Pink Floyd once asked, "Is anybody out there," and we've been wondering the same thing ever since. So has, apparently, comic veteran John Byrne, who has done his fair share of illustrating such aliens as Silver Surfer, the Skrull, Galactus, and countless other characters. In this week's installment of his IMO column, John ponders the existence of extraterrestrials, and does it using a few handy comic references.

Online at:
http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/features/johnbyrne_imo/default.asp

Pink Floyd once asked, "Is anybody out there," and we've been wondering the same thing ever since.

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We've been wondering a bit longer than that, Brian!!

JB-)

I was very interested in this bit:

And -- a little more difficult to stomach, outside science fiction, there could be a culture more advanced than us, who are using technology beyond our own.

I seemed to remember that socialogist sugggested that the worst thing that could happen would be for to meet culture more advanced than our own as it would cause us to develop a massive complex (as a race). There was a term for it - anyone know what it was?

Charles, while its a bit technical, I believe the term is: "Those G-d Damned Alien Bastards Think They're So Much Better Than Us Syndrome".

Glad I could help.

Edited to add...Don't forget To Serve Man is a cook-book!

Time to remind everyone to go find a copy of Frederick Pohl's "The Day After the Day the Martians Came".

JB-)

There's also my big paranoia about an advanced alien race deciding to use us to find a cure for its version of Alien AIDS.

And of course, the aliens would be no more "evil" for doing that than we are for experimenting on monkeys for the same purpose.

"Either we are alone or we are not; either way is mind boggling."

"Either we are alone or we are not; either way is mind boggling."


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I've heard or read variants on this quote for years, and I disagree each time. If we were alone, that would indeed be mind-boggling. But to find out that we share this infinite universe -- even with beings so distant we could never make physical contact -- seems nothing more than logical, to me. Life on earth is incredibly tenacious. It appears everywhere it can appear -- including places biologists insisted it could not be, until it was found there. Life here on Earth -- especially human life -- is the result of a long, long chain of large and small events that are most unlikely to have been repeated elsewhere in the known universe -- but that does not mean an infinite combination of other events has not produced an infinite variety of life.


And, of course, if the universe really is INFINITE, as the math would seem to insist, the answer to the question "Is there life on other planets" is "Yes, and it's us -- infinitely!"

Quote by JB, from the article:

"We haven't found anything (barring one brief and unrepeated signal about 30 years ago that inspired the astronomer who detected it to write "WOW!" in the margin of the printout)."

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JB -
this is the first time i've heard of this!!
Do you (or anybody) have any more info on this: Which direction did the signal come from? Etc.?

Quote by JB, from the article:

"We haven't found anything (barring one brief and unrepeated signal about 30 years ago that inspired the astronomer who detected it to write "WOW!" in the margin of the printout)."

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JB -
this is the first time i've heard of this!!
Do you (or anybody) have any more info on this: Which direction did the signal come from? Etc.?
 
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Except for what I mentioned, I know nothing of this. As noted, it was an unrepeated signal, so doesn't "count" but it did raise some eyebrows at the time, apparently. I don't think it was ever traced to a satellite or ground source, as so many signals are.


BTW -- Those who search for such signals out in the depths of space often come across odd or unidentifiable signals. They are usually labeled "LGM" -- which stands for "Little Green Men"!

(In a parallel if somewhat more disturbing story, in the Atomic Energy business every scrap of waste that comes out of a nuclear reactor must be accounted for. In order to accomplish this nearly impossible task, the folks who do the measuring often use the acronym "GKW" -- which stands for "God Knows What".)

I think the astronomical phenomenon you folks are discussing is when in 1967 Jocelyn Bell detected regular pulses of enery from some unknown object. Because the pulses were so regular, she beiefly wondered if some alien life form were directing the signals--"Little Green Men."

As it turns out, the object in question was a rapidly spinning super-dense object they dubbed a "pulsar." If I remember right, we now call them "neutron stars."

"We've been wondering a bit longer than that, Brian!!"

Yeah, I couldn't think of a clever opening for the intro so I went the easy route: Pink Floyd lyrics.

I think the astronomical phenomenon you folks are discussing is when in 1967 Jocelyn Bell detected regular pulses of enery from some unknown object. Because the pulses were so regular, she beiefly wondered if some alien life form were directing the signals--"Little Green Men."

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Nope. I remember Ms Bells (ultimately uncredited) discovery of Pulsars. It was a guy who made the WOW discovery.

