First Contact

[Dominic]

I'm interested in a discussion on what will Man's first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence be like.

First, let's forget little green men landing on Earth and hunting for Reeses Pieces. First Contact will most likely be some kind of communication, ala the Carl Sagan book and movie, Contact.

Second, what will the consequences be for the World if it happens in say, the next two hundred years? Will it effect religion, and if so, how? Will it have the possibility of bringing Earth's diverse and warring cultures together or might it drive us even further apart as governments jocky to control the information and communication?

Third, I guess we can also discuss the possibility of it happening at all. Do you think it's likely to happen? Impossible? Why or why not?

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To get the discussion started, here is the famous Drake Equation that was developed by Frank Drake in 1961 as a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy. The Drake Equation is:

N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL

The equation can really be looked at as a number of questions:

N* represents the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy
Question: How many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?
Answer: Current estimates are 100 billion.
fp is the fraction of stars that have planets around them
Question: What percentage of stars have planetary systems?
Answer: Current estimates range from 20% to 50%.
ne is the number of planets per star that are capable of sustaining life
Question: For each star that does have a planetary system, how many planets are capable of sustaining life?
Answer: Current estimates range from 1 to 5.
fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves
Question: On what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining life does life actually evolve?
Answer: Current estimates range from 100% (where life can evolve it will) down to close to 0%.
fi is the fraction of fl where intelligent life evolves
Question: On the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves intelligent life?
Answer: Estimates range from 100% (intelligence is such a survival advantage that it will certainly evolve) down to near 0%.
fc is the fraction of fi that communicate
Question: What percentage of intelligent races have the means and the desire to communicate?
Answer: 10% to 20%
fL is fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live
Question: For each civilization that does communicate, for what fraction of the planet's life does the civilization survive?
Answer: This is the toughest of the questions. If we take Earth as an example, the expected lifetime of our Sun and the Earth is roughly 10 billion years. So far we've been communicating with radio waves for less than 100 years. How long will our civilization survive? Will we destroy ourselves in a few years like some predict or will we overcome our problems and survive for millennia? If we were destroyed tomorrow the answer to this question would be 1/100,000,000th. If we survive for 10,000 years the answer will be 1/1,000,000th.
When all of these variables are multiplied together we come up with:

N, the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.

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Really, when you consider the huge number of life-providing stars in just our own galaxy, how is it not possible there is intelligent life somewhere out there? But if that's the case, why haven't we heard from someone by now? Obviously, the vast distances of light years separating Earth from potential neighbors is mind-boggling, so that could be the reason.

How do you think First Contact will happen, and what will be its consequences?

[asofel]

I used to be into cosmology and lots of questions like this. If you consider how many stars are out there (and basically a lot of the questions brought up in the Drake equation), its hard to really think we're alone. As far as just our galaxy, well who knows, but I don't think thats really the point of the question or topic.

I do wonder sometimes as I think there's no mathematical way we're the only form of life anywhere...and yet, wtf would something else look like?

I don't think it'd affect religion much in the sense that most religious people I know wouldn't suddenly think Jesus was a bastard if we discovered E.T. Maybe it'd spawn some new religions, really hard to say though, you know?

I can't imagine it really bringing us together; I guess the only possibility is if we were somehow under attack, like an Independence Day scenario, and even then I wonder if we'd be smart and accepting enough to really work together. Somehow, unfortunately, I doubt it, but then again I'm pretty misanthropic.

I guess this is kind of a cheap answer, but as far as likely....yeah, at some point in the future I would imagine two "alien" forms of life will come into contact with each other; at the same time, the universe is really, really, really, really [censored] big, and when you're talking about distances like 5 million light years that, on the cosmic scale, is nothing, but would take what we can only imagine is a minimum of 5 million years to travel....well, then you start to wonder if it'll ever happen....

Or maybe somewhere out there there're a few planets near each other that actually both support life, and they're laughing at us while trying to phase the [censored] out of each other.

[pete fabrizio]

I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

[Dominic]

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I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

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could you expand on this when you have a minute?

