Actually Alpha Centauri is two stars forming a binary system. And Proxima Centauri is closer, although not visible to the naked eye.
No planets have been discovered around either, and the program designed to discover planets in the habitable zone of the system was cancelled in 2010 for lack of funds.
Lord Jim wrote:
I'm making a far narrower point...
That given our own planetary experience, and how long it took, and the convergence of events required to create a species even of our level of development,
Actually, humans only developed about two million years ago ... Don't forget that life was pretty much wiped out 65 million years ago. So we developed in pretty much a blink of an eye ...
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear is he still wrong?
Actually, humans only developed about two million years ago ... Don't forget that life was pretty much wiped out 65 million years ago. So we developed in pretty much a blink of an eye ...
Stoat, I feel like you're making my point for me...
Look at how many different evolutionary paths the planet went down, over a period of 500 million years, (it took the first 3 and a half billion years just for this planet to develop to the point that it could sustain life) evolutionary tracks that were wiped out by sheer chance after millions of years, before we got to that "blink of an eye".....
In our case, yes, LJ, but being wiped out by an asteroid is a freak accident. If there are potentially billions of billions of habitable planets, and "intelligent" life can form within a few million years then I am quite sure it has done so elsewhere. I don't think that because our planet waited three billion years or so before we came along it had to wait that long. And even if a planet must wait three billion years before being mature enough to produce life, with a 14 billion year old universe, there will be loads of planets out there much older than the required time.
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear is he still wrong?
Is there 'life' in some form out there in the universe? I just can't ever get too worked up over it. The numbers alone make it seem likely but not of great consequence to us. Even if there is intelligent life the basic physics says that it really just can't ever matter. Even if we lived for hundreds of thousands of years the amount of mass we would need to move, and the distances, from one habitable system to another are too great.
"Is there life in the solar system" is a question we can do something with and certainly worth looking into.
I'm minded to agree with you, LJ, though for different reasons. One think to think about. If an alien race could travel close to the speed of light then they could feasibly travel thousands of light years in just a few of our weeks. for example. Suppose we could travel close to light speed and set off on a voyage around the galaxy. We might travel 10000 light years. To us, the journey might take a month. To observers on earth that journey would take over 10000 years! That's relativity for you ...
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear is he still wrong?
thestoat wrote:In our case, yes, LJ, but being wiped out by an asteroid is a freak accident.
Not a very scientific assessment, considering the number or asteroids, far outnumber other celestial matter.
Do you really want to talk science about this lo? Do you really? Then try considering the huge amount of space for the asteroids to be in, the fact that they need to be pretty big to wipe life out and the fact that planets like Jupiter act as a hoover, helping to keep them away from us. This is why we have only had one in a few hundred million years.
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear is he still wrong?
thestoat wrote:In our case, yes, LJ, but being wiped out by an asteroid is a freak accident.
Not a very scientific assessment, considering the number or asteroids, far outnumber other celestial matter.
Do you really want to talk science about this lo? Do you really? Then try considering the huge amount of space for the asteroids to be in, the fact that they need to be pretty big to wipe life out and the fact that planets like Jupiter act as a hoover, helping to keep them away from us. This is why we have only had one in a few hundred million years.
Regardless of the relative likelihood of asteroid strikes, there have been at least five or six mass extinctions that dramatically re-ordered life and its evolution on this planet, with a couple very nearly ending it altogether. (And that doesn't even include events on the scale of the Toba Catastrophe, which came close to doing away with our species.) So whatever number of planets might exist capable of producing life, there is a significant likelihood that it's being killed off perhaps just as rapidly.
Wiki suggests 5 in something like 540 million years (estimates vary up to 20) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event. So if we average one every 50 million years, then that gives a life form plenty of time to evolve, develop and protect itself from them. And there are potentially billions of habitable star systems out there - some that may not have many asteroids at all.
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear is he still wrong?
Lord Jim wrote:I've always had a little problem with that....
A civilization so advanced, that they had mastered the challenges of interstellar space travel....
Able to traverse the vast expanses of space....
Just so they could come here and shove stuff up the asses of a bunch of randomly selected drunken rednecks....
Seems hardly worth the trip.....
Channeling?
Shít My Dad Says
"No. Aliens exist, I just don't think they came millions of light years just to see earth. Be like driving 1000 miles to go to an Arby's"
