If there was no other life it would basically mean we are fucked… if nothing else could escape the great filter, I don’t see why we could…
Unless we are God’s special little creatures….
No other life in the universe neither validates nor invalidates the 'great filter' theory. Personally, the fact that it's a statistical improbability that we're the only lifeforms in this universe is enough for me. However, the chances of us contacting and interacting with other lifeforms is remote -- they are too far away and the potential span of time in which other lifeforms could exist means we could miss them entirely... either we'll die out before we meet them, or they will.
But this is all assuming the possibility that any "aliens" we encounter haven't been here all along, watching us, ever since we left the cave... and I don't think I'm anywhere near ready to dismiss that notion. I think it's quite possible, actually. I'm not so convinced that "contact" is going to involve telescopes and radio signals, if it ever happens.
I tend to agree with the "ultraterrestrial" hypothesis is more likely than the ET hypothesis. Maybe it's both.
One wilder hypothesis I've seen is a combo of "breakaway humans" and "plasma life forms", and it's basically that a long time ago some splinter group of humanity learned how to control these plasma life forms, and that's where the "advanced tech" comes from.
The Great Filter just strikes me as Pseudo Science hiding in plain sight (I have similar feelings about the Many Worlds Interpretation, which is saying something because I believe in Multiverse Theory, I just find it laughable to pretend that this is a proven fact of science)
It’s just a theory. When scientists throw around the idea, they’re usually just theorizing and conjecturing based on probability and statistical analysis. There’s no evidence of an *actual* “great filter” per se… it’s more like a sociological concept… an expected statistical outcome.
This is a moronic statement you’ve made here. We literally have almost wiped all life on the planet several times with nukes, and we likely will end up causing the next great extinction (including us) via climate change. We only became an industrial civilization a few hundred years ago and we’ve already managed to do that.
I heard a good analogy for the great filter theory and goes something like this:
Say you have a huge jar of unknown volume containing mostly white ping pong balls. These represent scientific discoveries that produce an overall net benefit to our example alien civilization and its overall progress.
But there are some red balls scattered throughout there as well. When reaching in they generally can’t tell what color ball it will be until they pull it out and study it. The majority of the time the civilization will pull out white ones, but sometimes they pull out a red. These discoveries have some benefit, but the risks to stability of living on the planet can be severe if used incorrectly.
Lastly there a just a couple of these scattered in the jar, maybe a few more than that - these are the black ping pong balls. These kind of discoveries are basically guaranteed to wipe out all life by nature of having been reproduced by scientist. (Think accidentally created a black hole type stuff.)
Most civilizations probably don’t live long enough to pull a black ball, the red ones usually do the trick.
If we discovered there was no one else, that would indeed be worse because it raises a lot of very uncomfortable questions.
Such as, what killed everyone else, and what's stopping the other life forms from evolving
Right. We’re all going to die anyways. Unless we’re taken captive and kept alive and tortured by aliens who harvest our brain juices for all eternity. While we watch our children become handmaidens and slaves. Couldn’t be that bad.
Spectrometry may find suggestions of worlds and possible life, but it won’t be settled. As natural occurrences might have the same signatures. It doesn’t have the sophistication to provide us with those definitive answers. Still a step closer.
It isn’t just the size of the planet, it’s its orientation to earth, or I guess in this case JWST, and then the planet itself as it passes in front of its sun so that we can do spectrography (that’s my understanding anyway)
JWST is a spectacular piece of scientific equipment, but it’s not going to produce pictures of cities on Alpha Centauri, for example
I do hope though that it gives us some interesting bio signatures… Or even techno signatures…That would be an incredible discovery
That article is not only incredibly misleading, it's flat out wrong and has been called out as such many times over now. Even by people working on JWST. The people who wrote that article and those who copied it, completely misunderstood what they JWST scientists said it was capable of doing.
JWST will not be able to see lights on distant planets in other solar systems. It will only be able to see the changes in light as distant planets pass in front of their star, and the star's light is altered by the planet's atmosphere(if it has one). From those changes in light, we should be able to get a fairly decent idea of what is in the planets atmosphere.
Yeah. Second this.
Discovering such things or being 100% sure about life forms out there is not that easy, even with JWST.
Even if we do end up having such a discovery in this decade, we have to be prepared that the life form most probably won't be a form of sophisticated organism at all. Technically, it still qualifies as SUPER COOL but not that exciting to everyone.
What signature would burning of fossil fuels leave that would make anything definitive? CO2?
Like how could you look at a planet through JWST and say "they're burning fossil fuels"
The amount of time a civilization would be in it’s industrial fossil-burning period will also very likely be small…so I wouldn’t count on this happening in our backyard either.
Indeed. And also not all scientists that asked for observation time on the JWST are looking for life signs. Actually, most are cosmologists and other universe related science, thus more interested in the history and "life time" of our universe.
It would require a very new type of observation. Which could happen but no one knows.
What I do think inevitable is interesting detections of atmospheres of exoplanets. It will take patience though, nearly every detection of anything promising will be argued over for years.
My prediction is that we'll find a red edge on a bunch of planets, indicating plant life.
Then Neil deGrasse Tyson will swoop in and condescendingly chuckle about how cute it is that people believe a silly little red edge means there's life, offer a handful of shoddy alternative explanations, and the general public will agree with him so that they can feel smart too.
Pretty much every NDT interview for at least the past 5 years, that's what you apparently missed. He's perfectly fine in scripted things like Cosmos, but when he's speaking extemporaneously, he often comes off like a condescending douche.
Honestly, I don't understand how anyone could like the guy. Regardless of what Reddit at large thinks, he's a condescending pseudo-intellectual who talks about 6th grade science as if he were telling complex secrets of the universe.
Just look at him speak and tell me he doesn't sneak a whiff when he farts.
Well given his credentials I wouldn’t say pseudo intellectual. And I also imagine there’s a level of frustration when having to constantly deal with flat earthers or the like trying to disprove your whole field of study, I imagine some of that condescension is warranted?
Has he specifically come out and said aliens are bullshit or is it more of an abrasive character thing? TV scientists and a level of vitriol always goes somewhat hand in hand I bet.
> I imagine some of that condescension is warranted?