In the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams stated that the population of the universe is ZERO. His reasoning went that the vastness of space versus the rarity of life rendered any life that you did encounter merely anecdotal and statistically insignificant.

~Bob

His reasoning went that the vastness of space versus the rarity of life rendered any life that you did encounter merely anecdotal and statistically insignificant.
 

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He was a bit more mathematical than that. He took the position that space is infinite, but life is finite, and any finite number divided by infinity is pretty much zero.

On a related note, since 99.99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct, statistically all life on Earth is extinct.

A statistician went deer hunting with some friends. He saw a beautiful buck and fired at it. His first shot was three feet to the left of the deer. His second was three feet to the right. He lept to his feat and proudly turned to the party and said, "Got him!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mike Nebeker - Super Genuis
Good Judgement comes from Experience
And Experience comes from... Bad Judgement

I developed the answer to this question while I was pondering the same question as Fermi did when he asked, "Where are they?" (Also known as Fermi's paradox.)

My answer is, simply, "They're dead."

My suspicion is that the Universe is a gigantic cosmic graveyard. The reason that we never have heard from or been visited by extraterrestrial intelligences is that they're all dead- every one of them.

I think that every intelligent species that develops technology eventually develops a technology that when unleashed by accident or intent will annihilate that species.

I should make note of Arthur C. Clarke's question in the "Sources and Acknowledgements" section of "3001: The Final Odyssey" where he asks, "..[H]ow many supernovae... are industrial accidents?" (He probably derived this question from Stanley Schmidt's 1976 novel "The Sins of the Fathers", which contains the line; "Seyfert galaxies are industrial accidents.")

Increasing complexity of systems is both the measure- and the Achilles' heel- of all technology. Complexity of systems is increasing at a rapid (and accelerating) rate. Remember that humanity went from 12 seconds of powered flight on the sands of Kitty Hawk to landing on the Moon in less than 66 years.

The inevitability of an accident is an unintended consequence of the creation of all complex systems. An "accident" is best defined as an unanticipated combinatorial effect of the failure of one or more elements of a system.

The technicians at the Chernobyl power plant did not realize (and refused to believe) that reactor number four had melted down, even as particles of graphite from the reactor core rained down on them. The seven astronauts on the Challenger died because the weather was too cold that morning they departed. A chunk of ice caused the death of seven more astronauts on Columbia less than two decades later.

As systems become more complex, they require more, not less, attention to prevent catastrophic failure. I argue the inevitability of systems growing so complex that the least inattention causes the most dire of consequences.

I need not discuss intentional release of destructive technology, as in war or other deliberate act, except to mention that the weapons ultimately used by the extremists to kill over three thousand people on 9/11 were simply airline tickets and box cutters.

If we want to find evidence of intelligent life we need to ask the question, "What events, originating from intelligent design and set in motion either intentionally or through accident, are sufficiently energetic as to be detectable across the reaches of interstellar space?"

Or, more simply, "What does a massive nuclear war sound like from outer space?"

This is not to imply that all civilizations will nuke themselves into oblivion. It is possible that the end will come because of an experiment or accident with a new technology, such as matter-antimatter reaction or the hypothetical zero point energy field. The vehicle by which a species travels to its destruction is not as important as the fact that that is the ultimate destination.

Sorry for the long (and depressing) post, especially seeing as it's my first here, but this has been a subject of much thought on my part.




Chuck Hoffmann
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"Osama bin Laden has about as much to do with Islam as Charlie Manson has to do with the Beatles" - Me

Can life exist in the Quantum world?

My suspicion is that the Universe is a gigantic cosmic graveyard. The reason that we never have heard from or been visited by extraterrestrial intelligences is that they're all dead- every one of them.

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While it is highly unlikely that every single extraterrestrial civilization annihilated itself, there is a very real likelihood that none of them survived long enough to develop interstellar vehicles (assuming such a thing is possible)

Technology is tricky. The Romans, Greeks and Egyptians (to name but 3) had civilizations that lasted thousands of years, yet none of them developed the internal combustion engine. So a civilization does not actually need to destroy itself to be taken out of the High Technology Game.


Our civilization (ie, European, post the gents mentioned above) is about 1000 years old, and we not only developed the internal combustion engine, we applied it to a series of technological leaps that have taken us (or our eyes, anyway) to the farthest reaches of the Solar System. One thing that helped us do this, while the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians did not, is that we abolished slavery.