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Category: alien life – Page 82

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Arguments for fine tuning: Physics has many constants like the charge of the electron, the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant. If any of their values were different, our universe, as we know it, would not be the same, and life would probably not exist.
0:00 — Defining fine tuning.
2:20 — Gravitational constant.
3:59 — Electromagnetic Force.
5:02 — Strong force.
6:13 — Weak force.
7:51 — Philosophical Arguments against fine tuning.
9:36 — Scientific arguments against fine tuning.
11:59 — Sentient puddle.
13:29 — Does fine tuning need an agent.
15:14 — Louse on the tail a lion.
Some say that it could not have occurred by chance, that there must be some agent, like a god that set up the constants to enable life.

Let’s just look at the constants associated with the different forces. Gravity: If the gravitational constant was too small, gravity would be too weak, and planets wouldn’t form. If it was too large, then stars like the sun would burn up too fast.

Electromagnetism: The electromagnetic force is responsible for the distance at which electrons orbits in atoms. If the force was weaker, the atomic size would increase because electrons would be further away from the nucleus. This could impact chemistry, as it would change the strength of chemical bonds.

A higher constant would lead to cooler stars and a lower constant would lead to hotter stars. If the constant was bigger, atoms larger than hydrogen atoms could not form and stars may never ignite, because protons may not have been able to overcome the coulomb barrier to fuse in the first place.

Strong force: If the strong coupling constant were lower, then you wouldn’t have stable heavy atoms as it would not be enough to overcome proton-proton repulsion. If the strong nuclear force was only 1% weaker for example, atoms crucial for life like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen may not form in sufficient quantities.

Continue reading “Is the Universe Fine Tuned for Life? The Case FOR and AGAINST Fine Tuning” | >

Signup for your FREE TRIAL to The GREAT COURSES PLUS here: http://ow.ly/5KMw30qK17T. Until 350 years ago, there was a distinction between what people saw on earth and what they saw in the sky. There did not seem to be any connection.

Then Isaac Newton in 1,687 showed that planets move due to the same forces we experience here on earth. If things could be explained with mathematics, to many people this called into question the need for a God.

But in the late 20th century, arguments for God were resurrected. The standard model of particle physics and general relativity is accurate. But there are constants in these equations that do not have an explanation. They have to be measured. Many of them seem to be very fine tuned.

Scientists point out for example, the mass of a neutrino is 2X10^-37kg. It has been shown that if this mass was off by just one decimal point, life would not exist because if the mass was too high, the additional gravity would cause the universe to collapse. If the mass was too low, galaxies could not form because the universe would have expanded too fast.

On closer examination, it has some problems. The argument exaggerates the idea of fine tuning by using misleading units of measurement, to make fine tuning seem much more unlikely than it may be. The mass of neutrinos is expressed in Kg. Using kilograms to measure something this small is the equivalent of measuring a person’s height in light years. A better measurement for the neutrino would be electron volts or picograms.

Another point is that most of the constants could not really be any arbitrary number. They are going to hover around some value close to what they actually are. The value of the mass of a neutrino could not be the mass of a bowling ball. Such massive particles with the property of a neutrino could not have been created during the Big Bang.

Continue reading “Is God in Physics? Fine Tuning Scrutinized” | >

No pressure.

We’re just weeks away from the next generation of astronomy.

When the James Webb Space Telescope launches in December, it will signal the beginning of a new day for the study of the universe, and officials at NASA and elsewhere think it could discover signs of atmospheres capable of supporting life on alien worlds beyond our solar system. But what will the process of evaluating these planets look like, and how long will it take?… See more.

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The era of space exploration brings with it a new risk: invasion. The peril comes not from little green men arriving on flying saucers but, rather, from microbiological contamination of Earth from extraterrestrial environments and vice versa. Writing in BioScience, Anthony Ricciardi, of McGill University, and colleagues describe the dangers posed by such organisms and outline an approach to address the threat.

The authors caution that biological contamination endangers both ecosystems and human well-being. “Owing to their massive costs to resource sectors and human health, biological invasions are a global biosecurity issue requiring rigorous transboundary solutions,” say Ricciardi and colleagues. And that threat may be more immediate than previously anticipated. Despite considerable microbial caution among space agencies, say the authors, “bacterial strains exhibiting extreme resistance to ionizing radiation, desiccation, and disinfectants have been isolated in NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.

