[meteorite-list] Alien Contact Predicted

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:04:05 -0500
Message-ID: <8B77635BDC7246B98846CBB3CF8F3A3C_at_ATARIENGINE2>

Phil, Eric, List

    We are "the only life" in the Universe, you say? Well, Phil,
The Universe, meaning the part within our particle horizon,
contains 10,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic
light years. That is one hell of a lot of closet space! For it to
be empty of life is a terrible waste of space, as Carl Sagan said.

    There are a vast host of theories offered to explain why we
haven't found anybody. It is an old paradox. Enrico Fermi, who
was not only a genius but a very practical man, gave voice to
the problem in 1950, at a lunchtime conversation with Teller
and other assorted geniuses, all of whom agreed that there must
be alien life. Fermi interrupted with, "So? Where are they?" By
extention, you can ask, "Why haven't we heard from them?"

    Because there are so many answers proposed to explain
the absence of aliens, here are some of those answers in
shorthand form, but you can figure them out.

They Are Here (The UFO Theories):
  1 They Are Here and They Call Themselves Hungarians
  2 They Are Here and Are Meddling in Human Affairs
  3 They Were Here and Left Evidence of Their Presence
  4 They Exist and They Are Us - We Are All Aliens!
  5 The Zoo Scenario: We're Pets.
  6 The Interdict Scenario: Contact Is Forbidden
  7 The Planetarium Hypothesis: The Universe Is An Illusion
  8 They Exist, Are VERY Advanced, and We Call Them God

They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated ("They're Out There!"):
  9 The Stars Are Too Far Away
10 They Have Not Had Time to Reach Us
11 A Percolation Theory Approach -- We're In a Place They Didn't Go To
12 Bracewell-von Neumann Probes Are All They Send
13 We Are Solar Chauvinists; Their Planets Are Not Like Ours
14 They Stay at Home . . .
15 . . . and Surf the Net
16 They Are Signaling But We Do Not Know How to Listen
17 They Are Signaling But We Do Not Know at Which Frequency to Listen
18 Our Search Strategy Is Wrong
19 The Signal Is Already There in the Data
20 We Have Not Listened Long Enough
21 Everyone Is Listening, No One Is Transmitting
22 Berserkers
23 They Have No Desire to Communicate
24 They Develop a Different Mathematics
25 They Are Calling But We Do Not Recognize the Signal
26 They Are Somewhere But the Universe Is Stranger Than We Imagine
27 A Choice of Catastrophes: Intelligent Life Always Destroys Itself
28 They Hit the Singularity
29 Cloudy Skies Are Common
30 Infinitely Many ETCs Exist But Only One Within Our Particle Horizon:
Us

They Do Not Exist ("We're The Only Ones!"):
31 The Universe Is Here for Us
32 Life Can Have Emerged Only Recently
33 Planetary Systems Are Rare
34 We Are the First
35 Rocky Planets Are Rare
36 Continuously Habitable Zones Are Narrow
37 Jupiters Are Rare
38 Earth Has an Optimal "Pump of Evolution"
39 The Galaxy Is a Dangerous Place
40 A Planetary System Is a Dangerous Place
41 Earth's System of Plate Tectonics Is Unique
42 The Moon Is Unique
43 Life's Genesis Is Rare
44 The Prokaryote-Eukaryote Transition Is Rare
45 Toolmaking Species Are Rare
46 Technological Progress Is Not Inevitable
47 Intelligence at the Human Level Is Rare
48 Language Is Unique to Humans
49 Science Is Not Inevitable
*from
http://books.google.com/books?id=-vZ0BVSHix4C&dq=webb+where+is+everybody%3F+download&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=eDqTSva8GYXWsgOgguXJDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11#v=onepage&q=&f=false

    Some of these answers have already been shot down
since the above book listed them. Planets, it turns out are
NOT rare. Neither are Jupiters.

    We are NOT signalling and advertising our presence to
the Galaxy. Why should anyone else? We (humans) have
only done so once, when Frank Drake sent a signal to Tau
Ceti one night for half an hour without consulting anybody.
Everyone was horrified and jumped all over him. Now, there
are Federal regs that, in effect, make it a crime to try to talk
to Alien Civilizations. Too dangerous. So why would we think
that "they" would signal us? Unless they are so powerful they
have no reason to be afraid of anybody, in which case I suggest
we don't answer if they ring our doorbell.

