New phenomena. That's a real knee slapper.

We can already "hear" very far into space. In fact, we hear so far that many of the things we hear happened a very, very long time ago.

If anything, this new radio telescope will help us hear older phenomena.



I think this is great though. As has been said, this isn't just about searching for a signal from intelligent beings. We can also use this technology to map outer space better.

As to actually finding intelligent life, we'd be lucky if the industrial age culture that sent out the signals was still alive by the time we could respond. It's not a bad idea to check though.



Also, Crytpo, Don't you think that advances in technology allowing us to receive and decode signals (as well as detect very subtle patterns) better is inevitable?

It seems logical that new algorithms will be constructed for detecting smaller and smaller variations from noise, and that more sensitive equipment will be developed.

ahhh geez....haven't you guys watched heroes at all? Everyone knows that if "aliens" could communicate with us, they'd have figured out a way to bend the space/time continuum, and are probably already here among us.'''--===



in other news, another ice cap melted today

No doubt about it.  Detection, correlation, decoding; all of these things will continue to evolve.  We are a very clever bunch of monkeys for sure, but we've only scratched the surface.

My point was really to say that for us to hear something today, we would have to be lucky enough to be listening during a very particular time in an alien civilization's development.  The technology advances so quickly that we would have to be extremely lucky to hear something at that particular stage in the alien civilization's technological evolution.

On the other hand, if ET is clever, and half as curious as we Earthlings, it stands to reason that they would predict more primitive civilizations attempting such a thing and continue transmitting some recognizable signal as a beacon - in a way, leaving the light on for us.

Yeah Crypto, I hear what you're saying. In 13.7 billions years of history since the Big Bang, how long have we been techologically capable of receiving a signal from space? Less than the blink of an eye.

And how to tell how long we will continue to be capable of this? For thousands of years to come, or will we blow our civilization back to the Stone Age, and then cycle back and forth?

And what is the common experience out there in the Cosmos? One of the most disappointing things about life is that I'm sure to die with all these wonderful questions unanswered. 

There may not be life out there.  We don't know how life from non-life begins so you would have to presuppose something on this point.  I don't see how you can come to your conclusion with only logic and statistics but with no presupposition. 

Without presupposition and if we bring in the empirical information we have gathered on life and the requirements for life, and we restrict causation to only material causes, we should conclude that life could not originate anywhere in this universe because the odds of spontaneous generation of even one self replicating biopolymer is so poor relative even to the total number of atoms in the entire universe (10^81).  I am getting ahead of you though.  Perhaps I am missing some empirical fact (please refrain from speculation and presupposition).

If on the other hand you presuppose life is easy to get started even in a wide range of conditions, then you would conclude based on your presupposition that there is life out there.   Do you think it would be more accurate if your words were, "to say otherwise denies presupposition".


The universe is unimaginably large, that is true.  But to have a thought that life exists or does not exist out there somewhere is presumptuous either way.  When one steps away from presumption and relies only on available empirical data, one can only conclude that life should not have started anywhere in this universe by material mechanisms.

You can answer this by saying we have not completed an exhaustive search for all the ways self-replicating biopolymers might have originated from non-biological chemistry.  But this does not add any empirical evidence and only sends us off to begin speculation and to construct presupposition again.


I doubt it.

Abraxas wrote, asking why life has to be carbon-based?
And I think he's right--it doesn't.
However, it probably is. Here's why: carbon has the not common properties of being
a) relatively abundant and
b) able to bind with many other elements.

Another element which enjoys those properties is silicon, which is why science fiction occassionally features silicon-based creatures. However, another (unfortunate) property of silicon is that it tends to have a very rigid structure, and it's hard to imagine intelligent rocks.

Reasoned Faith wrote: "There may not be life out there.  We don't know how life from non-life begins so you would have to presuppose something on this point.  I don't see how you can come to your conclusion with only logic and statistics but with no presupposition."

I think logic and statistics alone can give us a pretty good start. We can compare the chances of intelligent life evolving to the number of opportunities in the Cosmos.
Of course there are many unknowns when trying to calculate the chances of the evolution of intelligent life. But we can spell them out and speculate.

No one knows the answer, but one does not have to suppose anything to say that there is a reasonable chance that intelligent life has evolved somewhere other than Earth.

Nitrogen is an inert gas. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. It constitues over 70 percent of the Earth's atmosphere.

Nitrogen forms proteins.

Granted, it can't form long chains without becoming unstable, but it's entirely likely that life outside our solar system and possibly our galaxy are differently composed.