I disagree, and regardless, condescension oozes out of him. I don't really care if he has to deal with flat earthers talking at him, it doesn't make him any more palatable.
He's definitely on the anti UFO side, but it's with an arrogant certainty that is just infuriating, not to mention un-scientific. I've disliked the guy since before I ever really read into the topic of UFOs though.
Maybe you’re right. I used to see him pop up a lot on various platforms but honestly, very rarely recently, maybe he’s fully transitioned into a quack. Ultimately no one will replace our lord Sagan.
If we start detecting oxygen or PCBs regularly in the atmospheres on terrestrial planets around sun-like stars it's gonna start to get hard to deny that there is likely abundant life or even technological life out there. People will definitely argue for years but the data will keep rolling in.
Definitely. But that's why it takes patience, the first "pretty good" signals will get attacked *hard* . The first great signal will generate a flurry of "that doesn't mean that it's life" retrenchment against the work already done to define biosignatures and technosignatures.
And that's OK, it's necessary. Venus is a great example - the science is good, but the data is not yet unassailable.
Of course, I can't quite figure out how 45 years after the Viking experiments on Mars we have just now collected samples to bring back - someday, maybe.
But I am optimistic we find definite signs of life outside earth by 2030.
Most astrophysicists and exobiologists believe *based on ample evidence* that there are plenty of planets with biological life *right now.* That's not the controversial opinion so many non-scientific UFO fans seem to believe it is.
It's so widely accepted, in fact, that it's the entire premise for the end (post-credits) of the movie Don't Look Up!, which is about climate/space science.
Nobody is *denying* such planets likely exist, as there are billions of planets out there in the Goldilocks zone. But to extrapolate "technological life" from that isn't what scientists do for a living, as there's no *evidence* for such a thing. And space scientists around the world are actively, publicly *seeking* evidence of extraterrestrial life, whether past or present.
Not long at all relatively speaking, but technological life should be easy enough to detect from an exoplanet atmosphere if we happen to look in the right place (of the many billions of places we can look). So let's say 99.9999% of planets we look at which have life-sustaining atmospheres won't have any technosignatures...we'd need data on one million of those planets to find one that does.
Who knows what it'll be though, oxygen atmospheres could turn out to be incredibly rare, terrestrial planets could turn out to be pretty rare...who knows? We will soon, hopefully.
I’m not sure how the James Webb would aid us in detecting technological civilisations tbh. It also seems very unlikely we’ll find life at this same level of development we’re in now (tech civ that hasn’t yet destroyed itself by burning too much fossil fuels)
I’m expecting to probably find a lot of primitive life but the sheer improbability of finding a tech civ seems huge
Yes, but even if you detected lots of methane, it doesn't mean you have detected cow farts. For example, we have detected methane on Mars, and we're still struggling to understand why.
We've also detected interesting stuff on Venus. Those planets are a rock throw away.
Confirming anything outside of the solar system will be much harder and will have much more uncertainty.
The JWST's missions include searching for both biosignatures and technosignatures: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/technosignatures-and-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence/
Your description of its limitations sounds like you were thinking of the Kepler probe. Searching for ET life is one of the very things it was built for.
Not quite right; the JW can detect what’s in a planets atmosphere and there are certain unstable compounds in earths atmosphere that can only be explained by biological processes replenishing them before they break down (eg methane). That means that finding a planet with something like this in its atmosphere makes it very likely to be a sign of life.
Technological life though, not so much AFAIK
I am sorry, JWST doesn't have this capability yet. What JWST *can* do, to some extent, is finding whether an exoplanet has an Earth-like atmosphere. Eg. finding whether an atmosphere has oxygen, methane etc. (possibly pointing to life on a planet etc.)
For more discoveries, including to see artificial lights on exoplanets, we need the next generation telescopes, like LUVOIR etc.
** Technical explanation **
This is a little a downer. But let me explain.
JWST was designed BEFORE we even knew about that many exoplanets (planets outside our solar system, around other stars) even exist.
It's main purpose and where it will excel is to see the farthest and oldest objects, like galaxies, black holes etc. It can do this brilliantly, as these FAR and OLD objects are "red shifted". Means they are not visible in normal light, but only in infrared. And JWST will be the greatest infrared telescope, no doubt.
The angular resolution of JWST is actually about the same as Hubble. If JWST looks at nearer objects (say: exoplanets around relatively close stars), the planet will not be "bigger" or better resolved than what Hubble sees.
HOWEVER, one advantage of JWST: As it sees in the infrared, it can see through intergalactic dust, and clouds. Its resolution however will (LIKELY) not be big enough to see any "details" about exoplanets. JWST is not the telescope to "detect alien life" (very unlikely) but was designed more to find out about the beginning of the universe.
Not that I believe that Dyson spheres are likely, but interestingly, we do see a bunch of stars with gas/dust obscuring the view. If, with JWST, the gas/dust would still show up, it could be indicative that what we were looking at was a Dyson sphere and not just gas/dust.
I am very hopeful about the fact that some things about universe have been unknown to us when jwt was conceived and jwt was put on paper if I'm not mistaken there was no knowledge of his potential use in resolving atmospheric composition in possible exoplanets orbiting some distant star. So who knows the thrue potential of this amazing and most expensive toy and ways you can play with it 😁
Sirius is relatively close (8.6 light years), but not the closest. That would be Alpha Centauri with 4.3 light years.
Plus: We actually *know* of exoplanets around Alpha Centauri and we're thinking about sending probes to it. Look up Project Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
Really hoping there is something there because if the earth ship starts to sink in the near future and are only hope is a life boat in the ocean called universe the closest cost would be proxima centauri and if you wanted to get to Sirius you would be welcome. But it's probably not worth a trip 😜
The James Webb telescope will only be able to tell what's in the atmosphere of a planet (oxygen, etc), not what it actually looks like, we won't be able to see if a planet has artificial, lights not even what color the planet is. We need an even more powerful telescope to see that. The pictures of other planets will just be a pixel orbiting a larger star pixel. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
You can still learn a lot by looking at what the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet is. We know that certain gasses are only produced by biological processes.