    Suppose, just suppose, that there are no warp drives, no
wormholes, no faster than light travel. Einstein was right and
there IS a speed limit. Suppose that travelling between stars
is extremely difficult no matter how advanced you are, and
beyond one or two hundred light years, it's more costly than
any civilization is likely to be willing to spend, and suppose
there's nobody that close. All technologies have limits.

    Suppose we became dedicated to colonizing the Galaxy no
matter how long it takes. Every 1000 years, we sent 100,000
humans on a giant ship to a habitable system only 25-30 light
years away. It takes us 1000 years to get there. We defrost, settle
down, build a civilization, increase in numbers and power,
and only 1000 years later, we (now they) send out their own
colony ship to repeat the process. Every 1000 years, every planet
repeats the procedure with another colony in another direction.
In a mere 6,000,000 years, humanity inhabits 5,000,000 planets
stretching over the entire Milky Way Galaxy.

    Obviously, no other species has done this in the last few billion
years or they'd be thick as fleas on a dog. Or maybe it's been done
over and over, 129 times by 129 intelligent species, and each
species has become extinct every single time, utterly vanished
and all their vast monuments with them. Maybe we are ready
to be Number 130.

    Maybe not. Maybe every intelligent species destroys itself
shortly (a few thousand years) after achieving technological
prowess. Get smart. Start fiddling with the Universe. Blow
yourself up. Or wipe yourself out. Or poison your world and
fall back into savagery. Screw things up beyond fixing. Maybe
it's inevitable for every critter with a brain a bit too big for
its appetites.

    Maybe we're just lost in time. No human can even vaguely
conceive of what a billion years is like. Even a mere one million
years is too great a stretch. A million years ago, there were no
humans. 100,000 years ago there were no humans. 10,000
years ago we knew about as much about the Universe beyond
the Earth as the dog of today. The Sea of Stars is vast and the
Ocean of Time is deep. And we woke up about 1/25000000th
of the life of the cosmos ago.

    That we have listened to the stars for any word from another
intelligent species for 40-50 years and are desparate because
we have no message in our Inbox yet shows we have the attention
span of a gnat. Unless, of course, we expected the interstellar
equivalent of Top 40 radio. Hold your complaints (and your
conclusions) for a century (or two... or five), then get back to me.
We'll do lunch.

    As for "Whoopie! The Universe Is Ours!" I'd hold off a bit
before you run the Human Pan-Galactic Federation flag up
and salute it. It's a little too early to celebrate.

    You'll find a lot of interesting discussion of these issues in
the URL above at Google Books and this excellent summary of
the problem, by David Brin, "The Great Silence" (free download):
http://www.brin-l.com/downloads/silence.pdf



Sterling K. Webb
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Whitmer" <prairiecactus at rtcol.com>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 11:17 AM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Alien Contact Predicted


> Eric:
>
> It's my belief that We Are Alone! There's nobody out there. Life and
> intelligence is a singularity, a miracle, call it what you will, it
> only happened once, here on good old Planet Earth. We are the Seed
> that will spread throughout the Universe by Space Migration. It's our
> manifest destiny and a matter of survival. Nobody knows how or why it
> happened, it just did. It was either God or chance, take your pick.
> There are those who claim otherwise, but they have yet to provide even
> the thinnest shred of evidence. Those who make extraordinary claims
> must provide some extraordinary evidence to back it up. And they
> never do! Not one person abducted by ETs has ever grabbed an alien
> cellphone or anything else to prove they were aboard an intergalactic
> space ship.
>
> The argument for aliens goes something like this: "Well there's
> billions and billions of galaxies, one of them has to harbor life. It
> just has to! You know, a billion monkeys typing for a billion years,
> and one of them writes a Shakespearean Sonnet or the Book of Genesis,
> whatever. I think they will just type gibberish for eternity. Life
> doesn't just pop up all over the place. It can never be created in the
> laboratory. It's impossible to make live stuff out of dead stuff!
> (Except for that one time.)
>
> This argument puts a lot of faith in Chance and the Laws of
> Probability. Might as well say Yahweh or Brahma did it. Evolution
> guided by chance and probability, how is that any different from chaos
> and total randomness?
>
> And why do the aliens always appear in trailer parks and never at
> Houston Control, NAU, or the JPL?
>
> Now if I could see one bit of hard evidence, I would change my mind in
> a minute.
>
> Just my dos pesos,
>
> Phil Whitmer
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Received on Mon 24 Aug 2009 11:04:05 PM PDT