Intelligent life in the universe

Life on earth has existed for around 3 - 4 billion years and Earth itself has been around for about 4.5 billion years. I personally believe that there is intelligent life beyond our home planet, I think it is probably quite abundant given the numbers of stars and planets that are out there. Something I have always wondered is how long before we came along could an intelligent life form theoretically have evolved. In other words, how soon, after the universe began, did first generation of stars create the heavier elements required for planet formation? And how soon after that could life have evolved on that first generation of planets to our level of intelligence? Iv always found it fascinating to imagine what those first intelligent life forms are doing now. I know it would be pure speculation but are we able to have an educated guess at when this might have been?

 

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Astronomers have now looked back over 13 billion years and saw the oldest galaxy in existance so far. That galaxy contains stars and even planets perhaps so that could be when "life" started in this universe.

 

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2JU4gX6rg8

 

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There might be, but unless we find some way to travel faster than light, we may never know. Consider that our world is in a single star system in the goldilocks zone with a fairly stable orbit. Now I've heard that galaxies also have a goldilocks zones and I've also heard that 85% of all stars are in multi-star systems of two or more stars. Do we know of any worlds that could possibly have stable orbits in a multi-star system? If not, that would really cut into the possibilities would it not? Now consider what problems any intelligent life anywhere in the universe would have to over come to become a star traveling species.

 

Well that's not entirely true. The first star systems after the first big bang did not contain heavier elements, since those were not yet fused inside other stars. I'm sure you've heard Carl Sagan say "We are all star stuff." This would limit planet formation to gaseous planets.

@OP
You can probably readily google your answer and I don't know off the top of my head. There are estimates based on the lifetimes of stars and possibly other evidence as to how long after the big bang the first star systems with terrestrial planets arose.

 

We now have the ability to find planets in other parts of the galaxy, and have already found a few definite ones.

We can find planets among many stars now using the same technology. It basically looks at the star itself and how planets gravity affect it.

Anyways; maybe we can enhance listenning and focussing devices to pick up signals from other planets. Maybe eventually finding a planet that broadcasts television/radio shows. The shows will be millions or billions of years old by the time they get to us.

At least SETI type operations will have planets to aim at now, instead of just random co-ordinates in the night sky.

Who is to say how long an advanced civilization would take to evolve. Our own Earth is riddled with mysteries.

If we go back in time as far as we can about 6000 years, and look at one of the earliest civilizations known to exist, we would find the Sumerians.

Is it not strange that the Earliest known civilization we can find had advanced mathematics, and language skills. They passed down Astrology from that time. I am not saying astrology is real, but astrology is a complex form of reading the stars and planets and assuming they influence your life. It is not childsplay.

They needed and had astronomy..

They even made claims about gods in what appeared to be flying craft/spacetravel.

They left thousands of pages of writing as well.
imagine this was written by someone 6000 years ago.. it is awesome!

We can find skeletons going back further than LUCY and LUCY is 3.5 million years old if our carbon dating is correct.

So mankind can rise and fall, and has been around for millions of years.

If a humanity ending event happened like an asteroid, or nuclear war, what would the earth look like in a million years? Would we be able to detect the holes in the ground that our buildings once stood in. Is there a plastic alive that is solid enough it would survive a million years?

I am just saying the planets out there may see rise of technology more than once, and who knows if we are the first advanced civilization on earth?

 

Perhaps you could elaborate on this. I've always known that when stars "die" they create heavier elements while doing so. So what then was so different back 13 billion years ago that did not allow stars that "died" to not produce those heavier elements as they do today? Weren't those stars capable of creating the elements and if not when did they start to do so? I didn't realize there was such a point in time where stars changed their characteristics so greatly from no formation of elements to actually start formation of them. What made them change, thanks. :shrug:

 

@cosmictraveler - Its not just when stars die that they create the heavier elements, they are creating heavier elements in the super hot furnaces of their cores throughout their lifetimes. Those heavier elements are simply blasted out in to space when the star dies (i think the explosion itself creates other elements). The first generation of stars worked in exactly the same way, only back then there was only hydrogen and a little helium in the universe. Thats why there could be no planets around those first stars, because there had been no stars yet to produce the heavier elements required to make planets. So the galaxy astronomers are looking at, over 13 billion lightyears away will contain that first generation of stars made initialy only of hydrogen and helium, as they were when they were in the process of creating the heavier elements. I think that galaxy would be too young to have any second generation stars with planets forming.