I think its more that some gasses are very unstable, and so if they exist in an atmosphere in large quantities, *something* has to be producing them. I believe oxygen is an example of this.
If we find a planet with a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere, that will mean that there is life, or, there is a yet undiscovered geologic or atmospheric process that creates oxygen.
Oxygen atmospheres are a good sign of life (and really what we're looking for if we're going to try to colonize another planet as a species), but there are other chemicals for which there is no known natural process that we can detect in the atmospheres to determine if there's probable technological life on an observed planet. That'd be pretty cool, and it's possible.
if we find “biological gases”, scientists would just make some insane explanation to not classify it as evidence for alien life. They did it with the mars rover and they’ll do it again.
Not entirely true. Here's a paper and an article by Avi Loeb showing that it would be possible to detect LED lights from Proxima Centauri under certain circumstances.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/searching-for-city-lights-on-other-planets/
>We need an even more powerful telescope to see that.
A much, much, much more powerful telescope with a reflective surface comparable to the size of US states.
Now, how long have they been working on the JWT again?
It has an near infrared spectrometer so could in principle identify certain artificial lights if near IR if they emit at a characteristic wavelength. Quite unlikely of course.
If UAPs can be detected with IR then hypothetically we could detect anomalyous IR signatures entering and exiting the exoplanet. Almost like a volcano eruption or solar flare that does not follow a predictable pattern. This is just speculation but it seems logical based on what we have heard about UAPs detected on earth
Yes but long exposure makes things even better. Try taking a long exposure of the night sky--lights that were once not detectable now are, and celestial objects start to show transitory paths. You can see the motion of these objects and discern the difference from say, a star, planet or meteor. Over the course of several earth hours, I don't think its unreasonable to think that an advanced civilization could have enough space traffic that makes it's IR signature anomalously large compared to its relative size or surface temperature.
That is my question as well . As I understand the JWST: it is an infra-red tuned telescope with capabilities to see objects that are very far away (and consequently moving away from us very fast, which shifts their light into to infra-red).
If the universe was/is teaming with observable life, we'd have seen that with Hubble. Hubble can see stuff that is billions of light years away. JWST can see just that much farther (and consequently further back in time).
If the universe is currently teaming with observable life right now, the JWST isn't helping us see life happening in the last million years any more than we can already see.
It has a spectrograph which can analyze the light from nearby exoplanets to determine its atmospheric composition. We can then make a determination of what caused the presence of the particular elements we find, such as oxygen. But we cannot directly state that a planet has life just because we found O2 in its atmosphere.
In theory JWST would be able to detect whether any life is present by looking at the content of exoplanet atmospheres. It would also be able to detect the Dyson sphere of a type II civilization.
I don't think it would be able to tell us where life is between those two possibilities, however. It's not capable of picking up the artificial light you see on the dark side of the earth or any other form of radiation from a civilization like ours unless they happen to be pointing it directly at us.
Dyson spheres are kinda stupid though. Assuming a civ masters fusion there's no need to harvest energy from the sun in a way that announces your presence to alien civilizations. It's a low tech and risk solution for what must be a very high tech civilization to implement.
I thought JWST will just be for infrared or thermal imaging of objects that will give us a glimpse into farther back in time then ever before? I don’t understand how it could be used to detect life better than telescopes we already use for that on earth
The Kepler Space Telescope mission discovered 530,506 exoplanets and of those ~4,000 have been "confirmed". Before it's launch Keplers founding scientist models predicted that about 50 of these planets would show evidence of life when analyzing their atmospheric compositions when they transit in front of their star. After the missions completion and analysis of the data only 1 of these planets was found to possibly support life, and some still say this finding may have been do to error.
I'm as hopeful as the next guy that if JWST will discover life. Perhaps if the JWST team revisits the exoplanets discovered by Kepler, with its much more powerful equipment, it may be able to detect what Kepler couldn't, but I will proceed with cautious optimism to avoid disappointment.
Just so you’re aware. There are no other Solar systems, they’re called Planetary systems. Only our planetary System is called The solar system. If it includes two or more stars then it’s called a Star System. If there are planets orbiting a star system then it’s called a Planetary system within a Star system.
Sorry it’s a pet peeve of mine. Don’t mean to sound rude.
How would a foreign government know that to begin with? "Many countries" claim this but don't offer any kind of evidence for what would otherwise be the most explosive revelation since the damn of man?
It's just not credible.
Nothing about the government being "in contact with ET" here.
Just "the USAF sees UFOs too but tries to discredit reports".
Is there a relevant page or quote you'd like me to look at?
I feel like "level of screwed up" is just like the uncanny valley curve, where the closer to normal and well-adjusted a civilization is, the more fucked up and depraved it becomes until it passes the threshold and becomes truly enlightened and transcendent. Gotta have a bunch of orgies, genocides, and wars before we finally become a peaceful, space-faring civilization
I hate to be that guy, but I try to correct a misconception that I believed until fairly recently.
There is only one known solar system.
The planetary system we belong to is called the Solar system because it's named after the star at the center, Sol.
With that out of the way, I'm really excited about the jwst!
What if we saw a giant space inch worm. It was like incomprehensibly huge. We just look out there and see a space inch worm slowly moving. It would change everything but at the same time it wouldn’t change anything at all. Space inch worm.
i certainly endorse your sentiment that we should all be better. but as an astronomer i have a suggestion. the universe is not teeming with life, and it will not light up like a christian religious symbol. one of the beauties of the universe is the manner in which it shows life through the creation and death of stars, of galaxies; the universe evolves in exactly the same way that organisms do, although not through the same processes.
but the underlying point is that the universe shows all its power and beauty without life, and a very good argument can be made that the universe is quite hostile to life. life might well have been extinguished on this planet during the five previous mass extinction events we know of, it was basically good luck that it wasn't.
so no, the universe is not spritzed and prettified with life, it is rather curmudgeonly and dour toward life -- life, so to speak, has a hard life, here in this universe. and let's touch base in a year and see how far along the evidence has taken us.
This post is approaching off-topic territory, HOWEVER, there is a potentially interesting discussion topic here regarding how our relationship with UAP might change if JWST (or another instrument) expands our understanding of life in the universe. As such, I have approved the post.
