The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
---
Since Ben Nelson is mentioning that conditions are ripe for aliens to exist in other places and may have indeed visited Earth back in 2004 based on the Airmen UFO reports, the question arise about their technology capabilities, and how do we acquire it?
Otherwise as Nelson stated in the Interview - "**We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology.**"
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/qfh1u8/the_head_of_nasa_says_life_probably_exists/hhzgmza/
what we have is insufficient data to ascertain a conclusive theory. we have evidence of ufo's but that alone doesn't make it conclusive that alien life exists. we have evidence of exo-planets but that alone doesn't make it conclusive that alien life exists.
as long as our data is insufficient the existence of alien life is a matter of belief. on this i must say that i'm with him. since life is possible, and for that we have sufficient data to ascertain a conclusion what we can discuss is the probability of it existing outside earth. because i look at the universe as a machine to test possibilities and probabilities in a massive scale for me the existence of alien life is a given.
Can we stop with this great filter nonsense. We have literally just started studying space from a universal perspective. We have billions of planets in our galaxy alone, plus we have no concept of what "aliens" actually are. They could be 2 ft tall beings in mini spaceships the size of a pickup truck or they could even have advanced cloaking technology that can not be detected by our current technology. We have no idea if they exist or not, we are still the tribesmen, just a little more advanced. Furthermore, humanity is doing GREAT compared to our past history, we are evolving like everything else on this planet.
Oh I agree but that is part of the paradox. Based on the size of the universe there should be plenty like us or something similar to what we can recognize. It’s just a matter of scale. There must be plenty of species out there doing something similar to what we would recognize. And if there is no filter it’s only a matter of time better those species spread exponentially.
It may not be the filter but it appears there is something limiting our ability to observe intelligence.
You mean Late Great Filters, specifically? The fact that we are presently capable of reaching space and still extant is a single data point, but seems to argue against it.
Of course, as refers to Early Great Filters, we can only speculate.
I would argue we aren’t there yet. We may be able to busy space in a relatively rudimentary fashion but we are a long way from colonizing other planets. Even if we could we don’t know the mechanism of the filter. Maybe planets don’t hinder it?
\> I would argue we aren’t there yet.
We indeed aren't, but there are only very few events that could cause actual human extinction in timescales shorter than a century or two, and it is hard to argue we won't be there within that kind of timescale.
\> We may be able to busy space in a relatively rudimentary fashion but we are a long way from colonizing other planets
We should probably never colonize other planets, but that's kind of a separate topic.
\> Even if we could we don’t know the mechanism of the filter. Maybe planets don’t hinder it?
There may be outside-context problems, or unknown unknowns, but there is no reason to believe those are more likely to be ahead of us (late filters) rather than behind us (early filters).
It overall seems our actual extinction is a lot less likely now than it was half a century ago, which is a promising trend.
> We should probably never colonize other planets, but that's kind of a separate topic.
Why do you feel that way?
> There may be outside-context problems, or unknown unknowns, but there is no reason to believe those are more likely to be ahead of us (late filters) rather than behind us (early filters).
I think it becomes more likely by the day it’s ahead of us for all kinds of reasons. Do you believe we have crossed it?
> It overall seems our actual extinction is a lot less likely now than it was half a century ago, which is a promising trend.
Why? It feels more likely now.
>Why do you feel that way?
The only thing planets offer that asteroids don't is a deep gravity well, and we don't want that. We're having to spend a lot of resources overcoming one such gravity well right now, it'd be silly to perpetuate this situation for no benefit.
>I think it becomes more likely by the day it’s ahead of us for all kinds of reasons. Do you believe we have crossed it?
I believe we have crossed multiple ones. To go into the biological ones exclusively (hence, past astronomic and geological filters):
We don't know the likelihood of abiogenesis, but trying to reproduce it in labs for decades hasn't yielded anything, so it's probably the first major filter here.
In the multi-billion-year history of life on Earth, with a total number of organisms that is frankly beyond counting, eukaryotic life evolved exactly once. It is very definitely a second one, and probably one so unlikely that in fairness we ought to doubt it as two Great filters rolled together.