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Geological evidence suggests that Mars was temporarily habitable three billion years ago when liquid water existed on the surface of the planet. Because life had little time to develop and flourish, possible microfossils found in the Martian rocks will likely resemble simple organisms. On Earth, life persisted for over three billion years in the form of single-celled bacteria and algae.

In a new open-access study published in the Journal of the Geological Society, the two authors, astrobiologists Sean McMahon and Julie Cosmidis from the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford, note that the origins of any fossil-like specimens found on Mars are likely to be very ambiguous.

Rocks on Mars may contain numerous types of pseudofossils, structures formed by chemical processes or minerals resembling organic structures, that look similar to the kinds of fossils likely to be found if the planet ever supported life, a press release provided by University of Edinburgh explains.

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We often consider interacting with Aliens and Robots in the future, but what about Alien Robots? Today we’ll ask what artificial intelligence created by aliens might look like and what sort of circumstances we’d encounter them, and if they may be the only aliens we ever encounter.

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Credits:
Alien Civilizations: AI Aliens.
Episode 212a, Season 5 E46a.

Written by:

Continue reading “AI Aliens” | >

I think intelligent tool making life is rare but there is plenty of room for those far, far in advance of us. Robert Bradbury, who thought up M-Brains, said he did not think truly hyper advanced entities would bother communicating with us. Being able to process the entire history of human thought in a few millionths of a second puts them further away from us than we are from nematodes. But then that might not be giving them credit for their intelligence and resources, as they might wish to see how well their simulations have done compared to reality.

Foresight Intelligent Cooperation Group.

2021 program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/intelligent-cooperation/

Anders Sandberg, Oxford University.

Game Theory of Cooperating with Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Future Civilizations.

Continue reading “Anders Sandberg | Game Theory of Cooperating w. Extraterrestrial Intelligence & Future Civilizations” | >

Extraterrestrial life refers to life forms that did not originate and are not indigenous to our planet. So this term covers all possible types of life outside the Earth: These can be viruses, but also plant-like life forms. Some go even further: they are looking for creatures that are very similar to humans in their complexity or even surpass them, popularly known as aliens. But if there is extraterrestrial life, why hasn’t anyone heard about it until now? Do so-called aliens even exist? The Fermi Paradox addresses this very question. What approaches there are to this you can find out here!

Video recommendation:
Letters Show What Rescue Teams Did to the People on the Titanic!

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Credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, spacex, wikipedia, shutterstock,…

#TheSimplySpaceEN

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Recently, the SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, released an application called SETI AT HOME, which allows any regular computer to help the SETI researchers find alien intelligence. This idea is brilliant since it saves an enormous amount of money by distributing processing power throughout computers all around the globe instead of buying super expensive supercomputers. So, anyone can go to their website and download this application to help the SETI researchers crunch data to find extraterrestrials. This way, the entire internet can be turned into a giant supercomputer! But what if we needed a processing capacity that far exceeded all the computers on Earth used in conjunction? Well, for such vast computational power, we may have to look beyond our planetary resources, directly to the stars! This is where the idea of the Matrioshka Brain proposed by Robert J. Bradbury comes in!

In his 1960 paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation”, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson proposed the idea of a megastructure. Now commonly known as a Dyson Sphere, it was conceived to spot other advanced civilizations in the universe, particularly, Kardashev Type 2 civilizations that are capable of controlling all of the available energy in their stellar system! Dyson believed that a Type 2 civilization should be able to build this hypothetical megastructure around its star which would completely encircle it and harness all its energy.

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It’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the natural world: shapes repeat over and over. The branches of a tree extending into the sky look much the same as blood vessels extending through a human lung, if upside-down. The largest mammal, the whale, is a scaled-up version of the smallest, the shrew. Recent research even suggests the structure of the human brain resembles that of the entire universe. It’s everywhere you look, really. Nature reuses its most successful shapes.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is concerned with fundamental questions in physics, and there are few more fundamental than this one: why does nature continually reuse the same non-linear shapes and structures from the smallest scale to the very largest? In a new Big Think video (see above), West explains that the scaling laws at work are nothing less than “the generic universal mathematical and physical properties of the multiple networks that make an organism viable and allow it to develop and grow.”

“I think it’s one of the more remarkable properties of life, actually,” West added.

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