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Drake equation, for what it's worth.
Originally Posted by Litterick
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06-21-2026 05:42 AM
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Christian captured pretty much anything I’d have said. The only thing I might add in explicit response to the OP is that I think (given the, um, astronomical, number of stars and planets in the universe) it’s likely that there are (or were, or will be) other civilizations. But they’ll never get here (nor us there) because the distances can’t be overcome. Relativity’s a bitch.
It’s possible that there’s a civilization within a distance that would allow for communication with latency short enough that human civilization won’t have become extinct by the time an answer gets back to us. But that’s as close as we’ll get to an interstellar jam session, and so far not so good.
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Have you read your bible in depth? Have you looked into ancient sumerian history? Are you familiar with the multitude of similarities between demonic manifestations and "alien" encounters? What's interesting to me is the non-believer will entertain all sorts of fantastical off the wall theories and speculations on aliens but refuses to believe Christ lived, died, and was resurrected. Originally Posted by Bob_Ross
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Dawg... Originally Posted by DawgBone
one of my fave coveralls..Truth is stranger than fiction..
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That's because many theories and speculations about aliens are plausible... Originally Posted by DawgBone
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That is just being insulting. I think the stories about Jesus of Nazareth and the stories about aliens are equally plausible. Both stories have witnesses, but lack conclusive scientific evidence. Originally Posted by Bob_Ross
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"Plausible". Meanwhile one of the big goals of medical research is shutting off the aging gene and allowing man to live forever, outside Christ. If someone makes a youtube alien contact vid people are more willing to buy into it than believing historical and religious record and testimony on Christ. It's a sad world of delusion. The modern era has literally been primed for nonsensical beliefs in "alien" life forms with shows like star trek and star wars. It's all the work of the demons. A quick study of works by Crowley and Strieber, among others, shows this to be accurate. Originally Posted by Bob_Ross
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Finally, the best question! Originally Posted by Litterick
Begin with a quick review of the life we know about on Earth.
The current thinking is this:
- life began with the first molecules that emerged with the ability to self replicate themselves, and with exposure to environmental selection pressures acting against variations, this was the beginning of an evolutionary mechanism for them to gradually become more sophisticated.
- life began about a half billion years after the formation of the Earth (it took a while to settle down until the conditions were right), and after another three billion years of time the highest form of Earth life was a microscopic multicellular worm. After another only one billion years the highest form was man.
The important thing to notice is the rate and quality of advancement;
- three billion years from replicating molecule to micro multicellular worm
- one billion years from micro multicellular worm to man
This is a profound rate of change!
The Earth itself as a rocky planet was possible as part of the formation of the Sun because the material had high metallicity, as the astronomers would say - they call all material "metal" that has more protons than hydrogen and helium.
The first stars of the universe had no "metals", but metals were produced when some of them explosively died. This allowed subsequent generations of stars to increase in metallicity and increase the possibility of forming accompanying rocky planets.
Astronomers have looked for the earliest stars of sufficient high metallicity to form rocky planets by examining the light of further and further distant galaxies. The current earliest galaxies indicating high metallicity stars are 11.2 billion years old; the current thinking that the universe is 13.2 billion years old and its model for formation sees this as a bit too early for this level of observed galactic formation with stellar metallicity, so the cold dark matter lamda model (?CDM) may have a problem...
So, if we use what we think we know about the history of life on Earth and assume that the same process happened far away 11.2 billion years ago, and if you take a conservative figure (assuming the distant galaxy is showing us just the beginning of the rocky planet's formation) we can do this:
- assume the same rate of development
- compare the starting times
If life started there like it did here, "they" are about 6 billion years ahead of us. Since worm to man was only one billion years, if these entities are still around they might be over six billion years more advanced than us... there isn't much we can know about them or what they might be able to do.
There is a way to think about them by using a schematic hierarchy of life levels and see if any consistent asymmetrical relationships between the levels in the "down" direction suggest extrapolated relationships from the next up level in the "down" direction from there. It works like this:
Level 0 - this is non life; schematically earth, water, air, light. These things have no agency and no sense of each other.
