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  #21  
Old 01-03-2012, 03:05 PM
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Hmmm. She could be onto something there. Recognise this guy?
Peter
AAGGHH!!! Manson!

Charlie is in a world of his own! Maybe he is the life elsewhere, coz he certainly ain't with it here
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  #22  
Old 01-03-2012, 03:30 PM
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So there are apparently some small engineering problems to overcome.

Actually I dont know where I got the idea that action at a distance was instant I tried to find authority but well there was none.

AND I find the photo of Charles a worry but I now know why mothers shield their children when I walk by in the shopping center.

In general chat it appears NASA are in fact communicating with aliens but I sence the story needs confirmation as somehow it sounds to me someone is promoting a hoax... I know I am too sceptical but I think the story is phoney.

What a pity it is as to the lack of hope to establish the prescence of life out there...any life at all... still how could it be that we are the only life.

Chemistry although not fully understood yet suggests life is a natural consequence from chemical reactions and if such is valid the suggestion would be life could well be found in many places other than Earth.

I wonder if it was well established that other life was out there how our various cults of devil doggers would take it...deniel at first but latter they will all find text showing it was already written. Or would the finding of other life cause the collapse of such belief systems such that the masses lose their apparent morality. How could we keep everyone in line without a grand overseer?

mmmm that is why governments keep ufo visits under wraps and cover up the obvious contact between them and those who control the planet...maybe

Then who knows maybe SETI will get a reply in the years to come.

alex
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  #23  
Old 01-03-2012, 07:14 PM
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Bustin Balloons

Spooky action at a distance, as we presently define it, requires two entangled particles. So you're back to the light speed problem since in order to entangle particles they need to be close together. Then you have to send half of the entangled particles to the distant place and as they are ordinary matter light speed will apply. All before you can commence FTL communications.

As for alien civilisations being out there long before we were... most of the comments assume that once a civilisation is established, it does not die out or switch to something more efficient than radio. What you are actually hoping for is that the earth intersects a circular shell of communications that is loud enough to stand up above background noise at the frequency you are investigating. Many frequencies are useless for interstellar comms, but that still leaves an awful lot to search and some may think it wise not to attract attention by shouting across space!
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  #24  
Old 01-03-2012, 07:49 PM
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Nice interesting thread. I've always thought that the possibility of communication between us and a distant civilisation is almost impossible. When one considers that 14.5 billion years of Earth's existence has produced only 200 years-worth of emissions that an alien civilisation might be able to monitor as 'unnatural' ( ie not the product of physical processes, like Jupiter's radio emissions)... imagine if one of the Kepler planets harboured a civilisation at an equivalent stage to our Restoration England. All that genius and discovery! Newton, Wren, Hooke, Halley, Pepys....but the Industrial Revolution not even a twinkle in their eye....and we'd never know about it.
I think our best channel of inquiry is to assess the newly-discovered planets for their likeness to Earth, and refine our techniques for assessment of their biospheres. If we find decent Earth analogues, we might as well assume we have found life. although there have been some in these pages who wouldn't be satisfied til they received a stamped, self-addressed envelope from an alien penpal......
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  #25  
Old 02-03-2012, 08:33 AM
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Originally Posted by xelasnave View Post
... Chemistry although not fully understood...
Paul Dirac might disagree with this, having produced his equation which completely describes the behaviour of electrons with spin under electrodynamics (ie chemistry).

I have been told (can't find verification, annoyingly) that he later said, in response to a question about chemistry, "chemistry is an interesting problem which I solved in 1928". I still laugh every time I think about this.
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  #26  
Old 02-03-2012, 08:47 AM
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Paul Dirac ...... he later said, in response to a question about chemistry, "chemistry is an interesting problem which I solved in 1928".....
Sounds familiar,this may me true
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  #27  
Old 02-03-2012, 10:31 AM
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I think you will find we can only predict the spectra of a single proton and single electron perfectly accurately. That is for a single Hydrogen atom in a vacuum. After this it gets a bit more complicated. We hit what is called the three or N body problem.

We used to use supercomputers to calculate the interactions of protein enzymes with their targets or drug mimics. Quantum effects have to be taken into consideration as well as the fields resulting from the aqueous environment with all ion species that are present.

Last I heard it took two months to simulate a few nanoseconds and that was by using semi valid approximations.

We used to wryly say that only the actual molecules can do the quantum calculations.

Reality is far more complex than we can even imagine!

Bert
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  #28  
Old 02-03-2012, 10:34 AM
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Paul Dirac might disagree with this, having produced his equation which completely describes the behaviour of electrons with spin under electrodynamics (ie chemistry).

I have been told (can't find verification, annoyingly) that he later said, in response to a question about chemistry, "chemistry is an interesting problem which I solved in 1928". I still laugh every time I think about this.
Well such folk can say what they like however I suspect there is still stuff to discover ..even in the field of chemistry.

One must be careful with sweeping statements as they are dangerous however mine may be less sweeping than his.

His contribution should not be underestimated because of his unfortunate choice of words in describing his work ...still it reminds us that folk can get a little carried away by their vision of their grandness.

alex
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  #29  
Old 02-03-2012, 11:25 AM
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Originally Posted by xelasnave View Post
Well such folk can say what they like however I suspect there is still stuff to discover ..even in the field of chemistry.

One must be careful with sweeping statements as they are dangerous however mine may be less sweeping than his.