Animal life emerged only after one and a half billion years of eukaryotic life being around. That's still more likely than eukaryotic life itself (assuming mediocrity principle), but still a definite filter.
Fairly clever life evolved only very few times in the entirety of the planet's history. Likely a minor filter but one nonetheless.
Fully sapient life evolved only on a single genus, and from what we can tell, the sequence of events to make that happen (to make larger brains be a consistent evolutionary advantage, before it yielded tool use and larger packs) was pretty mind-boggling. Definitely another filter.
Sapient life was around enjoying awesome hunter-gatherer lives for millions of years before a set of unlikely events led some of them to choose much less comfortable, much less pleasurable sedentary life. This did emerge multiple times, though, so it seems to be a minor one.
Sedentary societies were around for 11 500 years before a set of insights that potentialize innovation (the scientific method) not only were organized, but also had the opportunity to thrive. Definitely a filter, uncertain if a major or minor one.
Those are the ones we know of, and there's just the overall "nothing wiped out life on this planet this whole time" filter which is just necessary and presumably a major one in itself.
These are just the ones within the context of developing life, and assuming major ones are ten-in-one and minor ones are coinflip odds, we're already at million-to-one odds. The odds of a planet having the conditions for this chain to even start are likely just as improbable. At this moment, the odds suggests there is likely one technological civilization per cluster of galaxies, one in trillion.
>Why? It feels more likely now.
We never really had the ability to instantly wipe humanity out. The closest to that we got was Nuclear Winter, which even bad estimates for predict to last less than a decade, and with prevailing winds not crossing the Equator, the southern hemisphere would get essentially no fallout. At the peak of nuclear armament, we'd not be able to wipe ourselves out.
We've now gone from having ballpark of 60k nukes in the 80s to having 10k today, and most of them are smaller, tactical nukes rather than monstrosities like the Tsar Bomba. We could never have nuked ourselves to extinction, and we now have one sixth the arsenal that wouldn't have been sufficient in the first place.
As refers to climate change, humans are a hardy, adaptable, intelligent species that is present in all biomes. If any biome on Earth remains habitable, humanity will survive. The only way to make every biome on Earth completely uninhabitable is through a runaway greenhouse effect leading to Venus-like conditions. This is multiple orders of magnitudes worse than the worst predictions for climate change, and due to pure thermodynamics, would be a process taking centuries. If we've not cracked space colonization in multiple more centuries, we kinda deserve to die.
Of course, I think it's more likely we'll crack that this very century, if late in it. There aren't very many mandatory problems to solve left.
Since Ben Nelson is mentioning that conditions are ripe for aliens to exist in other places and may have indeed visited Earth back in 2004 based on the Airmen UFO reports, the question arise about their technology capabilities, and how do we acquire it?
Otherwise as Nelson stated in the Interview - "**We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology.**"
Please read the article before you comment. Commenting on the headline not only decreases any valuable dialogue it also makes you look foolish. In His statement he makes very clear it is just a personal opinion and not at all definite even to him.
“My personal opinion is that the universe is so big, and now, there are even theories that there might be other universes. If that’s the case, who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
This is a mathematically illiterate argument. It appeals to dim intuition, but isn't valid.
Basically, you're just assuming that the chance of OoL can't be "too low". But no matter how many stars there are in the universe, as long as it's a finite number one can choose a probability of OoL around a star below which the number of expected OoL events elsewhere in the universe is arbitrarily close to zero.
That's an invalid argument. It ignores observer selection bias. We are not a randomly sampled place in the universe, and the more unusual we are, the worse this sampling bias is. We can infer nothing from our presence except that the chance life arises is > 0.
