When You Think it Should be Happening

[Zinjanthropos]

IMHO and perhaps that of others, the weirdest stuff is that which never occurs when you think it should.

Don't know if I'm alone in this line of thinking but if we are a magnet for LGM and their flying machines then why can't we hear their chatter or pick up communication signals? Furthermore, what chance does  SETI have when we can't get in touch with the aliens already observing, circling, touching down, or crashing into the planet?

If there are genuine  claims of listening in on LGM then why are we even bothering with SETI?

[Secular Sanity]

The Fermi Paradox (wikipedia.org)

Maybe they all died out—weren’t as optimistic as we are.   

[Zinjanthropos]

The Fermi Paradox (wikipedia.org)

Maybe they all died out—weren’t as optimistic as we are.   

A dead civilization's signals could still be heading our way. We can also send a signal to a place where an intelligent civilization is still at the  'edging away from a hot ocean vent' stage of evolution. 

I would hazard to guess that a bonafide believer of ET romping around our planet would be the first to say WTF do we need SETI to search the heavens for when LGM is right at our door. But that doesn't happen either?

[C C]

IMHO and perhaps that of others, the weirdest stuff is that which never occurs when you think it should.

Vaguely akin to "go-to-church regularly" Sadie wondering "How come I never see any angels?" when she's living in the heart of corn-belt country? "Many of my friends get contacted by angels, but why am I deprived of that privilege?"

Maybe this is the contingent, Hume-ish or without duty slash minus universal applicability way I feel like framing the subject today, but perhaps not tomorrow:

Geocentrism's fatal wounding wasn't enough. It was as if a solemn hymn had to be tacked-on as an auxiliary, which emphasized there not being anything special about Earth at all. ("Special" in terms of the sparse side of probability instead gets reflexively misinterpreted as "divine bias" in that segment of the sci and intellectual community that still has its head stuck up into the buttocks of bygone battles with the mainstream of a medieval era. That kind of "absorbs data, technique, and popular academic doctrine but can't actually personally think / examine / challenge for themselves" Idiot Acres section of Mensa land.)

Introduce something like the Rare Earth Hypothesis and the reaction is like tossing a graffiti-scarred, feces-smeared icon of Jesus into the middle of a Baptist revival. It's literally become a dogmatic nerd-religion, this belief that our Milky Way galaxy is strewn with so much complex or intelligent life that you can't help but trip over it. "Humans are being barred from contact and joining the Interstellar Federation until we evolve enough to end war and environmental / ecosystem destruction" might just as much soon be a b-class-cinema mantra excuse for the professional talking dolls as the groupies at entertainment conventions.

Not that REH definitely had the external gonads to hang in there... But the longer the silence continues, the longer the "million years of travel is nothing to us" exploratory / guardian / manipulating machines like the Black Monoliths are absent, the longer the lack of mega-sized engineering projects greets telescopes, and future probes of ours turn-up nothing... Then the more those contrarian points of view get enhanced in manhood.

Just how weird does "it's such an exotic form of intelligence that we can't discern or detect it as such" have to get to be out of the ballpark in terms of what "intelligence" originally meant, as an idea abstracted from the territory of ourselves, of what we do?

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[Zinjanthropos]

What's going on with creating life in the lab? Been kind of quiet recently. I'm talking from scratch, molda little pile of chemicals into something alive. Not using another life form, simply from the material at hand. Although I lean towards this someday being accomplished it seems to be one of those things that is always on the cusp but never gets there. Everything but the missing ingredient.

[C C]

What's going on with creating life in the lab? Been kind of quiet recently. I'm talking from scratch, molda little pile of chemicals into something alive. Not using another life form, simply from the material at hand. Although I lean towards this someday being accomplished it seems to be one of those things that is always on the cusp but never gets there. Everything but the missing ingredient.

AFAIK, nobody who makes headlines is doing anything "from scratch" in the old Stanley Miller style. It's geared toward taking the creation / development of synthetic life away from the arbitrary (abiogenesis and evolution), and placing it into the guidance of human hands as much as possible. Both the Craig Venter enterprises and the Mansy Lab stuff begin at a certain level of control and no deeper.