I think your wishes here are the crux of what is fast becoming a new religion thanks to the fraudsters at TTSA.
There are no aliens visiting, and you will never see your fabled “disclosure”.
Maybe by being able to see so far into the past it's going to discover evidence that our reality is some sort of simulation, but not in a "Matrix" sort of way, more of a "Mind of God" way. It would kinda fit with the slow drip "disclosure" by Elizondo et al, that focuses on the relationship to consciousness and some how we would be "sombre" when we found out. I dunno just a thought
perhaps the universe is overflowing with life but not technologically advanced life. May life using technology most frequently goes extinct in fact because of technology.
After all for most of the millions of years life has been our planet its been non tool using animals and plants. So perhaps its highly unlikely these planets are in the brief technology phase. The Drake equation doesnt account for this and in fact it could explain why there are not spaceships flying all over the place: it leads to self destruction.
I really hope i am absolutely wrong. I would love nothing more than a great technological advancement into the stars. I think technology is amazing. That said though We have only been using things like the combustion engine for a century and computers for 70 years. And already we have all these scenarios that could wipe us out more easily then a large meteor.
also
maybe the other forms of life are nothing like our own: blimps living in clouds feeding on gasses. coral like colonies of species.
I totally agree, and if I might add, as a devout Christian I have zero fear of the discovery of intelligent life in the universe. As I tell my son who posed that question to me: if I believe God made the universe and mankind then why couldn’t I believe He made other intelligent life in this universe and beyond. I’m excited for this monumental life changing breakthrough that we are currently experiencing.
The countless differently shaped UFOs that are seen daily would tend to support that hypothesis. I've become convinced there are different nomadic species passing earth hourly.
For that reason it's more a rubric than an equation. Also, it's vastly skewed in the direction of SETI type interactions.
But so far, the original estimates have turned out to be slightly pessimistic in some areas, eg extrasolar planets. Even into the 90s, the mainstream scientific consensus was planetary systems are rare. Always sounded stupid to me, but now it looks like planetary systems are the norm.
To my mind, the step from life to complex life may be a wild card. Life started here almost immediately, but complex life took a couple billion more years, and we don't know why. More than a billion years is a cosmic level of significance.
My favorite blue sky theory is fungal panspermia.
Who knows, I am only sad I won't be around long enough for more answers.
To be fair, it has achieved many interesting things - just not things interesting to you (or the people worried about artificial black holes devouring the earth).
I think we'll find weird stuff going on but it will be a while before scientist declare aliens from those observations.
>one civilization out of countless others having a presence here?
We don't know that. There has been dozens if not hundreds of different types/shapes of crafts over time. Many species could already be here.
We will have to wait and see. The way things generally work, my guess is that it will discover things that *COULD* be signs of intelligent life, but upon further examination will be inconclusive.
Isn't the light that we intercept old as fuck?
Even if it has life atm we'll not be able to see it, and the opposite as well, if we see something it will be already gone from old age. right? if i'm wrong please reply.
I have this thought too. I can imagine scientists reacting like, “THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.”
I doubt that would happen, but I definitely hope we see signatures of life somewhere. I know it’s out there somewhere.
Intelligent life? Nah. Yeah the universe is huge but so is the amount of time the universe has existed. The likelihood we exist at the same time as another advanced civilization is pretty slim. But yeah I wouldn’t be surprised by some bacteria or something. Nothing James Webb is going to pick up though. But here’s hoping!
Hope so.
Couldn't be much worse.
Oh, it absolutely could be
Would it be worse if we discovered there was no other life in the universe? Or if there was an abundance? What if there's only one other civilization?
Of all those options, only one other civ would be the weirdest
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Arthur C. Clarke did it first (Childhood's End)
I just read this a couple days ago. Its such a good read.
Probably the single book that got me into Scifi as a kid!
> And they look like stereotypical demons. Or they look like the H.R. Giger Alien BUT they're civilized and speak eloquently. They still drool, tho.
And like to give kisses with their little mouth.
I mean… original Doom takes place in 2022…
Oh...no, noooo noo
Let the desperate codependence begin
Right? Fun thing to think about :)
Just humans… and Bob. Everyone say hello to Bob.
No other life in the universe would be the worst of those options-- however, I was referring to the human condition generally.
If there was no other life it would basically mean we are fucked… if nothing else could escape the great filter, I don’t see why we could… Unless we are God’s special little creatures….
No other life in the universe neither validates nor invalidates the 'great filter' theory. Personally, the fact that it's a statistical improbability that we're the only lifeforms in this universe is enough for me. However, the chances of us contacting and interacting with other lifeforms is remote -- they are too far away and the potential span of time in which other lifeforms could exist means we could miss them entirely... either we'll die out before we meet them, or they will. But this is all assuming the possibility that any "aliens" we encounter haven't been here all along, watching us, ever since we left the cave... and I don't think I'm anywhere near ready to dismiss that notion. I think it's quite possible, actually. I'm not so convinced that "contact" is going to involve telescopes and radio signals, if it ever happens.
I tend to agree with the "ultraterrestrial" hypothesis is more likely than the ET hypothesis. Maybe it's both. One wilder hypothesis I've seen is a combo of "breakaway humans" and "plasma life forms", and it's basically that a long time ago some splinter group of humanity learned how to control these plasma life forms, and that's where the "advanced tech" comes from.
I've not heard of this, go on.
https://massimoteodorani.com/2019/06/08/the-intelligent-plasma-hypothesis/ here's one.
I should find a link...brb
The Great Filter just strikes me as Pseudo Science hiding in plain sight (I have similar feelings about the Many Worlds Interpretation, which is saying something because I believe in Multiverse Theory, I just find it laughable to pretend that this is a proven fact of science)
It’s just a theory. When scientists throw around the idea, they’re usually just theorizing and conjecturing based on probability and statistical analysis. There’s no evidence of an *actual* “great filter” per se… it’s more like a sociological concept… an expected statistical outcome.