Level 1 - plants; these do have some degree of agency as they seek water in the earth and light in the air. They are in, around, and among the elements of level 0 which "know nothing of level 1" yet level 0 elements are lived in, and consumed for the purposes of level 1 plants.
Level 2 - animals: these have agency, know about the level 1 plants and the level 0 elements. They are in, around, and among the plants without the plants "knowing", yet the animals live in them, use them, and consume them for their own purposes.
We notice that each level "knows" the levels below it but not the ones above it. We notice each level that is alive consumes and is around and within the lower levels all the time.
If we notice these asymmetrical relationships among the levels we might extrapolate "up" that a level 3 entity would be absolutely unknowable to us (we are functionally level 2), yet may be all around us, within us, among us, using and consuming us for their own purposes.
The earliest life in the universe with an over 6 billion year head start might be well past level three. As far as limitations of "travel" distance, time, energy, etc., I kind of think that with an extra 6 billion years to work on the problems, there may not be any problems that can't be resolved or overcome...
The impact of disclosure on religions depends on the advancement of the visitors. I see really two levels of impact:
- many have a simple view of the world, in some ways the same as the past. There are people and places that have never thought about these things and they will be shocked, but their faith very well may not be destroyed.
- some have a view based on "man" as the apple of God's eye. Depending on the advancement of the visitors, they may feel demoted to the relative position of the micro multicellular worm to man. A lot of foundations of belief have fallen throughout history, but highly enough advanced visitors might be a true collapse as our place falls toward unimportant.
To be clear, the mechanism for this fall is the idea of man in God's image. The other side of that coin is God in man's image from our limitations as being human beings. If dolphins had religion one might imagine their oral squeaky traditions passed from one generation to the next as including squeaky verses with phrases like, "...floating at the right flipper of God..." and the like.
The advanced visitors would demote us from our current sense of man in the image of God as the visitors would upgrade the highest position of beings in the image of God... we being pushed back toward the relative position of the worm.Last edited by pauln; 06-21-2026 at 03:32 PM.
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Actually, Aleister Crowley defined magic as a method to contact higher forms of intelligence (interdimensional beings), but if you're unbalanced and/or inept you may contact lower ones too, a.k.a., your "demons." His autobiography, the Confessions of Aleister Crowley, is fascinating. Originally Posted by DawgBone
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Well, I think he was deluding himself to large degree. All of the "interdimensional beings" he was contacting were of the demonic realm, because that is the source of power for any magickal practicioner. His "holy guardian angel" aiwass.....looks eerily similar to the "greys" of Whitley Strieber minus the large black eyes. Originally Posted by Mick-7
Interestingly in the Strieber saga he was given screen memories of owls, which are closely associated with the occult to this day. Seems pretty obvious "aliens" are just a repackaged demon for the modern technological era. There is nothing new under the sun....
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Just for the record I think stories about UFOs and Greys etc are nothing other than modern folklore.
The world today is full of anecdotes of otherworldly experiences and folkloric beliefs. Some are presented in the language of traditional religion or spiritualism and others present in the costume of today’s mythology - which is science fiction.
But beyond the surface they are all remarkably similar.
See also AGI, the god of the cult of the Silicon Valley high priests. Who all want to live forever.
We really don’t move on with our preoccupations over the millennia do we?
As for real extraterrestrial intelligence - it’s an open question. Who knows?
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There’s parameter in that we know, and a few very annoying parameters I can’t see us getting a fix until we discover ETI. Although we can probably start to fix lower bound on their product. Originally Posted by palindrome
But detection itself is … hard. It looks like the early SETI thinkers were optimistic about it and made some incorrect assumptions about the development of technology.
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There is a whole world buzzing around you that cannot be perceived with the material eyes and ears, even at the most basic levels of the light and sonic spectrums. For the record I think the modern secular world has educated themselves into a deep spiritual slumber. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Something like this? The music is AI.... end of an era really...
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Actually, I agree. Originally Posted by DawgBone
I think part of being a musician is making a connection to a more ancient way of being. The original common meaning of terms like Genius and Demon tells a story.
