Intelligent alien life: astronomy, astrobiology, and the age of inhabitable worlds

nivek

As Above So Below
And as to 'why no mass contact yet?'... well the simple answer to that perennial question is that 'we are not worthy'... I once started a blog to fully express my reasoning for that statement, it turned out to be far too long to hold even my own interest , [never mind anyone else.] I started by asserting that most if not all of the many intergalactic civilizations that surely populate our universe and have achieved intergalactic and interplanetary travel were likely much older and both technically superior and mentally much more sophisticated than we are, and therefore by the laws of common sense tells me that just about all of the violently domineering civilisations would have burned out long ago deep in universal antiquity, and what was left were the civilisations that were generally peaceful minded civilisations that share the creed of peaceful exploration...

Hello 1963, I've been re-reading this thread recently and have been thinking about the question above in the first sentence above, "Why no mass contact yet?" and pondering the many possibilities as to why...The answer could be multiple answers, and in my opinion likely to be multiple reasons, each particular species could have its own reason for not landing a space craft on the White House lawn, or over a large city, even landing on some island such as the Falklands thereby making themselves known to us...Safety could be a truly major concern, given our military 'might' and our knack for violence, I doubt all species evolved from violent pasts, perhaps some had to deal with the issues we now face but I doubt its the norm...I also believe some species never outgrew from their violent past, instead of conquering one another they found other species in their local star groups to unleash their aggressive tendencies towards...There would be some limits to this of course, intelligence but violent species would likely not dare to confront a species more technologically advanced than themselves and risk losing badly, so likely they would go around conquering lesser advanced species, those whom much higher advanced species would have no concerned for, such as ourselves...Along with that I have no doubts there are other species who are far more intelligent than us and vastly superior technologically and simply think of us too primitive to take notice of us much less land their space craft and sit down on the front porch with one of our kind, it's likely some of these never flew space craft into our atmosphere, just observed us from afar and moved on...I think we must be extremely cautious when we are sending signals out into space attempting contact with others, and we must be careful when we do finally have a means to travel to other star systems, because we really do not know for certain who are really out there and what their intentions are when we do meet them...We should not assume they will be peaceful nor should we assume they will be aggressive and definitely not make judgement one way or another just by their appearances nor should be just blindly believe them by their word alone either...First contact in mass will be a sticky situation for our species especially if it occurs while we are still in our current state of mental, emotional, and technological development...

and yes in time it stands to reason to me that there would have been the appetite or necessity for cooperation , which in turn led to [here comes the star trek analogy] to some sort of interspecies league [the federation if you like] that explores the vastness of this endless universe that we share. And just like the best science fiction writers have imagined, they have deemed a 'none interference policy' [prime directive] to be the most prudent in order not to contaminate the collective with bad blood and weaken the status quo of the 'civilised universe'. And in this quest for peaceful cooperation it would be a necessity to keep tabs on all of the 'dirty unwashed barbarians' such as us that still murder other lifeforms unnecessarily 'because they taste good' and are perpetually at war with each other, kill for pleasure and allow vulnerable members to starve or be subject to slavery etc... [aka, selfish murdering Troglodytes] to ensure that they do not reach the civilised collective before evolution has had the time to temper the urges to 'destroy for gain'. And in our case, no matter how much we bathe in the glory of just how far we have come in the last hundred or so years... in my view, you only have to watch the tea time news or read a newspaper to know that we are a very long way from membership qualification... [if we even get there in the end is the big question for me.]

I've always had a slight problem with this possibility, of some sort of interspecies league or federation, perhaps there exists something like this on a smaller scale in small clusters throughout the galaxy or in different galaxies, but a huge galactic federation or cooperative, whist possible, seems unlikely to me, it would take an extremely long period of time for such a structure to form...I also have hesitations on leaning towards such a type of galactic federation because too we are imposing our own human views and thoughts on this, aliens of various species could have reasoning and rational very alien to our style of thinking, scientific logic may follow similar paths for various species in their development their social reasoning and 'common sense' could be very alien to us and something we may not be able to understand straight away...An action or meaning behind actions could be interpreted quite differently from one species to another and building those bridges of understanding would require an immense amount of effort and work for all parties involved...A handshake could be offensive to one species for a crude example or any of our other social tendencies could offend one species or another, if we met a species which did something totally bizarre and disturbing by our standards it could be extremely offensive to us but be something totally natural and accepting to them...I think life out in the galaxy is truly and extremely diverse and intelligent life out there may be similar in some aspects technologically but vastly diverse in every other way, some species may build strong bridges of trust and have mutual cooperation with one other while others may have a tendency to respect one another on an intellectual and technological level but keep to themselves for the most apart because of other incompatible reasons...The galaxy is huge and the universe infinitely vast, if there are millions upon millions of intelligent species out there I think there are millions and millions of different types of conglomerations, cooperations, federations, conquerors, intelligences, etc. also in play out there and if we as a species make it around long enough to develop technology to traverse the stars, we must be cautious and careful because it is all truly unknown to us and we could be risking the very existence of humanity if we misstep...

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Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Here is something interesting.

Scott Manley worked out how big rocket needs to be to lift of an Super-Earth. As radius and mass of a planet grow, it gets exponentially harder to reach the orbit. So, in a sense we are privileged (once more) that Earth is small enough to need relatively small rockets for orbit and large enough to have enough metals to build such rocket:

 

nivek

As Above So Below
Here is something interesting.

Scott Manley worked out how big rocket needs to be to lift of an Super-Earth. As radius and mass of a planet grow, it gets exponentially harder to reach the orbit. So, in a sense we are privileged (once more) that Earth is small enough to need relatively small rockets for orbit and large enough to have enough metals to build such rocket:



That's interesting, I wonder if size has been truly considered, not size of the rocket but size of the species building the rocket...On certain planets, perhaps a large planet, isn't it possible that the intelligent species could be giants from our perspective, perhaps 20 plus feet tall?...They would build everything bigger, even rockets to propel them into orbit...Maybe there are many types of giant intelligent space faring species in our galaxy, species whom have never stepped foot on our planet earth nor have any humans seen before...If we survive as a species long enough to travel to other star systems we have to be prepared for any type of situation and prepared to encounter any type of alien lifeforms big or small...

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