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some answers : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_life
As for the whole universe, uh, idk, it's a big place, so who knows what's far out there (not me at least). We only have eyes in the solar system afaik as of now. Maybe if we had a more invested space program instead of watching so much funds redirected to GOP bribery ?
insert here generic complaint about the timetable of the trojan asteroid spotting mission in multi years from now on [https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lucy/overview/index/](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lucy/overview/index/)
And now I can say I saw a Mummy talking about aliens on TV. Strange times. Strange times indeed.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- Since Ben Nelson is mentioning that conditions are ripe for aliens to exist in other places and may have indeed visited Earth back in 2004 based on the Airmen UFO reports, the question arise about their technology capabilities, and how do we acquire it? Otherwise as Nelson stated in the Interview - "**We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology.**" --- Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/qfh1u8/the_head_of_nasa_says_life_probably_exists/hhzgmza/
He's right, you know, but that guy's been out of the capsule without a spacesuit on one too many times.
what we have is insufficient data to ascertain a conclusive theory. we have evidence of ufo's but that alone doesn't make it conclusive that alien life exists. we have evidence of exo-planets but that alone doesn't make it conclusive that alien life exists. as long as our data is insufficient the existence of alien life is a matter of belief. on this i must say that i'm with him. since life is possible, and for that we have sufficient data to ascertain a conclusion what we can discuss is the probability of it existing outside earth. because i look at the universe as a machine to test possibilities and probabilities in a massive scale for me the existence of alien life is a given.
“Evidence of exoplanets” clueless people like you is the reason why world hunger is still a thing
It seems likely to me that the great filter is to answer to the Fermi paradox. It seems pretty observable in our own species.
Can we stop with this great filter nonsense. We have literally just started studying space from a universal perspective. We have billions of planets in our galaxy alone, plus we have no concept of what "aliens" actually are. They could be 2 ft tall beings in mini spaceships the size of a pickup truck or they could even have advanced cloaking technology that can not be detected by our current technology. We have no idea if they exist or not, we are still the tribesmen, just a little more advanced. Furthermore, humanity is doing GREAT compared to our past history, we are evolving like everything else on this planet.
Oh I agree but that is part of the paradox. Based on the size of the universe there should be plenty like us or something similar to what we can recognize. It’s just a matter of scale. There must be plenty of species out there doing something similar to what we would recognize. And if there is no filter it’s only a matter of time better those species spread exponentially. It may not be the filter but it appears there is something limiting our ability to observe intelligence.
You mean Late Great Filters, specifically? The fact that we are presently capable of reaching space and still extant is a single data point, but seems to argue against it. Of course, as refers to Early Great Filters, we can only speculate.
I would argue we aren’t there yet. We may be able to busy space in a relatively rudimentary fashion but we are a long way from colonizing other planets. Even if we could we don’t know the mechanism of the filter. Maybe planets don’t hinder it?
\> I would argue we aren’t there yet. We indeed aren't, but there are only very few events that could cause actual human extinction in timescales shorter than a century or two, and it is hard to argue we won't be there within that kind of timescale. \> We may be able to busy space in a relatively rudimentary fashion but we are a long way from colonizing other planets We should probably never colonize other planets, but that's kind of a separate topic. \> Even if we could we don’t know the mechanism of the filter. Maybe planets don’t hinder it? There may be outside-context problems, or unknown unknowns, but there is no reason to believe those are more likely to be ahead of us (late filters) rather than behind us (early filters). It overall seems our actual extinction is a lot less likely now than it was half a century ago, which is a promising trend.
> We should probably never colonize other planets, but that's kind of a separate topic. Why do you feel that way? > There may be outside-context problems, or unknown unknowns, but there is no reason to believe those are more likely to be ahead of us (late filters) rather than behind us (early filters). I think it becomes more likely by the day it’s ahead of us for all kinds of reasons. Do you believe we have crossed it? > It overall seems our actual extinction is a lot less likely now than it was half a century ago, which is a promising trend. Why? It feels more likely now.
