21 December 2017

Notes - the odds of civilizations / trust?



       Dusk is done for the day. Carol is on the phone. You had a busy but relaxing day finishing Christmas cards. Late lunch at Smashburgers with a five dollar off coupon. Several  errands have been run -- a productive day from your perspective. You have been thinking about yesterday's post, particular about the "I believe" quote because you cannot ever remember writing that you 'believe' anything in term of 'being true'. - Amorella

       1815 hours. I always have my doubts, Amorella, even about the most significant of concepts such as Angels and G-D. Why would I believe about anything less? Too much crap in the world. Too little description of reality/Reality. As such, for me to think to write: "One day within this century I believe, we will learn another terrible lesson not from human history but from the future instead." One can't learn anything from the future. That's my thought on this particular subject. I need to check on the word, believe.

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believe - verb [with object] 1 accept (something) as true; feel sure of the truth of: the superintendent believed Lancaster's story | [with clause] :  Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead.  accept the statement of (someone) as true: he didn't believe her or didn't want to know.  [no object] have faith, especially religious faith: there are those on the fringes of the Church who do not really believe.  (believe something of someone) feel sure that (someone) is capable of a particular action: I wouldn't have believed it of Lois—what an extraordinary woman! 2 [with clause] hold (something) as an opinion; think or suppose: I believe we've already met | (believe someone/something to be) :  four men were believed to be trapped | things were not as bad as the experts believed | humu-humu are, I believe, shrimp fritters.

Selected and edited from the Oxford/American software

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       1827 hours. Obviously, the first definition neatly fits in my meaning; however 'feeling sure of the truth of the terrible lesson' is out of character. I am not much of a prognosticator except in the variables of 'futures studies' -- based on mathematical probabilities. There are no mathematical probabilities based on the future.

       That's what probabilities are, boy. See what the probabilities are that your planet is the only one with advanced species. - Amorella

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The Odds That We’re the Only Advanced Species in the Galaxy Are One in 60 Billion

A modified version of the Drake Equation, and what it tells us.

airspacemag.com
May 3, 2016

By Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Read more at http://www dot airspacemag dot com/daily-planet/odds-were-only-technologically-advanced-species-universe-are-extremely-low-180958975/#fG46mVUEfhCpMqUs.99
For decades the famous Drake Equation has been used to estimate the number of technologically advanced species in the universe. Now Adam Frank from the University of Rochester and Woody Sullivan from the University of Washington take a slightly different approach to the problem and suggest a modification of the Drake Equation. Instead of estimating how many civilizations are out there to communicate with today, they estimate how many civilizations have been out there since the beginning of the Universe. 
At first glance this seems to be only a slight semantic difference, but it is not. A big unknown in the original Drake Equation is the average lifetime of a civilization during which they might be available to communicate with us. This window might be very short, especially if technological species are typically replaced by machines. Or it could be very long.
Reframing the question makes longevity a moot point. Frank and Sullivan ask: What is the chance that we are the only technological species and always have been? If we put the question this way, the Drake Equation boils down to A = Nast * fbt, where A is the number of technological species that have ever formed over the history of the observable universe, Nast are all the astronomical unknowns (which we now have a much better handle on than we did in 1961), and fbt are the biological unknowns, which are still many—including the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears, the fraction of those planets on which intelligent life emerges, and the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
Based on recent exoplanet discoveries, Frank and Sullivan assume that one-fifth of all stars have habitable planets in orbit around them. This leads them to conclude that there should be other advanced technological civilization out there, unless the chance for developing such a civilization on a habitable planet in the observable universe is less than 1 in 1024 (a 1 with 24 zeros!). For our own Milky Way galaxy, the odds of being the only technologically advanced civilization are 1 in 60 billion. Thus, it’s very likely that other intelligent, technologically advanced species evolved before us. Even if only one in every million stars hosts a technologically advanced species today, that would still yield a total of about 300,000 such civilizations in the whole galaxy.
The Archilles’ heel of these statistical estimates is of course the biological uncertainties; Earth is still the only planet where we know life exists. The appearance of life may be extremely unlikely, and so might the evolution of technology. After all, there are many intelligent species on our planet, including dolphins, octopi, apes, parrots, and elephants, but only once in 4.6 billion years has a technologically advanced species evolved. And life cannot have appeared in the very early Universe until heavier elements produced by the explosions of many supernovas became abundant. 
Still, Frank and Sullivan think their 1 in 1024 estimate constitutes a “pessimism line”—a lower bound on the probability that one or more technological species has evolved over time. And that’s good news for SETI, even if it doesn’t help us know where to look.

Selected and edited from - https://www dot airspacemag dot com/daily-planet/odds-were-only-technologically-advanced-species-universe-are-extremely-low-180958975/

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       1843 hours. So, there you have it, the odds are one in sixty billion that we are not alone in our own galaxy and the plausibility of 300,000 such civilizations in our galaxy today.

       Post. - Amorella


       2239 hours. I am honestly surprised that there might be 300,000 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy today. It is no wonder governments secretly search for examples of UFO's. One might be an alien 'robotic machine' driven craft it doesn't have to have living aliens on it; it may have been built by a very humane species, more humane than our own. This opens my imagination to the plausibility, but I would not wish for alien-like contact for fear of human reactions even to machinery that was not warlike. We appear to be cursed to look for the worst possible scenario, for good reason. Survival. How would such a humane civilization such as those in my own fiction or anyone else's fiction ever plan to show themselves anywhere on or near our planet. We do not trust are own kind, our own species. How would we as a species ever learn to trust more mature heartsansoulsanminds of any extraterrestrials?

       Post. - Amorella

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