
Why Only Americans Are Interested in the Hunt for Alien Life - vmorgulis
http://www.nbcnews.com/mach/space/only-americans-are-interested-hunt-alien-life-n698706
======
acd
I am Swedish and interested.

There is 100-200 billion galaxies. The estimated number of stars in the
universe is between 10^22 to 10^24. Each star on average has more than planet
in orbit. That means its at lest 10^22 planets. 10000000000000000000000. Whats
the probability we are the only one with intelligent life on it?

Here is a Russian billionare funding interstellar space craft.
[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-
billionaire-u...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-billionaire-
unveils-big-plan-build-tiny-interstellar-spacecraft)

We should work together in peace to discover these new planets.

[http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How...](http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How_many_stars_are_there_in_the_Universe)
[http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-
univ...](http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-
universe.html) [http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-
many-...](http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-stars-
are-there/)

~~~
gpsx
I am going to take the opposing view here on the likelihood of
extraterrestrial life. But I do want to say that I think it is good someone is
out there looking for it. I have been known to be wrong quite a bit.

I don't think 10^22 is a very big number. If we try to guess the probability
of life evolving at random, I can see it being negligible given that number of
planets.

First we can try to calculate something easier, the famous monkeys banging on
keyboards to try to type Hamlet. If we put 1 trillion monkeys on each planet,
and let them try for a trillion years, with three attempts per day to make the
math easier, we get a total of 10^49 attempts.

We'll consider a keyboard with 50 keys. 10^49 is roughly 50^29, which means we
can expect one lucky monkey to get 29 characters into the play. That is
impressive but not very far into a play with 30,557 words (150,000
characters?).
([http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwo...](http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwords.php))

Now consider human DNA. I am not a biology expert so I may not have my DNA
right. But it looks like a typical human DNA molecule contains 500,000 to
2,500,000 nucleotides ([http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-
reach-...](http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-
moon.html)). I believe there are 4 possibilities for each nulceotide. That
means 4^2,500,000 or 10^1,500,000. That is a lot of possibilities. Worse even
then typing Hamlet. And that would be if we just had monkeys supplied with
adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine putting DNA together. Never mind that
these are each complicated molecules in themselves that have to be assembled
at random.

So how did we even get here? Well, thanks to quantum mechanics we have almost
endless opportunities to end up here. It just seems unlikely that we and some
other life ended up in the universe together.

~~~
firmgently
It sounds like you're calculating the likelihood of a human evolving in an
instant though? Which doesn't need to happen and isn't presumed to have
happened here on earth.

Intelligent life doesn't have to be like us at all, it doesn't even have to
use DNA (although intuitively it does feel like it would need some similarly-
complex form of reproductive instruction... __eventually __).

According to evolutionary theory early life on this planet was something far
simpler than us (eg. some form of self-replicating molecule - depending on
your definition of life) and evolutionary forces (imperfect reproduction
leading to variation along with 'survival of the best fit') do the rest of the
work. It's vastly unlikely that it would take all the same forks in all the
same paths and end up as something like humans (or even like vertebrates - the
whole tree of life begun from scratch on another planet would likely be
unrecognisable to us) but it seems (again, intuitively) like something akin to
what we call intelligence would eventually arise due to the competitive
advantages it offers.

~~~
gpsx
My comment was trying to address the idea of big numbers. People can say there
are so many planets there must be other life out there. But relative to the
numbers that can be involved here, 10^22 is not that big of a number.

You raise two very good points. The first (or really second) is multiplicity.
For the DNA example I gave, there are many different valid human DNA patterns,
and there are surely many non-human good patterns. We divide out number of
parameters by the multiplicity. I don't think this generally have a big effect
on the size of the _exponent_ we are talking about even if it does change the
number by a large factor.

The other point is that this was an evolutionary process. What this means is
that we could stop and save our work along the way, due to
reproduction/replication. When the monkeys try to type Hamlet, they have to
start over each time. If one gets the last character wrong, it is back to the
drawing board. A better evolution analogy would be if the scientist could stop
a monkey when he got the first paragraph and then give that as a starting
point for other monkeys. This _does_ seem like it could make a big difference
in the size of the exponent.

Back to the size of that exponent - it is roughly the number of components of
the system. We are composed of 10^29 atoms. There aren't even that many
planets, let alone a number raised to that exponent. Even the most simple life
consists of many atoms, but the size of our universe only supports putting a
small (100?) number of components together. Given this, I am personally still
skeptical the universe is big enough to create life besides us.

I do have one more thing I want to mention related to why life looks easy.
When we look back at our evolution, it looks like it was easy, even
inevitable. But there is one thing to consider. Imagine we lined up 10^300,000
monkeys or whatever it would take to type Hamlet, and we put a scientist
behind each one to check the monkey's work. Imagine if you were the scientist
behind that one monkey that actually pounded out all of Hamlet. Given that you
did not see the other 10^300,000 attempts, what would that look like to you?

------
ggggtez
They don't even answer the question. I guess he suggests that Americans are
still explorers and other countries aren't. That's hardly an explanation.

