In Star Wars, the bars are bustling with all types of alien creatures. And then, of course, there's Yoda and Chewbacca. Recently, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking stated that he too believes aliens exist: "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational."
Hawking thinks we should be cautious about interacting with aliens −- that they might raid Earth's resources, take our ores, and then move on like pirates. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."
But where are they all anyhow?
For years, NASA and others have been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. The universe is 13.7 billion years old and contains some 10 billion trillion stars. Surely, in this lapse of suns, advanced life would have evolved if it were possible. Yet despite half a century of scanning the sky, astronomers have failed to find any evidence of life or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennas should be able to easily detect.
Some scientists point to the "Fermi Paradox," noting that extraterrestrials should have had plenty of time to colonize the entire galaxy but that perhaps they've blown themselves up. It's conceivable the problem is more fundamental and that the answer has to do with the evolutionary course of life itself.
Look at the plants in your backyard. What are they but a stem with roots and leaves bringing nutriments to the organism? After billions of years of evolution, it was inevitable life would acquire the ability to locomote, to hunt and see, to protect itself from competitors. Observe the ants in the woodpile -− they can engage in combat just as resolutely as humans. Our guns and ICBM are merely the mandibles of a cleverer ant. The effort for self-preservation is vague and varied. But when we've overcome our struggles, what do we do next? Build taller and more splendid houses?
What happens after life completes its transition to perfection? Perhaps across space, more advanced intelligences have taken the next evolutionary step. Perhaps they've evolved beyond the three dimensions we vertebrates know. A new theory −- Biocentrism −- tells us that space and time aren't physical matrices, but simply tools our mind uses to put everything together. These algorithms are the key to consciousness, and why space and time -- indeed the properties of matter itself -- are relative to the observer. More advanced civilizations would surely understand these algorithms well enough to create realities that we can't even imagine, and to have expanded beyond our corporeal cage.
Like breathing, we take for granted how our mind puts everything together. I can recall a dream I had of a flying saucer landing in Times Square. It was so real it took awhile to convince myself that it was a dream (that I was actually at home in bed). I was standing in a crowd surrounded by skyscrapers when a massive spaceship appeared overhead. Everyone started running. My mind had somehow generated this spatio-temporal experience out of electrochemical information. I could feel the vibrations under my feet as the ship started to land, merging this 3D world with my inner thoughts and sensations.
Although I was in bed with my eyes closed, I was able to run and move my arms and fingers. My mind had created a fully functioning body and placed it in a virtual world (replete with clouds in the sky and the Sun) that was indistinguishable from the one I'm in right now. Life as we know it is defined by this spatial-temporal logic, which traps us in the universe of up and down. But like my dream, quantum theory confirms that the properties of particles in the "real" world are also observer-determined.
Other information systems surely exist that correspond to other physical realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time as we know it. In fact, the simplest invertebrates may only experience existence in one dimension of space. Evolutionary biology suggests life has progressed from a one dimensional reality, to two dimensions to three dimensions, and there's no scientific reason to think that the evolution of life stops there.
Advanced civilizations would certainly have changed the algorithms so that instead of being trapped in the linear dimensions we find ourselves in, their consciousness moves through the multiverse and beyond. Why would Aliens build massive ships and spend thousands of years to colonize planetary systems (most of which are probably useless and barren), when they could simply tinker with the algorithms and get whatever they want?
Life on Earth is just beginning to send its shoots upward into the heavens. We've even flung a piece of metal outside the solar system. Affixed to the spacecraft is a record with greetings in 60 languages. One can't but wonder whether some civilization more advanced than ours will come upon it. Or will it just drift across the gulf of space? To me the answer is clear. But in case I'm wrong, I have a pitch fork guarding the ore in my backyard.
Robert Lanza has published extensively in leading scientific journals. His book "Biocentrism" lays out the scientific argument for his theory of everything.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertLanza
Karl Giberson, Ph.D: Christianity and Extraterrestrial Life: Are the Gliesans Going to Hell?
Alien - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe
Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe | Video on ...
OMG it is the Republicans!
It Does? Where does evolutionary biology "suggest" this?
Aliens won't come to earth to plunder resources when there are abundant resources on other planets, even within this solar system alone. Why ores, when surely there could be far superior materials worth harnessing derived by other means and from elsewhere. Ores and commodities might well be precious to us humans, but that's simply due to the limitation of our own scope.
If and should we ever come across Aliens in our travels, they are going to be very much like ourselves, perhaps even mammalian in nature. In order to meet such species there has to be certain intersection in perception between us and them in order to have a remotely coincidental chance of acknowledgment one another. This is because of "similar thinking" effect which must exist between the two species.
And again, advanced civilisations are more likely going to be out of our realm of perception/thinking to make any meaningful and plausible acknowledgment between us and them possible.
Humans are still very limited, despite culture(s), science/technology, industrialisation, achievements all round. We may think we deserve and ought to meet other civilisations out there but this is of very little merit.
There is no such thing as Ultimate Perfection. Each civilisation runs its own, one man race against itself.
