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Donnie B.
Skeptic Friend
417 Posts |
 Posted - 03/28/2002 : 15:24:37 [Permalink]
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Robert Forward's great S-F novel "Dragon's Egg" describes an excellent example of "life not as we know it". The aliens are tiny, and their metabolism operates by nuclear processes rather than chemical ones. They live on the surface of a neutron star, on a thin crust of degenerate matter (not the neutronium itself).
Because their metabolism is nuclear, it runs several orders of magnitude faster than ours. When a team of humans from Earth visits the neutron star (unaware of their presence, at first), the visit triggers a process of social evolution among the aliens; they progress from feudal society to faster-than-light travel in (I think) about a week.
-- Donnie B.
Brian: "No, no! You have to think for yourselves!" Crowd: "Yes! We have to think for ourselves!" |
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Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2002 : 18:17:58 [Permalink]
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Lars H wrote:
"What it boils down to in every case is mathematics. Not just for communication but for recognizing the life itself. We might not expect to find 'life' when studying phenomenons in places and on scales that we would never associate with biology, but if we see a pattern that constitutes life somebody will know what it means."
Very well put!
Chip
"Speaking without thinking like shooting without aiming." - Charlie Chan |
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Omega
Skeptic Friend
Denmark
164 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2002 : 18:49:20 [Permalink]
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Humans visiting a neutron-star?
Yeah, science-fiction!
"All it takes to fly is to fling yourself at the ground... and miss."
- Douglas Adams |
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Omega
Skeptic Friend
Denmark
164 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2002 : 18:52:21 [Permalink]
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Lars_H> “In fact all it would actually take to evolve selfawareness would be some sort of self-replicating pattern.”
No. Unless, of course, you think fish have self-awareness.
"All it takes to fly is to fling yourself at the ground... and miss."
- Douglas Adams |
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2002 : 19:30:54 [Permalink]
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[quote]
Lars_H> “In fact all it would actually take to evolve selfawareness would be some sort of self-replicating pattern.”
No. Unless, of course, you think fish have self-awareness.
[/quote]
I phrased this a bit unlucky. What I meant was that a selfreplicating pattern has the chance to evolve into something with selfawarness. The minimum requirment for the development of sentinence. Everything else we might have incommon with ET is just coincidence.
Of course I did not mean to imply that a macromolcule like RNA was sentinent, just that it was all it took to start the evolutionary process that lead to us sentinet humans.
Some people think that those pattern that can form the basis of life are similar to those pattern that indeed directly form the basis of our consciousness. So there might be quicker and shorter way than the one the RNA molecule took.
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Donnie B.
Skeptic Friend
417 Posts |
Posted - 03/28/2002 : 20:25:38 [Permalink]
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[quote]
Humans visiting a neutron-star?
Yeah, science-fiction!
[/quote]
Don't knock it till you've tried it! 
Actually, they didn't get to the surface, since they didn't want to be converted into nucleus-thick stains. But they did manage to get into a fairly close orbit by using dynamic compensating masses to cancel most of the tidal forces.
Forward is a physicist in his day job; his fiction is very well thought-out and plausible. He's not the most poetic of writers, though.
-- Donnie B.
Brian: "No, no! You have to think for yourselves!" Crowd: "Yes! We have to think for ourselves!" |
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Chippewa
SFN Regular
USA
1496 Posts |
Posted - 03/29/2002 : 01:24:24 [Permalink]
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Lars_H wrote:
"...Of course I did not mean to imply that a macromolecule like RNA was sentient, just that it was all it took to start the evolutionary process that lead to us sentient humans..."
Crystals are non-biological yet have self replicating patterns. In some science fiction stories this results in a sentient yet totally alien "civilization" or a non-sentient alien micro organism. (As in the book and movie "Andromeda Strain.")
There is currently no evidence that this could happen in nature on Earth yet.
"Speaking without thinking like shooting without aiming." - Charlie Chan |
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Trish
SFN Addict
USA
2102 Posts |
Posted - 03/29/2002 : 10:18:30 [Permalink]
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Baxter proposes that life starts wherever it can in most of his books. Those are good reads.