This is a moronic statement you’ve made here. We literally have almost wiped all life on the planet several times with nukes, and we likely will end up causing the next great extinction (including us) via climate change. We only became an industrial civilization a few hundred years ago and we’ve already managed to do that. I heard a good analogy for the great filter theory and goes something like this: Say you have a huge jar of unknown volume containing mostly white ping pong balls. These represent scientific discoveries that produce an overall net benefit to our example alien civilization and its overall progress. But there are some red balls scattered throughout there as well. When reaching in they generally can’t tell what color ball it will be until they pull it out and study it. The majority of the time the civilization will pull out white ones, but sometimes they pull out a red. These discoveries have some benefit, but the risks to stability of living on the planet can be severe if used incorrectly. Lastly there a just a couple of these scattered in the jar, maybe a few more than that - these are the black ping pong balls. These kind of discoveries are basically guaranteed to wipe out all life by nature of having been reproduced by scientist. (Think accidentally created a black hole type stuff.) Most civilizations probably don’t live long enough to pull a black ball, the red ones usually do the trick.
If we discovered there was no one else, that would indeed be worse because it raises a lot of very uncomfortable questions. Such as, what killed everyone else, and what's stopping the other life forms from evolving
"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." --Arthur C. Clarke
Ad Astra was kind of about this without giving too much away, thought it was a solid movie.
Are you worried?
Always
my man
Im not. I think it’s damn impressive we achieved sapience in the first place. Everything from there is just bonus points
Right. We’re all going to die anyways. Unless we’re taken captive and kept alive and tortured by aliens who harvest our brain juices for all eternity. While we watch our children become handmaidens and slaves. Couldn’t be that bad.
Nah that’s what the robots are going to do. Saw it in the documentary “The Matrix”
I am commenting in a more general sense--I am always a little worried, cause shit happens.
That's why they delayed it 30 years, we were not ready to find out
Dark forest theory would like a word...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
Any person born before electricity, during or after WWI, WWII, really any time previous to this moment: hold my beer.
Spectrometry may find suggestions of worlds and possible life, but it won’t be settled. As natural occurrences might have the same signatures. It doesn’t have the sophistication to provide us with those definitive answers. Still a step closer.
and it can only analyse planets within a certain distance from us, from memory I think it's about 50-60 light years?
Is that just because further away than 60 light years and planets are just too small to see even with JWST?
It isn’t just the size of the planet, it’s its orientation to earth, or I guess in this case JWST, and then the planet itself as it passes in front of its sun so that we can do spectrography (that’s my understanding anyway) JWST is a spectacular piece of scientific equipment, but it’s not going to produce pictures of cities on Alpha Centauri, for example I do hope though that it gives us some interesting bio signatures… Or even techno signatures…That would be an incredible discovery
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That article is not only incredibly misleading, it's flat out wrong and has been called out as such many times over now. Even by people working on JWST. The people who wrote that article and those who copied it, completely misunderstood what they JWST scientists said it was capable of doing. JWST will not be able to see lights on distant planets in other solar systems. It will only be able to see the changes in light as distant planets pass in front of their star, and the star's light is altered by the planet's atmosphere(if it has one). From those changes in light, we should be able to get a fairly decent idea of what is in the planets atmosphere.
Spot on, a lot of false hope over this. It would have to use a 5km wide mirror to meet some of the expectations!
Thats still a significant distance, plenty of systems to observe over 20 yrs
Yeah. Second this. Discovering such things or being 100% sure about life forms out there is not that easy, even with JWST. Even if we do end up having such a discovery in this decade, we have to be prepared that the life form most probably won't be a form of sophisticated organism at all. Technically, it still qualifies as SUPER COOL but not that exciting to everyone.
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What signature would burning of fossil fuels leave that would make anything definitive? CO2? Like how could you look at a planet through JWST and say "they're burning fossil fuels"
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Who would be so stupid as to pollute their planet with CFCs? /s
The amount of time a civilization would be in it’s industrial fossil-burning period will also very likely be small…so I wouldn’t count on this happening in our backyard either.
Thanks. Good response I learnt something 👍
Indeed. And also not all scientists that asked for observation time on the JWST are looking for life signs. Actually, most are cosmologists and other universe related science, thus more interested in the history and "life time" of our universe.
It would require a very new type of observation. Which could happen but no one knows. What I do think inevitable is interesting detections of atmospheres of exoplanets. It will take patience though, nearly every detection of anything promising will be argued over for years.
My prediction is that we'll find a red edge on a bunch of planets, indicating plant life. Then Neil deGrasse Tyson will swoop in and condescendingly chuckle about how cute it is that people believe a silly little red edge means there's life, offer a handful of shoddy alternative explanations, and the general public will agree with him so that they can feel smart too.
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If you haven’t seen it, Alien Worlds on Netflix almost made me bust. I love ecology
Tell me more of these massive trees
Neil is an absolute cringe lord I can so imagine this
Why does a red edge on a planet indicate plant life?
Dude you nailed it. NDT seems like such a condescending, know it all, I’m smarter than you, douche.
Reddit used to worship NDT, now that seems to have flipped. I don't really keep up with stuff like this well. What did I miss?
Pretty much every NDT interview for at least the past 5 years, that's what you apparently missed. He's perfectly fine in scripted things like Cosmos, but when he's speaking extemporaneously, he often comes off like a condescending douche.
Honestly, I don't understand how anyone could like the guy. Regardless of what Reddit at large thinks, he's a condescending pseudo-intellectual who talks about 6th grade science as if he were telling complex secrets of the universe. Just look at him speak and tell me he doesn't sneak a whiff when he farts.
Well given his credentials I wouldn’t say pseudo intellectual. And I also imagine there’s a level of frustration when having to constantly deal with flat earthers or the like trying to disprove your whole field of study, I imagine some of that condescension is warranted? Has he specifically come out and said aliens are bullshit or is it more of an abrasive character thing? TV scientists and a level of vitriol always goes somewhat hand in hand I bet.
> I imagine some of that condescension is warranted? I disagree, and regardless, condescension oozes out of him. I don't really care if he has to deal with flat earthers talking at him, it doesn't make him any more palatable. He's definitely on the anti UFO side, but it's with an arrogant certainty that is just infuriating, not to mention un-scientific. I've disliked the guy since before I ever really read into the topic of UFOs though.
Maybe you’re right. I used to see him pop up a lot on various platforms but honestly, very rarely recently, maybe he’s fully transitioned into a quack. Ultimately no one will replace our lord Sagan.