From my experience you swear less, step up to better beer, stop lusting after the BMW Roadster, go vegan, volunteer more, and other things; including viewing as many good movies and reading as many good books as possible. You certainly wouldn't want to tinker with the algorithms.
I never read Jim's book. But how about some acute physical constraints? Like distance to the nearest Earth-like planet certainly seems well beyond 10 light years. Let's assume 100 light years. Then there's micrometeorites, which may limit vessel velocities to not too much above those typical of our satellites ~8km/sec. So, let's assume 100km/sec tops. Light travels ~300,000km/sec - 3,000 times faster. So, in 98 years, when they see the first images of Palin yowling, "Drill Baby, Drill", our nearest neighbors will certainly know it's worth an exobio expedition. But then they may have to spend the next 300k years in space just to reach us, by which time we'll have morphed to be five-dimensional tori or a higher form of tree frogs. Take your pick.
Possibilities are infinite, just as the universe.
Human condition, in terms of "overall knowledge", can be perfectly described using Plato's Myth of the Cave (later reinterpreted in the Matrix Saga): we're inside this cave thinking it's all of the Universe. Instead, there's a whole world outside, waiting to be discovered. Unless we don't destroy ourselves before.
Thinking about things that this article suggests:
it seems to me that Dr. Hawking is anthropomorphizing in his vision of aliens. In his description, they sound like corporate CEOs, unbounded by human laws. Hmmmm, come to think about it......
Recent scientific inquiry has led to the theory that this planet's magnetic field, which enables complex life forms to exist on the surface of the planet, by shielding the surface from solar and intergalactic radiation, is only a billion years old. Before then, life was limited to the oceans.
Oxygen only rose above a trace level in the atmosphere about 450 million years ago. Again, one of the requirements for widespread, complex lifeforms.
This solar system's star, our sun, is likely to progress in its natural evolution as a small yellow star, meaning that in about one billion more years it will have swelled up, engulfing the Earth, making life on this planet impossible.
After watching what passes for intelligence on the Fake News Channel, I am not optimistic about the chances for our species to avoid causing its own extinction.
Re: "... the theory that this planet's magnetic field, which enables complex life forms to exist on the surface of the planet, by shielding the surface from solar and intergalactic radiation, is only a billion years old."
Earth's geologic history shows the presence of its magnetic field throughout its life, including a few flips. Mars stands as an abject lesson of what Earth would be like if the theory were true. The solar wind would have blown away the atmosphere and the oceans, leaving Earth a lifeless rock just like Mars, which lost its magnetic field 4 billion years ago.
Re: "Oxygen only rose above a trace level in the atmosphere about 450 million years ago."
The geologic record indicates that oxygen level 2 billion years ago was 2-4 percent. Oxygen level rose sharply about 1.3 billion years ago and then again about 540 billion years ago just before the Cambrian explosion.
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/541/the-rise-of-oxygen
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=32563
http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1400/atmos_origin.html
(cont'd)
Inevitable? There is nothing inevitable about evolution, nothing law-law like in the particular evolutionary history life on our planet has followed. And there's certainly nothing progressive in it, other than a gradual increase in complexity and size that logically must result from a random walk away from the simplest and smallest starting point. Even that "inevitability" ended long ago: ost of the metabolic diversity of life was in place 2 billion years ago, an essentially present day-level of physical complexity had evolved by 500 million years ago and maximum size was reached about 200 million years ago.
1000 identical earths probably would follow 1000 completely different evolutionary histories, each of which in retrospect would appear to be inevitable.
I bet some psychologists specializing in mass psychology find it very interesting that whenever we talk about aliens, we automatically assume that they are not only intelligent, but much more intelligent than us. I'm sure there is a fascinating collective-psychology theory behind why that is.
Talk to astronomers and many will tell you that they have seen some disturbing things related to this subject. Further, the UFO matter hasn't been resolved at all... www.narcap.org for some science around the study of unidentifieds...
Our search for ET has been lame, a parlor outing, a weekend drive in the country. We spend next to nothing on it. The National Science Foundation considers it a lame endeavor and offers nothing so SETI is a privately funded endeavor. And that is just for a radio search. Nobody wants to talk about anything else...
Sure its a neat idea that they are popping in and out of our reality, Michio Kaku has been talking about it for decades...
I think the problem is antropomorphism. We think like we do, not like they do... and we just don't understand enough of the nuances.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - HL Mencken
In order to find extraterrestrial life - or for them to find us, it requires extensive searching. Such heavy searching requires heavy resources. Something a civilization short on resources can barely spare to spend on pipe dreams.
Because stars die.
Eventually "pipe dreams" might become *simple survival*..
Leaving one's eggs all in one basket is indeed risky.
Or is the entirety of existence (including aliens) subject to the choices made by all.
Love
Bette
Can we identify any universal constants that determine lifespan or how fast consciousness is likely to evolve? Hawking may think on a higher plane than me, but I doubt we can intelligently guess the likelihood of life beginning elsewhere, with only one example of it happening and no evidence of it elsewhere.