Hundreds of billions of planets, and this is just our one small galaxy.
Just given the sheer scale of the universe, I think we almost have to be foolish to think that we're the only life forms that exist in the whole thing.
It’s also foolish (no pun intended) to think that the Universe was meant to have life. We tend to believe that life is what gives meaning to all that vastness but Cosmos doesn’t need a reason for its existence, it’s just there.
Furthermore it’s not about just life but intelligent life. Life in form of microbes could be all around the Universe. But intelligent life could be extremely rare or it could be just too early and we could be the first of many species to come. It’s not egoistic to think so, it doesn’t make us feel unique and special, more likely it makes us feel depressed thinking that we are the only ones or the first of many to come.
If you take the Drake equation for example and tweak a couple of pessimistic numbers you realize it doesn’t take long before you come to the conclusion that life is extremely rare. A very good implementation you can find here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worl...
I would also like to point to the Fermi paradox. Given the aforementioned Drake equation many scientists have made estimations about the number of civilization in our galaxy. Estimations vary from a few dozen to the thousands. But if there were even one advanced civilization in the galaxy they should already have made contact somehow. That is the basis of the Fermi paradox, you can find more at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
It is also foolish to take Drake equation seriously or assume that we know what intelligent life is. Drake equation should be used for demonstration purposes only. As a side not, it is good to keep in mind that all we did for ETI search was looking out for a human-like radio signal with a narrow bandwidth, which is probably not the best way to transmit information through the Universe.
If you read the link I gave for the Fermi paradox you'll see that this is one of the dozen explanations on why we haven't been contacted yet by an alien civilization. So, yes, we might be trying to contact the wrong way.
Actually though it's not exactly wrong, we managed to capture once a significant signal that could be of alien origin. It's called the wow signal and you can find more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal
The basis of the Fermi paradox though isn't about what we did/do to contact alien civilizations but the fact that even if one advanced existed in our galaxy they should have already found us even if we weren't looking for them. Which brings us back to the conclusion that there might not be advanced civilizations around and life could very well be in the beginning.
As for the Drake equation it's not a law of physics. It is just a way to estimate the number of habitable planets in the galaxy and from there to make an assumption of the number of alien civilizations able to make interstellar contact.
Ugh. It is not unreasonable to take the Drake equation seriously. You just have to correctly understand what purpose it was supposed to serve.
The equation is not about calculating the probability of intelligent life. It was about identifying what information needs to be gathered do that you can calculated the probability of intelligent life arising.
In other words, the equation was created to help guide research, not to answer the question itself directly. As a guide to research, I think the equation remains highly relevant.
This is an interesting philosophical point. If the Universe is capable of supporting life, if indeed life is fairly common in the Universe then couldn't one say that life is fundamentally implied in the laws of physics and so forth?
Yup. It absolutely boggles my mind every time I look up at the stars. Especially when I'm out in the country with no light pollution, and you can clearly make out the light streak signifying the plane of the Milky way through the sky.
> Just given the sheer scale of the universe, I think we almost have to be foolish to think that we're the only life forms that exist in the whole thing.
This is why I like the Drake equation [0]. Even if it is not perfect, it is inherently understandable by the lay person when we are discussing such matters.
This is amazing. When you can zoom in on a bright speck and discover that it's actually a giant cluster of stars, and then continue zooming in on that cluster until it doesn't seem dense anymore, it actually lends context to the static photos of space we've all seen before.
The colors are a bit arbitrary. The sensor that takes these images only records intensity and not color. Different filters are placed over the sensor to record different wavelengths. Not all of these wavelengths are visible light. The colors are a mapping of these wavelengths to the visible spectrum.
It'd be REALLY cool if someone could turn this into a screensaver, where it progressively pans and zooms in/out. Then when you're mind is just about to be blown at full-zoom-in, it should rotate like a boss and slap a new perspective of life into your life.
update: the paper is fairly large and doesn't have pretty pictures (it has lots of technical plots, but i imagine it's not what most people think of as a fun read). also, this image is more a "public view" of the data; the paper is for the underlying survey.
What do you mean by 'not centered'? Imagine you are standing on a field of corn. To you, the field looks like a line encircling you, although it may look like a square or circle from above. There's your projection thing.
> P.S. Yes, I know I don't really need that much resolution, but still.
I call bullshit ;-) as at 15" retina is 4Mpix. In a short time span we'll have 20~30" retina)class at that size and they could very well be 9~15Mpix. Of course billion pixels is way too much, but it means that it will scale to the future (I'd love to have a wall-screen with this)
Anyway, multiple links are on the lower part of the rightmost column, available from 1024x768 to full res in a variety of formats.
How does ~275Gpix sound? [0][1]. I did a stint at UCSD for two months as an undergrad, and sat next to this monster while they were playing with it.
It might sound stupid having that much resolution, but it really is cool to be able to see that much information in front of you. It's especially good if you have a number of people standing around who are interacting with various data sets.
And if you want one yourself, it is all COTS hardware, and you can start with just a few screens then add later [2].
It's really really big. What gets you is that it's really there, go outside and look up. All those stars, all that energy running down, without anything harnessing that energy.
There it is, running down like a forest fire. What will it turn into next? I see the universe as an egg. And it's designed to become a single super sentient entity someday that makes our sentience look like inanimate energy. Our sentience will be the inanimate matter building blocks for something we can't comprehend.
We will comprehend it as much as a carbon molecule comprehends the human mind.
If you zoom all the way in, it's blurry (I know, I waited for the tiles to load). There's no single-pixel detail. That means it's not really a 9-gigapixel image, you can easily reduce it by 2x2, and make it a 2.3-gigapixel images. Save space, bandwidth and time for everyone.