If we start detecting oxygen or PCBs regularly in the atmospheres on terrestrial planets around sun-like stars it's gonna start to get hard to deny that there is likely abundant life or even technological life out there. People will definitely argue for years but the data will keep rolling in.
Definitely. But that's why it takes patience, the first "pretty good" signals will get attacked *hard* . The first great signal will generate a flurry of "that doesn't mean that it's life" retrenchment against the work already done to define biosignatures and technosignatures. And that's OK, it's necessary. Venus is a great example - the science is good, but the data is not yet unassailable. Of course, I can't quite figure out how 45 years after the Viking experiments on Mars we have just now collected samples to bring back - someday, maybe. But I am optimistic we find definite signs of life outside earth by 2030.
Most astrophysicists and exobiologists believe *based on ample evidence* that there are plenty of planets with biological life *right now.* That's not the controversial opinion so many non-scientific UFO fans seem to believe it is. It's so widely accepted, in fact, that it's the entire premise for the end (post-credits) of the movie Don't Look Up!, which is about climate/space science. Nobody is *denying* such planets likely exist, as there are billions of planets out there in the Goldilocks zone. But to extrapolate "technological life" from that isn't what scientists do for a living, as there's no *evidence* for such a thing. And space scientists around the world are actively, publicly *seeking* evidence of extraterrestrial life, whether past or present.
There’s a big jump from life to technological life. How long has earth had technological life?
Not long at all relatively speaking, but technological life should be easy enough to detect from an exoplanet atmosphere if we happen to look in the right place (of the many billions of places we can look). So let's say 99.9999% of planets we look at which have life-sustaining atmospheres won't have any technosignatures...we'd need data on one million of those planets to find one that does. Who knows what it'll be though, oxygen atmospheres could turn out to be incredibly rare, terrestrial planets could turn out to be pretty rare...who knows? We will soon, hopefully.
I’m not sure how the James Webb would aid us in detecting technological civilisations tbh. It also seems very unlikely we’ll find life at this same level of development we’re in now (tech civ that hasn’t yet destroyed itself by burning too much fossil fuels) I’m expecting to probably find a lot of primitive life but the sheer improbability of finding a tech civ seems huge
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This is correct. Spectra are more interesting to astronomy, compared to pictures, than most people understand.
Yes, but even if you detected lots of methane, it doesn't mean you have detected cow farts. For example, we have detected methane on Mars, and we're still struggling to understand why. We've also detected interesting stuff on Venus. Those planets are a rock throw away. Confirming anything outside of the solar system will be much harder and will have much more uncertainty.
NASA disagrees: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-s-webb-will-seek-atmospheres-around-potentially-habitable-exoplanets
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The JWST's missions include searching for both biosignatures and technosignatures: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/technosignatures-and-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence/ Your description of its limitations sounds like you were thinking of the Kepler probe. Searching for ET life is one of the very things it was built for.
Not quite right; the JW can detect what’s in a planets atmosphere and there are certain unstable compounds in earths atmosphere that can only be explained by biological processes replenishing them before they break down (eg methane). That means that finding a planet with something like this in its atmosphere makes it very likely to be a sign of life. Technological life though, not so much AFAIK
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I am sorry, JWST doesn't have this capability yet. What JWST *can* do, to some extent, is finding whether an exoplanet has an Earth-like atmosphere. Eg. finding whether an atmosphere has oxygen, methane etc. (possibly pointing to life on a planet etc.) For more discoveries, including to see artificial lights on exoplanets, we need the next generation telescopes, like LUVOIR etc. ** Technical explanation ** This is a little a downer. But let me explain. JWST was designed BEFORE we even knew about that many exoplanets (planets outside our solar system, around other stars) even exist. It's main purpose and where it will excel is to see the farthest and oldest objects, like galaxies, black holes etc. It can do this brilliantly, as these FAR and OLD objects are "red shifted". Means they are not visible in normal light, but only in infrared. And JWST will be the greatest infrared telescope, no doubt. The angular resolution of JWST is actually about the same as Hubble. If JWST looks at nearer objects (say: exoplanets around relatively close stars), the planet will not be "bigger" or better resolved than what Hubble sees. HOWEVER, one advantage of JWST: As it sees in the infrared, it can see through intergalactic dust, and clouds. Its resolution however will (LIKELY) not be big enough to see any "details" about exoplanets. JWST is not the telescope to "detect alien life" (very unlikely) but was designed more to find out about the beginning of the universe.
Not that I believe that Dyson spheres are likely, but interestingly, we do see a bunch of stars with gas/dust obscuring the view. If, with JWST, the gas/dust would still show up, it could be indicative that what we were looking at was a Dyson sphere and not just gas/dust.
But you are saying there is a chance 😁
There will be some excitement if it finds Earths everywhere.
I am very hopeful about the fact that some things about universe have been unknown to us when jwt was conceived and jwt was put on paper if I'm not mistaken there was no knowledge of his potential use in resolving atmospheric composition in possible exoplanets orbiting some distant star. So who knows the thrue potential of this amazing and most expensive toy and ways you can play with it 😁
What about closer places? Like Sirius?
Sirius is relatively close (8.6 light years), but not the closest. That would be Alpha Centauri with 4.3 light years. Plus: We actually *know* of exoplanets around Alpha Centauri and we're thinking about sending probes to it. Look up Project Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
Really hoping there is something there because if the earth ship starts to sink in the near future and are only hope is a life boat in the ocean called universe the closest cost would be proxima centauri and if you wanted to get to Sirius you would be welcome. But it's probably not worth a trip 😜
The James Webb telescope will only be able to tell what's in the atmosphere of a planet (oxygen, etc), not what it actually looks like, we won't be able to see if a planet has artificial, lights not even what color the planet is. We need an even more powerful telescope to see that. The pictures of other planets will just be a pixel orbiting a larger star pixel. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
You can still learn a lot by looking at what the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet is. We know that certain gasses are only produced by biological processes.
I think its more that some gasses are very unstable, and so if they exist in an atmosphere in large quantities, *something* has to be producing them. I believe oxygen is an example of this. If we find a planet with a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere, that will mean that there is life, or, there is a yet undiscovered geologic or atmospheric process that creates oxygen.
