20 Responses to “Friday Quote: ETI Like Us”

1. Jean Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 8:07 am

   Indeed, I predict that if intelligent ETI is discovered, it will be remarkably similar to us. Even in appearance, as I suspect evolutionary pathways will produce similar results under similar circumstances. That's what I'd expect from a designed universe.

Comment by Jean — July 20, 2007 @ 8:07 am

2. Raevmo Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

   I wager that intelligent ETI are catholics. Any takers?

Comment by Raevmo — July 20, 2007 @ 12:20 pm

3. WedgeHead Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 12:29 pm

   I wager that there is no ETI to be found except right here. That's what I'd expect from a designed universe that had us in mind.

Comment by WedgeHead — July 20, 2007 @ 12:29 pm

4. Jean Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

   I wager that there is no ETI to be found except right here. That's what I'd expect from a designed universe that had us in mind.

   Ah yes, God would create lots of empty galaxies. It's like building a house with thousands of rooms which are all vacant, but one.

   No, if life is the natural or predetermined outcome of this universe, if life is front-loaded into the universe, then life is bound to pop up elsewhere.

Comment by Jean — July 20, 2007 @ 1:46 pm

5. WedgeHead Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

   Ah yes, God would create lots of empty galaxies.

   In my Father's house are many rooms

Comment by WedgeHead — July 20, 2007 @ 1:59 pm

6. magnan Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

   At least some of the similarities of cognitive function between chimps, dolphins and crows would be explained by Darwinians as features of consciousness commonly necessary to enable improved interaction with the physical environment. This necessarily requires certain modes of "logic" and "reasoning". Darwinists assume this convergence is simply adaptation to a physical existence with certain commonalities of its workings and constraints. This seems reasonable to me, even as an ID advocate.

Comment by magnan — July 20, 2007 @ 2:09 pm

7. magnan Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

   Jean: Ah yes, God would create lots of empty galaxies.

   But there is the Fermi Paradox. If they are all out there, why aren't they here or at least with some physical evidence for them even if just electromagnetic signals? There are a lot of possible explanations for this, but they ultimately seem to be contrived in order to support ETI. Ward and Brownlee in their book Rare Earth speculated that indeed simple life is common in the universe, but that intelligent tool using beings are exceedingly rare if not unique to the Earth. Though they are Darwinians, their reasoning is similar to Gonzales' in Privileged Planet.

   Many ID advocates like myself don't feel there is any contradiction between man's uniqueness and notions of Divine origin.

Comment by magnan — July 20, 2007 @ 2:27 pm

8. David Heddle Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 3:15 pm

   Actually, God had to create lots of "empty" galaxies. Once he decided to use secondary causes (physics) then he had to choose the correct baryon density of the nascent universe–which led to a huge universe, and hence lots of empty galaxies. Well, a lot of galaxies, anyway. Whether or not they are empty…

   The point is, the vastness of the universe is not inexplicable in terms of a creator–in fact it is expected.

Comment by David Heddle — July 20, 2007 @ 3:15 pm

9. Bilbo Says:
   July 20th, 2007 at 4:26 pm

   A common objection to ID, is that we are assuming that other intelligences would have to be like us. If Morris is correct, this is actually a reasonable inference.

Comment by Bilbo — July 20, 2007 @ 4:26 pm

10. Thought Provoker Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

    Magnan wrote…

    But there is the Fermi Paradox. If they are all out there, why aren't they here or at least with some physical evidence for them even if just electromagnetic signals?

    Suppose we presume conscious life on earth is typical (this includes all life, not just humans). We further presume that it is so typical that it occurred in parallel with all life elsewhere in the universe.

    The nearest galaxy is 2 million light-years away. There is no mystery as to why we haven't heard from that intelligence due to speed of light limitations. Therefore we are talking about near neighbors in the Milky Way Galaxy.

    We have been sending out radio signals for less than 100 years. There aren't that many stars within 100 light-years of us. Even 2000 light-years isn't that large of a search area.

    This presumption would make sense if it turned out that life, especially conscious life, was universally connected via quantum mechanics (i.e. universal wavefunction).

    Yet another piece of evidence consistent with the Third Choice hypothesis.

Comment by Thought Provoker — July 20, 2007 @ 5:22 pm

11. Jean Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 5:25 pm

    David:

    I have no problem with lots of galaxies, just with the notion that God only put life on earth. If conditions allow it – and there have to be other earth-like planets out there – intelligent life will develop eventually is my guess.

