First alien signal may have been detected...!

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
I didnt read the whole thing, but IIRC they discussed the Cambrian extinction in some detail.

You meant the Cambrian Explosion, right?

The thing about life is we don't really know where we could find it. We have found life in environs previously thought to be totally inhospitable. The two most famous examples are the hot vents and the cold seeps, both at the bottom of oceans.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
I didnt read the whole thing, but IIRC they discussed the Cambrian extinction in some detail. Their arguments struck me as compelling, though i dont know near enough to comment beyond that.

The Cambrian explosion (as I'm sure you meant) could very well have been due to a natural progression rather than pure chance.

I WOULD note, of the 125 extrasolar planets found thus far, all but the last 3 or 4 are gaseous giants - of course thats a result of the bias of our planet finding techniques. Of the smaller planets (and theyre still pretty big - Neptune sized or so) none, AFAIK is in a temperature zone suitable for earth like life. No M class planets yet , even in Drake equation terms. And thats NOT taking into account the long term stability factors identified in "Rare earth"

We can't see earth-sized planets yet.

[Az]

We cant see any planets, so far. We can only find some fluctuating interference in the spectra of stars, and some jumps in their gravity. That's hardly "seeing". We need some big-ass telescopes ( giant interferometers) to actually see anything.

[Brent]

Wasn't there at least one that we could see?

[DRoseDARs]

We can't see any planets directly. Some of them were detected by measuring the principle star's light level. Whenever it dipped regularly, that difference might coincide with a gravity flux aka "wobble" and we thus infer the presence of a planet. Others were detected by only by looking for the wobble. We won't be able to directly confirm the presence of extrasolar planets until an interferometer(?) satellite system is set up. That'll be more than a decade off since they're just looking at designs. It'll take years and a great deal of money to build the multi-satellite system. Almost certainly it'll be a international project to mitigate costs and shorten build time.

[Chemical Ollie]

Sorry, I farted!!!

[Az]

DRoseDARs: Save time and money. Read my post above yours.

[DRoseDARs]

Mine was more detailed...

[Az]

Wasn't there at least one that we could see?

I think there is a couple in which we can se a small wabble in the blob of light. This are those with enormous planets ( 5+ times the size of jupiter) that are REALLY close to them. I don't consider that "seeing"

[Dauphin]

Edit - umm bump.

[Odin]

One thing that annoys me about the Sagan worshippers is that they assume that evolution leads to intellegence. Sorry, but there is no goal in evolution. Most of the guys who push for intellegent life tend to be physicists and astronomers, not biologists, and most of these Saganites think that life is deterministic, but it isn't. Life is a chaotic system, and cannot be reduced to a few equations that Freeman Dyson and his determinists think.

[DRoseDARs]

Don't be silly, of course there are goals in evolution: Survival and propagation. Intelligence is just another means of achieving those goals. Whether it's more successful in the long run or not I cannot say.

[Urban Ranger]

Odin is right, there is no goal in evolution. Afterall, the genetic variations are all random. Reproduction (more precisely, sexual reproduction) is the means to bring about more variations, as that's when the genes are shuffled. Survival is the end result of evolution - all those that didn't survive, we don't see, except as fossils.

[DRoseDARs]

Whatever...

[Urban Ranger]

Sore loser