@AlexG - Ace video, love the last line: 'and pray that theres intelligent life somewhere up in space, cos theres bugger all down here on earth' Lol!

@KilljoyKlown - Interesting point about multi-star systems, i didnt know that most stars are parts of multi-star system. That would lower the chances for intelligent life out there but the way i see it, there are going to be many planets like jupiter, many planets like mercury, many like mars and many like earth. The universe is just so vast, i cant imagine our set of circumstances is so unique that it couldnt have happened anywhere else.

@kwhilborn - Maybe there were other civiilisations before the Sumerians, im not sure about that myself. I am pretey sure though that ancient civilisations do exist on other worlds, like i say in my original post, and i believe that some will still be around wherever in the universe they are.

I wonder to what extent they have mastered their surroundings, i believe they will have learnt to be peacefull like we haven't yet managed to do. I wonder what projects they are working on. Are they seeding life on other planets and watching as they grow? Terraforming planets with the potential so they can create new worlds? How big is their empire? What happened when they first came accross other intelligent life forms? Endlessly facinating!

 

We can only see the galaxies that were giving birth to stars back 13 billion years ago so why couldn't they be living and dying just as our own galaxy has been doing for billions of years? Those older galaxies could have been producing stars for billions of years as well, why couldn't they have? So if that was the case then the earliest galaxies could have had planets around some stars since those stars had come and gone many times creating the heavier elements. If that didn't happen according to you I'd like to know why you don't think that it might have.:shrug:

 

Remember that astronomers can only see this galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago. It is 13 billion light years away from us, so its light has been traveling through space for that long to get to earth. Im not saying that right now this galaxy hasnt got planets, im saying that the galaxy we can see through our telescopes hasnt got planets because it is so young. The galaxy as it realy is right now will have stars and planets just like the milky way. Btw, our galaxy is just as old as this galaxy 13 billion light years away is. We say it is an early galaxy not because it was around long before ours was but because we can see it as it was when the universe was much younger.

Not sure if that helps or not? Hope it does.

 

I think that intelligent life would be a good idea, both on the earth and in the universe.

 

*tips hat to AdamMc*

And just to give rough estimates, I know the lifetime of some O type stars are predicted to be less than a million years(I believe my memory serves me correct). I don't recall the estimated time for solar system formation but I believe it's roughly on the same order of magnitude. So you're talking about in maybe tens of millions of years having solar systems with terrestrial planets, which is a drop in the bucket compared to 13 billion years. So theoretically an alien species could be that ancient but they would likely have had to develop interstellar means of travel to move from one star system to another since it's unlikely their birthing star system would still be habitable (Although the lifetime of cooler stars like our sun can be on the order of tens of billions of years, the habitable zone would likely have shifted due to an ever expanding sun). Also, the odds for terrestrial planets increases with the age of the universe as more and more stars go supernova and release more heavier elements into the cosmic mix.

You can google the Drake equation which will give you an estimate of the chances of other life in the universe. For me personally, the odds seem insurmountable in favor of life. Of course overcoming not just the third dimension, but the fourth would be necessary to meet said species. Overcoming these two barriers is also very unlikely unless there is vast technology for traversing space and/or time of which we do not yet have a conceptualization.

 

the drake equations gives us more of an idea of what we don't know of the possibility of life in the universe rather than an estimate of it.