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...no one has ever found a 4.5 billion year old stone artifact (at the right geological stratum) with the words "Made by God."
<i>No Sense of Obligation</i> by Matt Young |
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Omega
Skeptic Friend
Denmark
164 Posts |
Posted - 03/29/2002 : 19:29:38 [Permalink]
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Lars_H> Okay, gotcha.
Donnie B.> Right then. You go visit the neutron-star. I stay back at space-lab and monitor your life-signs. :)
When it comes to discussing life there are two topics: 1) Life. Any kind of life, microbes, bacteria, anything. 2) Intelligent life and civilisations.
I think life of type 1) will evolve where it can. When the astrophysicists finally find out if there was life on Mars or not, I'll take my view up to consideration.
As for type 2) life, you need a lot more conditions. Decent temperature, water, a planet in the habitable zone, a stable star and so on and so forth.
"All it takes to fly is to fling yourself at the ground... and miss."
- Douglas Adams |
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Jesus
New Member
USA
34 Posts |
Posted - 04/13/2002 : 11:04:10 [Permalink]
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I would have voted yes if the poles were still open .they do exist but have never visited earth.But one thing is for sure ,the creationists would claim that it proves god exists! When we find them.
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 04/13/2002 : 11:39:01 [Permalink]
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quote:
I would have voted yes if the poles were still open .they do exist but have never visited earth.But one thing is for sure ,the creationists would claim that it proves god exists! When we find them.
I don't think that the poll is actually closed.
The creationist would only claim that the existance of extraterrestial life proves the existance of God as a second step. The first step after the discovery of evidence in favor of ET's existance would be to claim that it is a fabricated lie.
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scumbagio
New Member
Canada
12 Posts |
Posted - 04/18/2002 : 19:18:53 [Permalink]
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I think the probability is quite good that they do exist. I mean there are trillions of stars out there. If only one planet in a trillion could even possibly sustain life, and maybe only 1 in a billion actyally did thats one thousand planets with life on them. Whether or not it is intellegent life that is another question for another day. I think there is intellegent life out there but I am positive they don't visit us.
"The truth is seen through keyholes" |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 04/19/2002 : 13:57:00 [Permalink]
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These days I getting more and more drawn into the field of inter-species communication (3 weeks ago a gorilla gave me fashion hints) but it always involves "talking" on our terms and relies a lot more on anecdote than anyone is comfortable with.
The only reason we want "intelligent aliens" is that intelligence is our primary survival/reproductive adaptation. By intelligence in other creatures we almost always mean how closely they resemble us. We can find that resemblance in many creatures on Earth. Surprisingly enough we find that the larger cephalopods are very "intelligent."
But the idea that we would find creatures who evolved on another world who resembled us closely enough to have recognizable intelligence is more than we could ever hope for.
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It will sometimes be necessary to use falsehood for the benefit of those who need such a mode of treatment.
----Eusebius of Nicomedia,
The Preparation of the Gospel |
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Trish
SFN Addict
USA
2102 Posts |
Posted - 04/19/2002 : 22:00:33 [Permalink]
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Why does life developing on another planet/body (especially in our solar system) have to be intelligent? I'd just be fascinated if they found life on Europa (I think that's the right moon) similar to that which lives around the volcanic vents here on earth. That would go a long way toward the idea that life does and has developed elsewhere beyond simple/single celled organisms.
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...no one has ever found a 4.5 billion year old stone artifact (at the right geological stratum) with the words "Made by God."
No Sense of Obligation by Matt Young |
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Tim
SFN Regular
USA
775 Posts |
Posted - 04/20/2002 : 00:22:10 [Permalink]
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Come to think of it, I don't understand this preoccupation with intelligent life, either.
Maybe, we should hope to find 'unintelligent' life first. Perhaps, we should learn to walk before we run?
Intelligent life? We can't even get along with ourselves.....
"The Constitution ..., is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society." P. Robertson |
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