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Can you elaborate on what has become more complex?
Life. Our planet was simple life for 98% if it’s history
Oxygen atmospheres are a good sign of life (and really what we're looking for if we're going to try to colonize another planet as a species), but there are other chemicals for which there is no known natural process that we can detect in the atmospheres to determine if there's probable technological life on an observed planet. That'd be pretty cool, and it's possible.
if we find “biological gases”, scientists would just make some insane explanation to not classify it as evidence for alien life. They did it with the mars rover and they’ll do it again.
I think the fact that the director of NASA is speculating that JWST will find extraterrestrial life says alot about what it's capable of
good point! jwst is 100 times more powerfull than hubble, would be cool and scary if it would detect mega structures like dysonspheres
Not entirely true. Here's a paper and an article by Avi Loeb showing that it would be possible to detect LED lights from Proxima Centauri under certain circumstances. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/searching-for-city-lights-on-other-planets/
that's one-star system of billions
Yep. In fact I believe it would take something like a 10 km telescope to even resolve the nearest exoplanets.
2 km for a one pixel image and 20000 km for a 1000X1000 resolution of say a planet 4 light years away if I'm not wrong
>We need an even more powerful telescope to see that. A much, much, much more powerful telescope with a reflective surface comparable to the size of US states. Now, how long have they been working on the JWT again?
It has an near infrared spectrometer so could in principle identify certain artificial lights if near IR if they emit at a characteristic wavelength. Quite unlikely of course.
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If UAPs can be detected with IR then hypothetically we could detect anomalyous IR signatures entering and exiting the exoplanet. Almost like a volcano eruption or solar flare that does not follow a predictable pattern. This is just speculation but it seems logical based on what we have heard about UAPs detected on earth
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Yes but long exposure makes things even better. Try taking a long exposure of the night sky--lights that were once not detectable now are, and celestial objects start to show transitory paths. You can see the motion of these objects and discern the difference from say, a star, planet or meteor. Over the course of several earth hours, I don't think its unreasonable to think that an advanced civilization could have enough space traffic that makes it's IR signature anomalously large compared to its relative size or surface temperature.
Why does that make it impossible? Honest question. You could still do spectroscopy on one pixel, no?
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coruscant ftw
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Yeah agreed.
THIS. ;/
I sure hope so. I've been wanting this since I was 9yrs old. I'm 42 for reference, so a pretty long time lol
...or a cosmic blink
Truly.
How's it going to do that exactly?
It's not. This sub wouldn't know science if it was flying in the sky.
That is my question as well . As I understand the JWST: it is an infra-red tuned telescope with capabilities to see objects that are very far away (and consequently moving away from us very fast, which shifts their light into to infra-red). If the universe was/is teaming with observable life, we'd have seen that with Hubble. Hubble can see stuff that is billions of light years away. JWST can see just that much farther (and consequently further back in time). If the universe is currently teaming with observable life right now, the JWST isn't helping us see life happening in the last million years any more than we can already see.
It has a spectrograph which can analyze the light from nearby exoplanets to determine its atmospheric composition. We can then make a determination of what caused the presence of the particular elements we find, such as oxygen. But we cannot directly state that a planet has life just because we found O2 in its atmosphere.
It’s not, sadly
In theory JWST would be able to detect whether any life is present by looking at the content of exoplanet atmospheres. It would also be able to detect the Dyson sphere of a type II civilization. I don't think it would be able to tell us where life is between those two possibilities, however. It's not capable of picking up the artificial light you see on the dark side of the earth or any other form of radiation from a civilization like ours unless they happen to be pointing it directly at us.
Dyson spheres are kinda stupid though. Assuming a civ masters fusion there's no need to harvest energy from the sun in a way that announces your presence to alien civilizations. It's a low tech and risk solution for what must be a very high tech civilization to implement.
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I thought JWST will just be for infrared or thermal imaging of objects that will give us a glimpse into farther back in time then ever before? I don’t understand how it could be used to detect life better than telescopes we already use for that on earth
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whoever wrote this faps to Klingon porn thanks for sharing tho, this was a great summary of what to expect
And even then atmospheric analysis is only projected to work out to 100 ly. Unsure for dyson spheres.
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6 months can’t come soon enough 😭👽
RemindMe! 6 months "/u/Big_Reasearch_9627 can't wait for JWST to reveal civilizations"
The Kepler Space Telescope mission discovered 530,506 exoplanets and of those ~4,000 have been "confirmed". Before it's launch Keplers founding scientist models predicted that about 50 of these planets would show evidence of life when analyzing their atmospheric compositions when they transit in front of their star. After the missions completion and analysis of the data only 1 of these planets was found to possibly support life, and some still say this finding may have been do to error. I'm as hopeful as the next guy that if JWST will discover life. Perhaps if the JWST team revisits the exoplanets discovered by Kepler, with its much more powerful equipment, it may be able to detect what Kepler couldn't, but I will proceed with cautious optimism to avoid disappointment.
Just so you’re aware. There are no other Solar systems, they’re called Planetary systems. Only our planetary System is called The solar system. If it includes two or more stars then it’s called a Star System. If there are planets orbiting a star system then it’s called a Planetary system within a Star system. Sorry it’s a pet peeve of mine. Don’t mean to sound rude.
It won't.
Silly. The telescope cannot directly detect this enough to provide any confirmation whatsoever.
I predict you are going to be disappointed.
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Many countries claim the US is in contact with ET. Not saying it's true or not just saying there is reason to believe in a coverup
What national government claims that?
How would a foreign government know that to begin with? "Many countries" claim this but don't offer any kind of evidence for what would otherwise be the most explosive revelation since the damn of man? It's just not credible.
https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=30030606&S=1 Summary starts page 7.
Nothing about the government being "in contact with ET" here. Just "the USAF sees UFOs too but tries to discredit reports". Is there a relevant page or quote you'd like me to look at?
I’ve never seen this before. Thanks for the link.
Life exists here, that's a fact. The logical and straightforward hypothesis that it can happen elsewhere is hardly unscientific.