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You mean like getting beer at old world prices? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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That’d be nice! Originally Posted by DawgBone
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except no star like ours can support life for 6 billion years - photosynthesis will cease on Earth within 600 million years and all plant and animal life will die Originally Posted by pauln
its at least as likely that we already know 99% of the laws of physics and there is no great discovery that will make interstellar travel feasible, leaving any intelligent aliens out there are locked in their own systems and doomed to die as their star matures just like us.Last edited by BWV; 06-22-2026 at 12:07 AM.
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Like signals quickly dissipating to the point of becoming indistinguishable from background radiation? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
(I mean, didn't they know as much back then? Not sure.)
Another factor in the formula I cannot really wrap my head around entirely: perhaps equating intelligence with the ability to send out signals deliberately is a bit rash.
In my little mind, all of this stuff basically comes down to thought experimentation that can help us fake a different perspective with a view to getting a better hang of the one we happen to be caught in.
In the Seventies, did they *really* believe that anyone would ever be playing back the records shipped with Voyager 1 and 2? I guess not. Presumably, the unique planetary configuration at the time was too good an opportunity to be missed.
(Sorry about my fuzzy logic, I'm not quite awake...)
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Just to add another fuzzy point:
My general understanding is that Rare Earth (in the sense of Earth perhaps being unique after all, rather than in the Big-John-is-my-name sense) may not be totally out of the question, i.e. that, unlike what is popularly assumed, the figures are not such that they render this eventuality totally implausible).
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Heck, I got this wrong: what I had in mind was the story how Penzias/Wilson famously stumbled upon cosmic background radiation, but that was 1964. The Drake equation dates back to 1961.
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Yeah there was definitely a bit of publicity stunt energy to the stuff Carl Sagan was involved in (quite consciously I think, Sagan understood the media very well) like the Voyager gold record and the Arecibo transmission - but SETI was quite a serious enterprise and 50 or 60 years ago looking for radio transmissions seemed like a good idea. Originally Posted by palindrome
As time has worn on it’s become apparent that as our technology advances the earth is likely to become quieter in the radio spectrum than 50-100 years ago (so the last parameter in the Drake “equation” could be as little as a century) and given the inverse square law it was never going to possible to pick up similar transmissions from very far away - a few light years max iirc.
A tight beam would travel further, but we’d have gone on beam to ‘hear’ it. So as i understand it the conversation broadened to other tech signatures, especially as telescopes etc have developed since then as well.
Incidentally the CMB isn’t in the same part of the EM spectrum SETI efforts have traditionally targeted. SETI efforts are concentrated on the longer frequency radio spectrum, most famously the 21cm line
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K type stars (“orange” main sequence stars cooler than the Sun) live a lot longer and don’t have the issues Ms do with flaring and tidal locking. Originally Posted by BWV
K’s feature quite a lot in discussions of hypothetical Superhabitable worlds (ie planets better suited to life than Earth.)
I don't know though, I have heard that some astrophycisits have concluded that the Sun is unusually quiet even for a G type star. Another Rare Earth filter.
And over the very long term, a civilisation could start to mange the evolution of their star, or engineer the solar system.
OTOH in terms of interstellar travel, I can't see it happening in the near future even for probes. But it becomes very hard to predict what a tech civ might get up to over should they last for even modest geological timescales, a couple of million years, say. Would interstellar travel always remain too much of a faff even over millions of years?We can't get our heads around it - modern humans haven't been around that long, let alone technological civilisation.
Can we download our consciousness into immortal machines and travel the stars like that for example? Or beam ourselves across the light years using quantum teleportation? Turn the sun into a rocket and move the whole solar system around? Unlike warp drive (which seems to constantly violate Energy conditions in General Relativity) physics doesn't appear to rule out these ideas, but honestly, we have no idea. This is SF territory. (Or increasingly, Silicon Valley tech bro discourse.)
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkLast edited by Christian Miller; 06-22-2026 at 05:57 AM.
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Wikipedia, for what it's worth: 'Criticism related to the Drake equation focuses not on the equation itself, but on the fact that the estimated values for several of its factors are highly conjectural, the combined multiplicative effect being that the uncertainty associated with any derived value is so large that the equation cannot be used to draw firm conclusions.' Originally Posted by palindrome
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Yes, I do realize that the question you were posing is an unfathomable unknown in the equation itself. Originally Posted by Litterick
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