Dev.SN

Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @09:30PM   
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"

• Re:Blink of an eye (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 03 2014, @11:47AM

  by VLM (445) on Monday March 03 2014, @11:47AM (#10085)

  From an old telecom engineers perspective, if I'm trying to relay an old fashioned analog microwave carrier 75 miles there is no way my budget, both link budget and economic budget, will permit you to "accidentally" have the SNR margin to detect 10 million lightyears away. Even idiot humans, mere decades after the first radio broadcast, were already pretty good at running near the Shannon limit and optimizing links to darn near the dB. So assuming you'd hear anything other than a long term intentional interstellar broadcast seems a little irrational. Maybe an accident, or maybe something inadvertent like a MASER pumped ion drive which happened to be pointed at us. Maybe. But we are not going to monitor incidental telecoms-grade conversations. The engineering just doesn't work out for anything except some weird intentional stuff.

  Another interesting perspective is an intelligent species could have been sending us a continuous broadcast of rickrolls and goatse from the Andromeda galaxy for the last 2.3 million (or so) years and we're still not going to see them for another 100K (or so) years. Depending on exact geometry. Or "they" could have had a fad of broadcasting to us for 100K or so years, unfortunately 2.6 million years ago, and when their "momentary" fad ended, our ancestors were still working on that whole stone tool thing, so too bad.

  Finally the light cone is only about 14 billion years in radius but at least assuming earthly evolution there's not much to see for the first couple billion. Although the whole universe is at least 78 billion across. So there's an immense fraction of the universe we'll never see, at least using light propagated thru vacuum. Admittedly there's a heck of a lot in our light cone that we could theoretically be expected to see. This does put a bit of a damper on any theoretical warp drive cultures or even substantial sublight cultures as you'd expect a couple billion years would be enough to colonize a large plot of land, and a large plot of land Might result in strange overspill of interstellar comms channels.

  Or perhaps there's IS a perfectly good sublight galaxy wide civilization a mere billion lightyears away, and in a billion years we'll hear all about it.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#M isconceptions [wikipedia.org]

  Now if you wanted to really F with an interstellar capable civilization, you'd dump weird things into the sun to create some truly bizarre stellar spectra. We would certainly notice that. That might not be terribly wise. Aside from being wise or not, unfortunately we haven't seen anything that weird.

  I'm forever optimistic that some gamma ray burst or quasar or whatever mystery of the month is just some advanced civilization trying to F with us by putting on a confusing show.

  Parent

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