 

Have you read this yet?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...3uzIDA&usg=AFQjCNGINbf95tKB_lGv4517ZBWX-FVYVA

 

depends how you define intellegent.

 

In this context, I guess im defining it as any race that is recognisable to us as civilised and intelligent. A life form that we could interact with, maybe share ideas, stories or technology with.

Interesting, although not that sure exactly what it all means! If you are interested in the evolution of the universe, im reading a book at the moment called Journey of the Universe by a Cosmologist called Brian Swimme. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you haven't already read it. He tells the universe story from big bang to present day not with dry, scientific jargon, but with the warm heartfelt passion i think this subject deserves! He did a really good series of videos a few years back, search youtube for this (Sorry I cant be trusted to post links yet!)

Swimme 1: The New Story

It should be the first result, its the first in a series of 8.

I would think any intelligent species that had evolved and survived long enough would have developed the tech for interstellar travel by the time their star had expired. Take humans, as soon as we became intelligent enough to use tools (develop technology) there was an exponential explosion in progress, from that point it only took tens of thousands of years to reach civilisation, and a few thousand from there to reach our industrialised, technological, postmodern, information age. Imagine where our technology will be a few thousand years from now! I think we will have developed technology to take us far beyond earth. Now imagine where we will be in a few MILLION years! I certainly think we will have developed interstelar means of transport by then, if we haven't then we're still ok cos we will still have another few million years to play with till the sun dies!

 

It's a great question I wanted the answer to some time ago. I read somewhere that approx 1.5-1 billion years ago is the earliest possible time for similar stars to sprout out life like us(assuming same time-line in difficulty). Of course we don't even have a clue how common life (and by proxy "intelligent" life like us) is ...currently so that makes predicting the earliest possible civilization even more improbable.

The drake equation is old news(at least the numbers mostly pessimistic scientists plug into it). New planet discovery recently will give us a far better set of numbers to work with.

 

Another optimist. What makes you think human civilization as we know it will continue for even another thousand years let alone another million years? Our technical civilization is nothing but a house of cards that could collapse within the next 100 years for any number of reasons we have very little control over.

When it does billions will die, and our planet will never be the same again. You might think we can rebuild and get back to where we are now, but will we, we won't have the same resources to work with as we are using them up. We need to get off planet and start finding new resources in our solar system before that happens. From my point of view it's going to be a close call whether we will make it or not.

 

. . . . sorry . . . . carbon dating will not accurately 'date' way back to 3.5 by ago . . . .

 

Yes I am an optimist, however, I do think that we are at a very precarious point in history. We face many problems which combined can be seen as a deep crisis at a global level, over population, global warming, water shortage, food shortage, peak oil, economic instability, religious war, social inequality... its a long list. The world right now is like a dry tinder box, if any one of these issues sparked the whole thing could go up. I can see that, so while I am an optimist, im not a 'blind' optimist. I guess you could say that the longer the timeframe the more optimistic the outlook. Even if we did blow it and life on earth ended never even to return, the universe wouldnt even notice we had been here, it would be business as usual, afterall we have been around for a whole millionth of a percent in the life of the whole cosmic journey, we are but a fart in a windstorm to the universe. On this cosmic timeframe though you can still be optomistic even in the face of such a bleak situation, I believe life would still spring up in some other corner of the universe as it probably has done for billions of years before we arrived. That doesnt mean that we shouldnt care about what happens here though.

A few billion years ago bacteria went through a similar situation as we find ourselves in now. They faced a crisis that threatened to wipe them out. But they managed to inovate their way out of catastrophy. They developed the ability to work with eachother, each one becoming specialised for a specific task and fusing together to form something that had never existed before, the nucleated cell. The same thing is happening now, we are facing a global crisis which we need to inovate our way out of, there are no guarantees we will make it but i am definitely hopeful that we will. If we do, who knows where we could go, the nucleated cell went on to be pretty successful theres no reason why we couldnt be just as successful on a global scale, imagine that!