    Magnan and Wegdehead are borrowing a familiar argument from atheists: absence of evidence is evidence of absence. I consider that a poor argument and am surprised they would use it to argue in favor of man's uniqueness.

    As for the Fermi paradox, solutions have been discussed extensively. See one recent example here. They may seem contrived to Magnan, but they certainly don't seem so to me. In fairness, one can't complain that people are not seeing aliens visiting and then handwave serious UFO evidence away (and yes, like PSI and NDE/OBE phenomena there is a serious component to UFO sightings, wether one likes it or not).

    To an extent I consider myself an ID advocate and I don't see any contradiction between the existence of intelligent ETI and a designed universe. Quite frankly, I'd favor the diversity.

    If one suggests that the universe was front-loaded for life right from the start, it makes no sense to argue that the creator singled out one specific planet out of one of many galaxies.

Comment by Jean — July 20, 2007 @ 5:25 pm

12. Jean Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 5:29 pm

    Hi TP:

    We have been sending out radio signals for less than 100 years.

    Indeed. Which is why the argument that we have not detected other signals from ETI is a poor one. The time window in which a civilisation might broadcast radio signals is considered to be very small, so one would have to be pretty lucky to have an ETI society nearby which just happens to be at the same technological level for us to pickup their broadcasts.

Comment by Jean — July 20, 2007 @ 5:29 pm

13. Jean Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 5:34 pm

    Wedgehead:
    

    In my Father's house are many rooms

    Yes, but the issue is not whether there are many rooms, but if those rooms are occupied.

Comment by Jean — July 20, 2007 @ 5:34 pm

14. WedgeHead Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 5:48 pm

    Jean sez:

    Magnan and Wegdehead are borrowing a familiar argument from atheists: absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

    I wasn't arguing, I was wagering. But there is no evidence for ETI. The only reason for thinking there is is because the universe is so big and there are so many galaxies that there has to be life elsewhere. Which, come to think of it, is a familiar argument the atheist use, as in "I wouldn't have done it that way".

    I like to entertain the notion that the ancients were right all along about somethings. They called galaxies 200 million light years away The Heavens.

Comment by WedgeHead — July 20, 2007 @ 5:48 pm

15. WedgeHead Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    Jean:

    Yes, but the issue is not whether there are many rooms, but if those rooms are occupied.

    The rest of the quote from the NT is

    John 14:2
    In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.

    I guess the implication to me is that they are not already occupied but I wouldn't mind if they were. I admit I find the idea fantastic that we are the crown of creation, so to speak, but no more fantastic than being here and thinking about it.

Comment by WedgeHead — July 20, 2007 @ 6:05 pm

16. onething Says:
    July 20th, 2007 at 7:51 pm

    If they are all out there, why aren't they here or at least with some physical evidence for them even if just electromagnetic signals?

    Try "The Talk of the Galaxy" by Paul La Violette.

Comment by onething — July 20, 2007 @ 7:51 pm

17. stunney Says:
    July 21st, 2007 at 12:33 pm

    David Heddle wrote:

    Actually, God had to create lots of "empty" galaxies. Once he decided to use secondary causes (physics) then he had to choose the correct baryon density of the nascent universe"“which led to a huge universe, and hence lots of empty galaxies. Well, a lot of galaxies, anyway. Whether or not they are empty"¦

    The point is, the vastness of the universe is not inexplicable in terms of a creator"“in fact it is expected.

    Agreed, though I would say it's not so much that the vastness of the universe is to be expected merely given a creator of some sort, but that it's to be expected given a theistic creator, that is, a creator who, because he is supremely rational and moral, wants to create a universe containing life as highly evolved and complex as humans, and do so in a way that accords with the supreme (hence mathematically consistent) rationality of his own mind ('using physics', as you put it).

    In a piece in First Things magazine, Stephen Barr, explains why such a universe needs to be so vast:

    … Having said all this, we remain with a question very troubling to many: Why is the universe so big? How can we claim to be important in a universe that dwarfs us in its scales of space and time? There is at least a paradox here. It is a paradox that was not lost upon the Psalmist, who exclaimed, "When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visit­est him?"

    One answer, of course, is the traditional one. The universe was not made only for our benefit. As the Psalmist also said, "the heavens proclaim the glory of God." If it is the glory of God that they proclaim, then there is no particular reason why they should have to be made to human scale. In fact, in the fifteenth century Nicolas of Cusa argued that only a universe of infinite extent would be worthy of the Creator and able to manifest His glory.