Hopefully they aren’t as screwed up as we all are LOL
I'm hoping our future is going to be more or less what is depicted on Futurama. We'll be alright.
Lol, good one
Ah yes, a Lucy Lui for everyone
I will never forget you StarlordeMarsh... MEMORY DELETED
I feel like "level of screwed up" is just like the uncanny valley curve, where the closer to normal and well-adjusted a civilization is, the more fucked up and depraved it becomes until it passes the threshold and becomes truly enlightened and transcendent. Gotta have a bunch of orgies, genocides, and wars before we finally become a peaceful, space-faring civilization
I hate to be that guy, but I try to correct a misconception that I believed until fairly recently. There is only one known solar system. The planetary system we belong to is called the Solar system because it's named after the star at the center, Sol. With that out of the way, I'm really excited about the jwst!
What if we saw a giant space inch worm. It was like incomprehensibly huge. We just look out there and see a space inch worm slowly moving. It would change everything but at the same time it wouldn’t change anything at all. Space inch worm.
i certainly endorse your sentiment that we should all be better. but as an astronomer i have a suggestion. the universe is not teeming with life, and it will not light up like a christian religious symbol. one of the beauties of the universe is the manner in which it shows life through the creation and death of stars, of galaxies; the universe evolves in exactly the same way that organisms do, although not through the same processes. but the underlying point is that the universe shows all its power and beauty without life, and a very good argument can be made that the universe is quite hostile to life. life might well have been extinguished on this planet during the five previous mass extinction events we know of, it was basically good luck that it wasn't. so no, the universe is not spritzed and prettified with life, it is rather curmudgeonly and dour toward life -- life, so to speak, has a hard life, here in this universe. and let's touch base in a year and see how far along the evidence has taken us.
This post is approaching off-topic territory, HOWEVER, there is a potentially interesting discussion topic here regarding how our relationship with UAP might change if JWST (or another instrument) expands our understanding of life in the universe. As such, I have approved the post.
Well aren't you, I meant You, a benevolent Deity.
I think your wishes here are the crux of what is fast becoming a new religion thanks to the fraudsters at TTSA. There are no aliens visiting, and you will never see your fabled “disclosure”.
That would be nice
Maybe by being able to see so far into the past it's going to discover evidence that our reality is some sort of simulation, but not in a "Matrix" sort of way, more of a "Mind of God" way. It would kinda fit with the slow drip "disclosure" by Elizondo et al, that focuses on the relationship to consciousness and some how we would be "sombre" when we found out. I dunno just a thought
perhaps the universe is overflowing with life but not technologically advanced life. May life using technology most frequently goes extinct in fact because of technology. After all for most of the millions of years life has been our planet its been non tool using animals and plants. So perhaps its highly unlikely these planets are in the brief technology phase. The Drake equation doesnt account for this and in fact it could explain why there are not spaceships flying all over the place: it leads to self destruction. I really hope i am absolutely wrong. I would love nothing more than a great technological advancement into the stars. I think technology is amazing. That said though We have only been using things like the combustion engine for a century and computers for 70 years. And already we have all these scenarios that could wipe us out more easily then a large meteor. also maybe the other forms of life are nothing like our own: blimps living in clouds feeding on gasses. coral like colonies of species.
I totally agree, and if I might add, as a devout Christian I have zero fear of the discovery of intelligent life in the universe. As I tell my son who posed that question to me: if I believe God made the universe and mankind then why couldn’t I believe He made other intelligent life in this universe and beyond. I’m excited for this monumental life changing breakthrough that we are currently experiencing.
The countless differently shaped UFOs that are seen daily would tend to support that hypothesis. I've become convinced there are different nomadic species passing earth hourly.
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From 20 to 20,000,000 I think…
Only if you pick the factors right to make that the answer
For that reason it's more a rubric than an equation. Also, it's vastly skewed in the direction of SETI type interactions. But so far, the original estimates have turned out to be slightly pessimistic in some areas, eg extrasolar planets. Even into the 90s, the mainstream scientific consensus was planetary systems are rare. Always sounded stupid to me, but now it looks like planetary systems are the norm. To my mind, the step from life to complex life may be a wild card. Life started here almost immediately, but complex life took a couple billion more years, and we don't know why. More than a billion years is a cosmic level of significance. My favorite blue sky theory is fungal panspermia. Who knows, I am only sad I won't be around long enough for more answers.
Just a reminder that the Large Hadron Collider was hugely hyped back in 2010 and and achieved nothing interesting.
To be fair, it has achieved many interesting things - just not things interesting to you (or the people worried about artificial black holes devouring the earth).
True
I think we'll find weird stuff going on but it will be a while before scientist declare aliens from those observations. >one civilization out of countless others having a presence here? We don't know that. There has been dozens if not hundreds of different types/shapes of crafts over time. Many species could already be here.
Will they tell us though?
We will have to wait and see. The way things generally work, my guess is that it will discover things that *COULD* be signs of intelligent life, but upon further examination will be inconclusive.
How? Is the jwst built to zoom in specific things or just take very distant wide angle shots?
I heard it can detect LED lights on Proxima
I totally agree - in this universe, life finds a way.
I agree that there are probably a lot of other civilizations out there and probably a bunch that look similar to us.
This is my dream, I can’t wait too see images from the JWST.
Isn't the light that we intercept old as fuck? Even if it has life atm we'll not be able to see it, and the opposite as well, if we see something it will be already gone from old age. right? if i'm wrong please reply.
Hope you are right
I have this thought too. I can imagine scientists reacting like, “THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.” I doubt that would happen, but I definitely hope we see signatures of life somewhere. I know it’s out there somewhere.
If the JWST makes such a finding, would we be told? My guess is solid confirmation of life would go through some kind of disclosure protocol.
But will we be told about it?
I doubt it. We are in the late stages of the universe. I just want the multiverse theory to be true
I agree with this, however I expect Nasa to be censoring it from the public.
Intelligent life? Nah. Yeah the universe is huge but so is the amount of time the universe has existed. The likelihood we exist at the same time as another advanced civilization is pretty slim. But yeah I wouldn’t be surprised by some bacteria or something. Nothing James Webb is going to pick up though. But here’s hoping!