Matt_W
4693
That was a really cool read. I hadn’t even heard of this mission. It’s pretty awesome, thanks for posting!
Unfortunately it’s not all good news
edit: Though it does seem like it might be generating sufficient power, at least so far:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/lucy/2021/10/19/nasa-team-remains-focused-on-lucys-solar-arrays/
Romalar
4695
They’ve reported an estimate of 90% power from the second panel. Since they get around 25x the sunlight near Earth than they will get during the core science parts of the mission out near Jupiter’s orbit, I’m hoping that means they have a few years to figure out a good solution.
RichVR
4698
Ain’t it though? I get how they say they detected it. But at such a distance! Sometimes I think they’re just fucking with us.
Finding a planet? That far away? Oh hell no. Just made that shit up. Gotcha! :)
Romalar
4699
It’s amazing, a century ago the question of whether there was such a thing as another galaxy was based on the latest discoveries and fought over in astronomers’ debates I doubt the public understood.
Now we know there are billions of them, we can examine them in great detail with the right devices, and we have examples of all kinds and stages of their evolution. In many cases, we can now see what they’re like better than much of our own galaxy.
Well… considering they can’t prove it for another 70 years, they just might have :-)
Editer
4701
I like the people who know how many stars are in a galaxy and how many galaxies we’ve detected but they’re such sticklers for the scientific process that they still assume we’re the only intelligent life in the universe until we see actual evidence otherwise.
“Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Spock
Matt_W
4702
Obviously depends how you define intelligence. Are dolphins intelligent? I assume we’re the only intelligent life in the universe with a technological civilization until we see actual evidence otherwise. Why wouldn’t we assume that? It’s hard to apply the principle of mediocrity with a sample size of 1. And we just don’t have great estimates about the likelihood of technological civilizations without more data. Regardless, also, it doesn’t matter at all whether there are other signaling cultures out there unless we can see them. I think an agnostic stance wrt non-terrestrial technological civilizations is pretty appropriate. (I think it’s pretty definitive that we’re the only terrestrial one.)
Skipper
4703
That’s a pretty pessimistic life view. But I’ll add my own belief, which is that I believe there are many, many forms of life in the universe, some way more advanced than we ever will be. But I also believe we will never meet any of them. I think that’s a safe bet and you and I could agree on the overlap and drink to it pretty safely.
Matt_W
4704
By that particular statement, I just meant we’re clearly the only technological civilization on Earth. I personally think that life is probably abundant. I think life capable of the kind of abstract thinking and language we do is probably very rare. In all of Earth’s fecund history of life, only one species has developed it (that we know of), so I suspect it’s not actually very adaptive. I think life capable of high technology is even more rare. Our own species has spent 99.99% of its existence without high technology. And I think intelligent life capable of interstellar communication is probably nearly non-existent. We’re not even capable of interstellar communication, except the kind where you send a dead probe into the void for tens of thousands of years.
Skipper
4705
Gotcha. The high technology bar might be too high for us to ever see or even know of another. And I would agree with the rarity, but I do think there are others. Still, you and I will never know so it as nonexistent to us and to probably the timeline of homo sapiens on earth.
I fully expect we will, even in our lifetimes, find some microbe or otherwise form of life within our solar system. But even as small of a find as that is, it raises the hope that there would be life that has progressed to a technological civilization elsewhere. Even if that probability only raises .0001 %.
I mean, if there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that a given star has a planet with intelligent life, then there are a hundred such planets in our galaxy alone, and the universe contains a trillion or more. Just given those numbers and probability, I would wager that we are not the only sentient life in the universe, nor are we even the most technologically advanced.
Granted, space is so vast that it may be physically impossible to ever cross those distances and connect. So we may functionally be the most advanced civilization we’ll ever know of. Especially if we extinct ourselves.
But we have no reason to assume it’s one-in-a-billion. If it’s one in 10^20 then there are probably no other intelligent species in our galaxy. The only way to decide if it’s one-in-a-billion or one-in-a-billion-billion-billion would be to count the number of intelligent species out there. And so far, it’s 1.
Enidigm
4709
The universe is big… but it’s smaller than you think. Numbers in the billions are huge but not like infinitely huge.
The number of possible arrangements of two full decks of cards is greater than the number of particles in the universe (according to astrophysicists estimates anyway).
Not that anyone cares, but here’s what I believe ( and it’s not my idea):
Space is VAST.
Time is VAST.
The time we’ve spent as cosmically-aware critters is vanishing small.
That kind of life is rare.
That rarity, combined with the aforementioned vastness, means the chance of intelligent aliens being close enough in spacetime for us to ever meet them is miniscule.
Our best friend died before we born, and our greatest love will be born after we die when it comes to detectable alien intelligence
Skipper
4711
Far from it. What we don’t know is the devil in the details. We only know what we observe (observable universe.) We don’t even know if the universe is flat, spherical, torus shaped or any other form. We only know there was A big bang 13.8 billion years ago and that things are moving apart from that in speed such that our observable view of the universe is 46 billion light years away (again, that we can observe light from.)
But who’s to say that the universe is just -that- space. Perhaps it is an infinitely large surface that has sections of nothing, perhaps some with big bangs, perhaps some with great shrinks, etc. If we take a thought leap from, “wow a big bang created all of this,” to, “well, what made the big bang,” that certainly seems to lend credence to the vastness of space being more than just what we know, and what there is currently light from stars in.
Here’s a mixed answer by multiple experts that I found to be a really cool read a while back.
When we get to the edges of what we know of any subject, we tend to fill in the unknown with examples, discussions and theories from what we DO KNOW. Which might just be wholly inapplicable.
It’s a pretty fascinating thing to think about for sure, that the actual number there is so huge. The number of arrangements from just one deck of well shuffled cards is apparently so great that it is almost a certainty, "you are almost certainly holding an arrangement of cards that has never before existed and might not exist again.”
To me, the even crazier fact is that, in powers of 10, humans are closer to the size of the observable universe than they are to Planck length. The observable universe is something like 9x10 to the 26th meters. But Planck length is 1.6x10 to the -35th meters.