His contribution should not be underestimated because of his unfortunate choice of words in describing his work ...still it reminds us that folk can get a little carried away by their vision of their grandness.

alex
Absolutely agree. If indeed he said it, it's unclear to me whether it was intended to be funny, though I find it most amusing.
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  #30  
Old 02-03-2012, 12:25 PM
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Absolutely agree. If indeed he said it, it's unclear to me whether it was intended to be funny, though I find it most amusing.
Probably he just wanted to make a joke.. and amusing it is
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  #31  
Old 02-03-2012, 12:52 PM
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Probably he just wanted to make a joke.. and amusing it is
Hard to tell with Dirac. He did not have a reputation for being particularly normal or humourous.
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  #32  
Old 04-03-2012, 08:08 PM
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Dirac is correct it's all physic's now.

In the worlds of Mr Adams "Space is big, you may think it's a long way to the corner shop, but that's just peanuts when it comes to space".
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  #33  
Old 28-03-2012, 12:59 AM
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A real good point on the map of the galaxy. The article author, though, had some confusion over the difference between radius and diameter.

Carl Sagan made a similar point in his story "Contact," where the first televised broadcast from Nazi Germany made its way back from Vega. In that story, some were wondering why intelligent aliens would only respond to Hitler. That's because they hadn't yet received Lucille Ball.
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  #34  
Old 28-03-2012, 07:44 PM
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Originally Posted by xelasnave View Post

Chemistry although not fully understood yet suggests life is a natural consequence from chemical reactions and if such is valid the suggestion would be life could well be found in many places other than Earth.
I don't think Dirac's purported quote is at odds with this. All Alex seems to be saying is that the chemical pathway that changes non-living into living is not understood but evidence suggests that such a pathway would be followed where ever suitable conditions are found. This is a pretty common opinion.

In many peoples' view there is only one basic chemical pathway and so life only occurs in water in the Goldilocks zone. Isaac Asimov speculated that life may arise over a much wider temperature range than Goldilocks could endure and to do this it may be based in different solvents. He argued that the chemical building blocks (basically protein in our case) must be sufficiently stable at the ambient temperature but not inert. For example at somewhat lower temperatures than we live in proteins become unreactive but lipids (fats and oils) are now sufficiently stable that they could become the basis of life. I forget the details of what he suggested for each temperature range but I think that at the upper end - many hundreds to thousands C - it was some 'exotic' fluorine compounds.
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  #35  
Old 29-03-2012, 03:39 PM
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I may just be a little ignorant, but they are showing that as a nice little bubble expanding from our little blue ocean

Now i don't know about you but our lovely modern day signals if there are say mountains and what not between i have never found the signal to be any good. There in lays my question how did it pass though the Earth? and if it did pass around the out side how did it get out? If this is actually the case, then half that sphere and reduce the amount of people who might hear it!

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  #36  
Old 30-03-2012, 10:13 AM
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[QUOTE=AstralTraveller;835601] All Alex seems to be saying is that the chemical pathway that changes non-living into living is not understood but evidence suggests that such a pathway would be followed where ever suitable conditions are found. This is a pretty common opinion.

Yes indeed David as Bert would say "self evident" ..but one tends to say that when others have glossed over the simple things one has said but were not regarded as important and so they miss the self evident simplicity of a concept.

If we know all there is to know then such a process (the life chemical process) would be well understood. As Bert mentioned the complexities are mind bending ..just because one can use a hammer does not mean you can automatically build a house...

If we could identify the process (and control it such that we can test enviroments) it would then be reasonable to conclude life must exist everywhere basically, indeed such is an extrapolation but extrapolations have been used before in the name of science.

Add the survival of the fittest and adaption to environment we observe in the life we can sample .... at that point perhaps we would be entitled to use the Drake equation to estimate probabilities on a reasonable footing.

I think identifying the procees would be wonderful and it matters not if we wish to call it physics or chemistry.

alex
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  #37  
Old 30-03-2012, 02:06 PM
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I may just be a little ignorant, but they are showing that as a nice little bubble expanding from our little blue ocean

Now i don't know about you but our lovely modern day signals if there are say mountains and what not between i have never found the signal to be any good. There in lays my question how did it pass though the Earth? and if it did pass around the out side how did it get out? If this is actually the case, then half that sphere and reduce the amount of people who might hear it!

They aren't talking about an individual transmission, rather our total planet-wide transmission. But even if it was just one transmission, if the transmission last for 12 hours the entire sky has been covered. Yes, technically one side of the sphere would be 12 light-hours smaller than the other but at the scale of the diagram this is impossible to see. Details aside, the take home message is that not much of the galaxy has even had the chance to hear us.
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  #38  
Old 30-03-2012, 02:14 PM
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Yes indeed David as Bert would say "self evident" ..but one tends to say that when others have glossed over the simple things one has said but were not regarded as important and so they miss the self evident simplicity of a concept.
Alex,

I wasn't having a go at you. I was actually defending you against what I saw as I misunderstanding of your point and supporting it by pointing out that many other hold the same view.

BTW anyone who thinks chemistry can be reduced to physics clearly isn't a chemist. Perhaps in some ways it can be done but the complexity is overwhelming. If you want to achieve anything in practice it's the wrong level of abstraction. In a similar vein, music can be reduced to physics but to do so destroys what you are trying to achieve.
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  #39  
Old 30-03-2012, 02:46 PM
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David I did not for a moment think you were having a go at me and even if I did it would not worry me.
I should have complimented you on expressing the idea was I was trying to point out. You made the point I probably clouded and I thank you.

I wonder if survival of the fittest can be related to "chemicals" seeking their course in nature...

I wonder how news of life elsewhere would be received on Earth.. I mean if reliable evidence was presented ( a body will do) of life from another world how would the various folk around the planet take it..some would reject it of course others would form domesday cults...the reaction would be so interesting. The thinking more there are folk who believe "they" are aready here

alex
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