~~~
betrothed
From the article:

    
    
      So I've resorted to amateur sociology to provide 
      justification. Unlike the countries of Europe, 
      America still resonates to its pioneering heritage, 
      and that heritage is stunningly recent.

------
Tepix
The author is misinformed.

Jurij Milner who is Russian, is giving an unprecedented 100 million USD for
SETI purposes as part of the Breakthrough Listen project.

------
mcv
I'm absolutely interested in the hunt for alien life. It's just that I don't
think SETI (looking for technological radio signals) is a good way to find it.
No signal we've sent into space can be detected from more than half a
lightyear away. Radio broadcasts lose power over distance far to quickly to be
detectable over interstellar distances, unless you're transmitting with the
power of a star.

You could send a tight beam of course, but then you need know where to send
it. Aliens have to know we're here and they need to care enough to spend
significant resource to send us a message.

So while I'd love to see a sign of extraterrestrial life, I don't think
searching for radio transmissions is the way to go.

------
kirykl
Age of life on earth: ~3,800,000,000 years

Age of earth life knowing about electromagnetic radiation: ~217 years

Radio SETI will arguably only help us find a species in our relative window of
technology. But I think it's worth working on.

------
Hydraulix989
This feels like one of those articles where the author justifies the truth of
some non-obvious "fact" without first showing that it is true.

Like is it really a thing that "only Americans are interested in searching for
alien life" \-- I am American, and I wasn't aware (and many of my friends
aren't American).

------
hubert123
didnt China just build a massive radio station for space?..

------
disposablezero
Given the U.S. propensity for religiousity, perhaps another effort is
searching the universe for God?

~~~
TheOsiris
dude, if you think the US ranks even near the top 25 countries in terms of
religiosity then you need to travel more

~~~
throwaway2016a
While that is true as a percentage of the population, as for total number of
religious people the US is in the top 5 just due to population size. [1]

Also, some US states are larger than entire countries and the percentages vary
greatly by state. So depending on where you live in the United States it may
feel like literally everyone is religious.

I live in a relatively liberal part of the country and I still feel the need
to stay in the closet as an atheist for fear or being disowned by my community
and family.

But back to the topic at hand, I think finding aliens would be definitive
proof that at the very least the part about God creating earth as something
unique and special is bogus.

In other words I think the origional poster is completely wrong. If you
believe in God you should fear finding aliens. Philosophically many religious
people have trouble reconciling with evolution, never mind another living
creature on a planet other than our own.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country)
\- yeah I know I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but I only have so much
time to debate on Hacker News per day and finding quality sources takes time
:(

------
treehau5
Maybe the rest of the world realizes it would go something like this,

"OK found them!"

"Awesome! Yay! Hurray!"

 _celebration for weeks, maybe months, hysterical articles, news headlines,
further research initiatives, etc_

Decades later, still have hunger, famine, rising global temperatures, scarce
resources, disease, cancer, wars mongering superpowers, and corporate greed,
etc