    The traditional answer is a good one, but there may be another. It turns out that the very age and vastness of the universe may have an "anthropic" significance. Life emerged in our universe in a way that required great stretches of time. As we have seen, most of the elements needed for life were made deep in stars. Those stars had to explode to disperse those elements and make them available before life could even begin to evolve. That whole process alone required billions of years. The evolution of human life from those elements required billions of years more. Thus, the briefness of human life­ spans and even of human history compared with the age of the universe may simply be a matter of physical necessity, given the developmental way that God seems to prefer to work. It takes longer for a tree to grow to maturity than the fruit of the tree lasts. It took much longer for the universe to grow to maturity than we last.

    Physics can also suggest why the universe has to be so large. The laws of gravity discovered by Einstein relate the size of the universe directly to its age. The fact that the universe is many billions of light"“years across is related to the fact that it has lasted several billions of years. Perhaps we would be less daunted by a cozy little universe the size, say, of a continent. But such a universe would have lasted only a few milliseconds. Even a universe the size of the solar system would have lasted only a few hours. A universe constructed in such a way as to evolve life may well have had to extend widely in space as well as in time. It may well be that the frightening expanses that are so often said to be a sign of human insignificance may actually, like so many other features of our strange universe, point to man, as they also proclaim the glory of God.
    "”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"� ��"”"”"”"”"”-

    Stephen M. Barr is a theoretical particle physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware.

    Barr is the author of a very good book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Earlier in his article he also makes another highly interesting and non-obvious observation: life would be impossible had the number of large spatial dimensions not been three:

    …So far I have described various quantities, like the strengths of the strong nuclear force and the flatness of space, that had to be "fine"“tuned" to very special numerical values to make life as we know it possible. But there are also certain gross qualitative features of the laws of physics that are "anthropically" important.

    One example is the fact that space is three"“dimensional. We take this fact for granted, but we shouldn't. That space has three dimensions is an empirical fact, not a metaphysical necessity. Theoretical physicists study hypothetical universes with other numbers of dimensions all the time. If the world had not had three space dimensions, but four or more of them, the gravitational force between two objects would have depended in a different way upon the distance between them. And that, in turn, would have made it impossible for planets to orbit stably around stars: they would either have plummeted into stars or flown off into space. (Interestingly, the first person to point out this consequence of a different law of gravity was the Anglican clergyman William Paley. Paley was one of the first people to think about anthropic coincidences in the laws of nature.) In the same way, the orbits of electrons in atoms would not have been stable, and life based on chemistry would have been impossible. On the other hand, had there been fewer than three space dimensions, complex organisms would doubtless have been impossible for quite a different reason. Complex neural circuitry, as is needed in a brain, would not be possible in one or two dimensions. If one tries to draw a complicated circuit diagram on a two"“dimensional surface, one finds that the wires have to intersect each other many times, leading to short"“circuits.

    He goes on:

    As a final example, the fact that nature obeys the principles of quantum theory is highly important for the possibility of life. It turns out that matter would not be stable in a non"“quantum world.

    People generally suppose that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes the world, at least at the atomic level, a fuzzier and more indefinite place. However, paradoxical as it may sound, that principle is ultimately responsible for the fact that subatomic particles form stable atoms with well"“defined chemical properties. Were it not for the principles of quantum theory, matter would be amorphous and protean to such a degree that it is hard to imagine a living organism being possible"¦..

    "¦..In the final analysis one cannot escape from two very basic facts: the laws of nature did not have to be as they are; and the laws of nature had to be very special in form if life were to be possible. In my view these facts lend themselves most naturally to a religious interpretation. Certainly, they tend to undercut the claim so often confidently made by materialists that the discoveries of science point to a universe without meaning or purpose, in which man is an accidental by"“product.

    One can read about many more examples of fine-tuning data in here. It's really quite amazing how much of it there is.

    Scientifically informed people who wish to remain naturalists don't really have much by way of a rational option but to hypothesize a multiverse (with either parallel or cyclic universes), because: 1) as Barr notes, the fine tuned values are not metaphysically or logically necessary—many other values are perfectly conceivable, coherent, and are actually modeled; and 2) the odds against all these parameters (many of which are mutually independent) having the values they do by chance, given only one or a few universes, are astronomical. And so, we observe the naturalist, in a desperate and amusingly ironic attempt to explain the empirical data, positing an infinite number of physically unobservable entities as part of an untestable hypothesis, so as to avoid positing one unobservable transcendent rationally conscious reality.