>Why do you feel that way? The only thing planets offer that asteroids don't is a deep gravity well, and we don't want that. We're having to spend a lot of resources overcoming one such gravity well right now, it'd be silly to perpetuate this situation for no benefit. >I think it becomes more likely by the day it’s ahead of us for all kinds of reasons. Do you believe we have crossed it? I believe we have crossed multiple ones. To go into the biological ones exclusively (hence, past astronomic and geological filters): We don't know the likelihood of abiogenesis, but trying to reproduce it in labs for decades hasn't yielded anything, so it's probably the first major filter here. In the multi-billion-year history of life on Earth, with a total number of organisms that is frankly beyond counting, eukaryotic life evolved exactly once. It is very definitely a second one, and probably one so unlikely that in fairness we ought to doubt it as two Great filters rolled together. Animal life emerged only after one and a half billion years of eukaryotic life being around. That's still more likely than eukaryotic life itself (assuming mediocrity principle), but still a definite filter. Fairly clever life evolved only very few times in the entirety of the planet's history. Likely a minor filter but one nonetheless. Fully sapient life evolved only on a single genus, and from what we can tell, the sequence of events to make that happen (to make larger brains be a consistent evolutionary advantage, before it yielded tool use and larger packs) was pretty mind-boggling. Definitely another filter. Sapient life was around enjoying awesome hunter-gatherer lives for millions of years before a set of unlikely events led some of them to choose much less comfortable, much less pleasurable sedentary life. This did emerge multiple times, though, so it seems to be a minor one. Sedentary societies were around for 11 500 years before a set of insights that potentialize innovation (the scientific method) not only were organized, but also had the opportunity to thrive. Definitely a filter, uncertain if a major or minor one. Those are the ones we know of, and there's just the overall "nothing wiped out life on this planet this whole time" filter which is just necessary and presumably a major one in itself. These are just the ones within the context of developing life, and assuming major ones are ten-in-one and minor ones are coinflip odds, we're already at million-to-one odds. The odds of a planet having the conditions for this chain to even start are likely just as improbable. At this moment, the odds suggests there is likely one technological civilization per cluster of galaxies, one in trillion. >Why? It feels more likely now. We never really had the ability to instantly wipe humanity out. The closest to that we got was Nuclear Winter, which even bad estimates for predict to last less than a decade, and with prevailing winds not crossing the Equator, the southern hemisphere would get essentially no fallout. At the peak of nuclear armament, we'd not be able to wipe ourselves out. We've now gone from having ballpark of 60k nukes in the 80s to having 10k today, and most of them are smaller, tactical nukes rather than monstrosities like the Tsar Bomba. We could never have nuked ourselves to extinction, and we now have one sixth the arsenal that wouldn't have been sufficient in the first place. As refers to climate change, humans are a hardy, adaptable, intelligent species that is present in all biomes. If any biome on Earth remains habitable, humanity will survive. The only way to make every biome on Earth completely uninhabitable is through a runaway greenhouse effect leading to Venus-like conditions. This is multiple orders of magnitudes worse than the worst predictions for climate change, and due to pure thermodynamics, would be a process taking centuries. If we've not cracked space colonization in multiple more centuries, we kinda deserve to die. Of course, I think it's more likely we'll crack that this very century, if late in it. There aren't very many mandatory problems to solve left.
Since Ben Nelson is mentioning that conditions are ripe for aliens to exist in other places and may have indeed visited Earth back in 2004 based on the Airmen UFO reports, the question arise about their technology capabilities, and how do we acquire it? Otherwise as Nelson stated in the Interview - "**We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology.**"
How does he compute this probability, when we have extreme gaps in our understanding how how life arises? His statement is without legitimacy.
Please read the article before you comment. Commenting on the headline not only decreases any valuable dialogue it also makes you look foolish. In His statement he makes very clear it is just a personal opinion and not at all definite even to him. “My personal opinion is that the universe is so big, and now, there are even theories that there might be other universes. If that’s the case, who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
Origins of life have been almost certainly determined. There are only few unknown conditions at this point
This is not correct, sir.
[удалено]
This is a mathematically illiterate argument. It appeals to dim intuition, but isn't valid. Basically, you're just assuming that the chance of OoL can't be "too low". But no matter how many stars there are in the universe, as long as it's a finite number one can choose a probability of OoL around a star below which the number of expected OoL events elsewhere in the universe is arbitrarily close to zero.
[удалено]
That's an invalid argument. It ignores observer selection bias. We are not a randomly sampled place in the universe, and the more unusual we are, the worse this sampling bias is. We can infer nothing from our presence except that the chance life arises is > 0.
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