Ewen Callaway: Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism. Functioning with 473 genes, the cell is a milestone in his team’s 20-year quest to reduce life to its bare essentials and, by extension, to design life from scratch. [...] Unlike the first synthetic cells made in 2010, in which Venter’s team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, copied an existing bacterial genome and transplanted it into another cell, the genome of the minimal cells is like nothing in nature. Venter says that the cell [...] constitutes a brand new, artificial species. (‘Minimal’ cell raises stakes in race to harness synthetic life)

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The ongoing quest to build life from scratch
http://ideas.ted.com/the-ongoing-quest-t...m-scratch/

EXCERPT: For the past six years, Mansy has been trying to make artificial cells that can interact with natural cells. His team recently achieved a notable success: their partially artificial cells can “hear” molecules naturally released from bacteria, and they can also synthesize and send molecules back in reply. Here, Mansy explains the science behind the breakthrough and discusses the potential implications. [...] Start by building your artificial cells. What exactly does it take to make one? “We take non-living component pieces and put them together into something that displays the properties of life,” says Mansy. “Using lipids, or fat molecules, we make microscopic containers called vesicles. Inside the containers we put synthetic pieces of DNA, along with a mixture of molecules extracted from bacteria to ‘power’ the system. The activity of our artificial cells is encoded in the synthetic DNA.”

A range of artificial or simulated life "species" and their evolving generations have, of course, been developed and transpiring for decades. But the most dominant "definition of life" canon doesn't accept computer-based Alife as being alive.

Computer-simulated life forms evolve 'intelligence'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/...gence.html

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[Zinjanthropos]

https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_hanczyc...d_not_life

Watching this I always wonder how much time does a protocell need before it is officially deemed alive. In the early Earth I'm thinking not much plus the advantage of mass production during the right conditions. Martin Hanczyk stops short of calling his lab results life but maybe he shouldn't.

For those who haven't watched it, I think I've provided this link before but it's one of my favorite vids of all time.

[Syne]

The Fermi Paradox (wikipedia.org)

Maybe they all died out—weren’t as optimistic as we are.   

A dead civilization's signals could still be heading our way. We can also send a signal to a place where an intelligent civilization is still at the  'edging away from a hot ocean vent' stage of evolution. 

I would hazard to guess that a bonafide believer of ET romping around our planet would be the first to say WTF do we need SETI to search the heavens for when LGM is right at our door. But that doesn't happen either?

For believers, SETI is the glorious possibility for affirmation. It's somewhat akin to the belief in the rapture...some event that no one could deny.

What's going on with creating life in the lab? Been kind of quiet recently. I'm talking from scratch, molda little pile of chemicals into something alive. Not using another life form, simply from the material at hand. Although I lean towards this someday being accomplished it seems to be one of those things that is always on the cusp but never gets there. Everything but the missing ingredient.

As with UFO believers, abiogensis believers will hype anything as evidence of accomplished fact.

I'm skeptical of both (including CC's angel visitations...I mean, how much does that really differ from LGM encounters), and for the same reasons. If either occurs, why do we find zero compelling evidence? If abiogensis is common enough to spawn life from inorganic substances, why don't we have evidence of it happening or the ability to reproduce it. And it would seem to require abiogenesis to postulate that the universe may teem with enough intelligent life to make contact likely.

Maybe these are just modern superstitions.

[Zinjanthropos]

How's things going Syne?

I'm inclined to agree with you somewhat re life created from scratch because I suspect the key ingredient has either long since left the confines of the universe, had an expiry date or has morphed into something. No idea what it might be though and hope I'm wrong about anything missing.

My thoughts on intelligent life in the universe is that it may be very rare, perhaps something in the line of 1 in every million galaxies or even greater. The odds of us meeting them may be astronomically stacked against it ever happening. Other life incapable of producing the technology to communicate with us is more likely out there, IMHO.

[Syne]

Not bad here, Zin. Good topic, BTW.

I would agree that intelligent life, if it even exists elsewhere, is likely very rare. But even aside from that, humans haven't existed long...relative to the cosmic timescale. So why would we expect any other intelligent life to exist concurrently enough with our own for signals to be detected? Electromagnetic signals weaken by the inverse-square law with distance...making them increasingly noisy and difficult to detect.