[asofel]

[ QUOTE ]
I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

[/ QUOTE ]

Do you really think that means much? I mean, how long has it been running for now? I really don't know, but I'd imagine any sort of data its collected/processed/etc is a minute blip in the grand scheme of things. (Not disagreeing that we face a far likelier chance of blowing ourselves up before making contact...)

[suzzer99]

[ QUOTE ]
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I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

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could you expand on this when you have a minute?

[/ QUOTE ]

If civilizations were around for a billion or even a million years, it's likely that we would pick up the radio waves of near us (within a million light years). Since we haven't it tells us that civilizations are a) rare and/or b) don't last very long. The fact that someone hasn't found us yet, means the odds of someone finding us now, or of us finding someone else, are miniscule.

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

[/ QUOTE ]

could you expand on this when you have a minute?

[/ QUOTE ]

If civilizations were around for a billion or even a million years, it's likely that we would pick up the radio waves of near us (within a million light years).

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Pretty sure this is wrong.

I doubt radio waves from Earth would be detectable beyond a couple dozen light years. Below that, the signal to noise ratio is too low. Not to mention dispersion.

[SBR]

[ QUOTE ]
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[ QUOTE ]
I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

[/ QUOTE ]

could you expand on this when you have a minute?

[/ QUOTE ]

If civilizations were around for a billion or even a million years, it's likely that we would pick up the radio waves of near us (within a million light years). Since we haven't it tells us that civilizations are a) rare and/or b) don't last very long. The fact that someone hasn't found us yet, means the odds of someone finding us now, or of us finding someone else, are miniscule.

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I'm not sure that's true we've only been around in any sort of detectable way for at most what? 50 years? 70?

I think there is a question of what "contact" will be. I mean if we received a signal from some sort of ultra advanced civilization tomorrow wouldn't it be very likely that the civilization that sent the message has long since disappeared? I think the chances of us receiving a signal from a civilization that still exists is very close to 0 due to the huge distances any signal would have to travel.

[asofel]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

[/ QUOTE ]

could you expand on this when you have a minute?

[/ QUOTE ]

If civilizations were around for a billion or even a million years, it's likely that we would pick up the radio waves of near us (within a million light years). Since we haven't it tells us that civilizations are a) rare and/or b) don't last very long. The fact that someone hasn't found us yet, means the odds of someone finding us now, or of us finding someone else, are miniscule.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not sure that's true we've only been around in any sort of detectable way for at most what? 50 years? 70?

I think there is a question of what "contact" will be. I mean if we received a signal from some sort of ultra advanced civilization tomorrow wouldn't it be very likely that the civilization that sent the message has long since disappeared? I think the chances of us receiving a signal from a civilization that still exists is very close to 0 due to the huge distances any signal would have to travel.

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just keep in mind decouple pairs, the theoretical possibilities of black holes and whites holes being connected, and of course, the force.

[pete fabrizio]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
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[ QUOTE ]
I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.

[/ QUOTE ]

could you expand on this when you have a minute?

[/ QUOTE ]

If civilizations were around for a billion or even a million years, it's likely that we would pick up the radio waves of near us (within a million light years).

[/ QUOTE ]

Pretty sure this is wrong.

I doubt radio waves from Earth would be detectable beyond a couple dozen light years. Below that, the signal to noise ratio is too low. Not to mention dispersion.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think the idea is that if there were civilizations out there that lasted for millions or billions years and kept advancing technologically, they would leave a bigger footprint than we do.

The SETI failure hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but it's pretty significant, and there are a lot of interesting inferences that can be drawn from it. For example, back before all this planetary discovery started taking off in the late 90's/early 2000's, it was still common to believe that our solar system was probably "normal," or that solar systems around similarly-sized stars would likely be similar. Some scientists, however, took the SETI null result to suggest that systems like ours must be much rarer than we had imagined. Sure enough, as we started finding planets, we discovered all kinds of bizarre systems, with gas giants much closer to their stars than most scientists even believed possible, etc.