Comment by stunney — July 21, 2007 @ 12:33 pm

18. stunney Says:
    July 21st, 2007 at 1:57 pm

    Jean and Thought Provoker wrote:

    TP: The nearest galaxy is 2 million light-years away. There is no mystery as to why we haven't heard from that intelligence due to speed of light limitations. Therefore we are talking about near neighbors in the Milky Way Galaxy.

    We have been sending out radio signals for less than 100 years. There aren't that many stars within 100 light-years of us. Even 2000 light-years isn't that large of a search area.

    Jean: Indeed. Which is why the argument that we have not detected other signals from ETI is a poor one. The time window in which a civilisation might broadcast radio signals is considered to be very small, so one would have to be pretty lucky to have an ETI society nearby which just happens to be at the same technological level for us to pickup their broadcasts.

    One quick point, TP, the distance to Andromeda is only 2 million light-years as measured in our frame of reference. It is arbitrarily shorter than that as measured in a vehicle travelling from there to here at speeds arbitrarily closer to the speed of light. The journey could take 30 seconds or less as far as the basic laws of physics are concerned.

    The challenge of Fermi's Paradox is not simply to do with technological challenges posed by distance, however. It's to do with time, but in a different sense from the dilation involved in special relativistic travel scenarios.

    Statistically, if intelligent life is common in our galaxy, it's highly unlikely that humans are the most evolved and advanced example of it. We went from hunter-gatherers to growing crops for global export in 10,000 years. We went from the Wright brothers to walking on the Moon in less than 70 years. Imagine how much more advanced we could be in 10,000 years starting from where we are now. If among intelligent civilizations in the galaxy we rank as average, there should be thousands of civilizations which are thousands of years more advanced than us. And I think Fermi's point was that one or more of them should have found us by now, or left some kind of calling card even prior to homo sapiens appearing on the scene. If they haven't (and I'm not ruling out the possibility that they have), then the reasonable, more probable conclusion to draw is that in fact intelligent civilization is very rare in the galaxy.

    Though I've not read the books Rare Earth and Privileged Planet, my understanding is that they both argue on scientific grounds that while the conditions for scientific civilization are ideal on Earth, they are very likely to be extremely rare elsewhere. For instance, the Earth, Moon, and Sun create ideal conditions for studying eclipses, without which it would have been vastly more difficult to develop the science of spectrum analysis needed in astrophysics, which in turn is needed to study far-distant regions of the universe, which in turn would be important for trying to make contact with far-off civilizations.

    This won't matter to TP, but there are theological pros and cons in this issue too. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation argues that Christ is uniquely human and divine. Some Patristic authors took this to indicate that humans are at the pinnacle of the physical creation. Some, indeed, explained Satan's rebellion as being the result of his fury that a divine Person would so 'degrade' himself as to become such an inferior creature as a human, and because Satan judged that human sin should not be forgiven and redeemed. Thus Satan could not be close to God because Satan opposed God's love for humanity. At any rate, this line of thought makes it harder to imagine humans not being special in God's eyes.

    However, an alternative thought would be that we are the one lost sheep among a hundred—the other ninety-nine are not sinful and don't need to be saved. This allows for a unique Incarnation in Christ, while the rest of the universe lives in friendship with God. It would also suggest a possible defense against the problem of evil: God made the universe the way it is because God foresaw that it would contain very many sinless, deliriously happy, paradisal civilizations, ours being a tragic exception. Another purpose may be to let the physics of the universe so evolve that ultimately we can be resurrected and placed in various physical paradises, using information that is stored in the cosmos now, wormholes, and God knows what else.

    Yes, the weekend is here.:cool:

Comment by stunney — July 21, 2007 @ 1:57 pm

19. dimasok Says:
    July 21st, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    I think we'd all be long dead before we stumble upon any traces of other civilizations (of which I hope there are many) so it wouldn't really matter now, would it?

Comment by dimasok — July 21, 2007 @ 8:53 pm

20. WedgeHead Says:
    July 22nd, 2007 at 12:44 pm

    stunney:

    Imagine how much more advanced we could be in 10,000 years starting from where we are now.

    Is it a given that we will be that much more scientifically advanced? Am I the only one asking this question?

    I wonder if we are reaching the limits of material science. If we go to other stars, it will not be in something resembling a space ship, perhaps. Maybe thats why we haven't gotten calling cards from other more advanced civilizations.

Comment by WedgeHead — July 22, 2007 @ 12:44 pm