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. Even if intelligent life is so rare that we are the only ones in our galaxy, the odds that we are the only ones in the universe would be greater than someone winning a lottery daily for 20 days. (I’m making this figure up, I didn’t do the actual math, but I think that’s a low estimate.)

I still don’t think we will learn of intelligent aliens in the next hundred years, but with new high definition images coming from the James Web telescope, we can peer further into our universe. We can marvel at the vastness of space, the variety of galaxies, and even find out more about possible life-sustaining planets. We might not be able to find intelligent life, even knowing it’s likely out there… but we will be able to look deeper into space, and farther into to past of our universe… and that is both beautiful and exciting!

Alien life over eons of time

I’m listening to a book where the earth is invaded then the aliens that defended earth start recruiting our troops to fight in low level intergalactic wars. This book got me thinking about the chances of meeting aliens and I thought about how time is the major factor preventing this.

I’m not just thinking about how any intelligent life form would likely be hundreds or thousands of light years away. I’m thinking about time since the universe began. The universe is about 13.5 billion years old. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The earth has missed 2/3rds of all existence. Even then Homo Sapiens have only been around for 200,000 years or 0.0044% of the earth’s existence. And we’ve had just over 100 years of radio transmissions, that’s about 0.0000022% of the earth’s existence. (That’s 0.00000074% of the existence of the universe,)

Now when you look at 100 years over the span of the life of the universe, it becomes evident that entire civilizations could have survived for 5 thousands years and could have died off 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, or 50 million, or 500 million, or 5 billion years ago, great distances from us, and we’d never know.

Let’s say intelligent life is abundant in the universe, giving us a great opportunity to meet aliens. And let’s say that life didn’t start for the first 3.5 billion years of universe development. That still leaves 10 billion years of inelegant life. There could be 1,000 civilizations that existed and died and each one could have missed the birth of another civilization by a million years.

Let’s face it, we are developing technologies that make it unlikely that we will survive another 2,000 years. In less than 100 years high school students will have the technological know how, and the tools, to build a deadly virus or a deadly bomb that could set our civilization back hundreds of years. I give humanity a 50/50 chance of getting through the next 200 years.

I’m willing to bet that even if there were thousands of intelligent civilizations across the universe most space travel ready civilizations wouldn’t make it to 2,000 years. So forgetting the vast expanse of the Milky Way and the universe beyond that, it’s highly unlikely that any close enough for contact aliens are even around now… They are probably either long destroyed, or they are in their version of the dinosaur age, still millions of years from developing to where we are, much less to the point of light speed travel.

So following this train of thought, it’s likely that intelligent life is/has been abundant in the universe, and yet we are very much alone.

Limits of time, space, and intelligence

“The Fermi paradox, named after Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability.” Wikipedia

We are not alone in the universe. Our insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe, can’t be the only place intelligent life exists. So where are the aliens? Why haven’t we discovered them or why haven’t they discovered us?

The universe is incredibly large to a scale we can’t really comprehend. Beyond our galaxy, stars that we see are so far away that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions to billions of light years for light from them to reach us. Think about that… that means that any of those stars that have planets with intelligent life, who might be looking at the light from our sun, is seeing that light from a time when humans were prehistoric or non-existent. They can’t look through a telescope and see our human satellite encircled earth, they can only see a planet that might have water, in the Goldilocks zone where life as we know it might exist.

It is hard to conceive of the distance and relationships between time and space that make our discovery of other life so unlikely, even if their existence is very likely. Our earth is 4.5 billion years old and the first satellite, Sputnik 1, was only launched 64 years ago.

What I also wonder about is the limits of intelligence. None of our great civilizations lasted very long. Maybe the intellect and intelligence of our species, and any intelligent alien species, has a very small window of time to find other intelligent life. Maybe the same holds true for all other intelligent life that might be looking for us.

In the short time that we have been able to leave the gravitational pull of earth, we have gone through a Cold War where we were on the brink of destroying ourselves, and we have harmed our environment to a level where we have altered the climate. Maybe from the time we can look to the stars through telescopes until we destroy ourselves, will only span a time of a few hundred years?

Think about this: in less than a hundred years a high school aged kid could have the technology and access to resources to create a weapon that involves splitting atoms… or create a deadly virus that’s 1,000 times as deadly as Covid-19. That’s in their basement, with easily acquired resources, and no university degree. With the advancement of science and knowledge, comes easy access to dangerous knowledge.

Maybe there are hundreds or thousands of intelligent species out in the universe but from the time they are intelligent enough to look beyond their universe for life, until they destroy themselves, is so small that most of them are already extinct. Or they exist now, but the light we see from their solar system is coming from so far away, we are literally only able to see their prehistoric past.

It’s a bit of a depressing thought, but maybe we will never find aliens and they will never find us, because as intelligent as we and they may become, a world-ending knowledge will undermine our/their abilities to keep searching long enough.

(And I didn’t even factor in Artificial Intelligence taking over and not having the same inquisitive nature to explore the heavens.)

We are not alone

I love this quote by Arthur C. Clarke:

“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

When I comprehend the size and scale of the universe, it is inconceivable to me that humans are the only intelligent life that seeks to understand and explore the stars and worlds beyond our own. It just seems staggeringly beyond possible that we could be alone in the universe.

I also think about Arthur C. Clarke’s 3 Laws. From Wikipedia:

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future.

These so-called laws are:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

His most famous of these is the 3rd one. Imagine being born 2000, 1000, 500, or even 150 years ago and being shown an iPhone or a self-driving Tesla. It would surely seem like magic or witchcraft.

I truly doubt that we will have any significant technology leap in my lifetime to see any meaningful human space travel beyond revisiting our moon. Our technology won’t get that magical so quickly. Therefore, if we were to meet aliens in my lifetime, it would be because they poses technology that seems magical to us.

So, at least in the short term, if we are visited, it will be from highly advanced aliens. I wonder what they would think of our divided, polluted planet? Would they see a primitive species? Which, if any, of our cultures would they look at and say, “I think they are on the right track”?

When I think of the idea that we are not alone, and that if we are visited, the visitors will be highly advanced compared to us, what would they say about how we treat each other? How we treat other species? And, how we treat our world?