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Aliens Don’t Exist

Conditions for intelligent life are rare – unlikely to form outside the earth


Columbus Dispatch, 2k (David Lore, “LIKELIHOOD OF ALIEN LIFE DWINDLES, RESEARCHERS SAY”, January 30, L/N)
During the 1990s, a number of discoveries pointed towards extraterrestrial life. NASA scientists claimed evidence in a meteorite that fell from Mars. Astronomers reported indirect evidence of about 20 planets outside our solar system, based upon slight wobbles in the movement of distant stars. Reconnaissance of the Jovian and Saturnian systems found indications of liquid seas on the moons Europa and Titan.

Two reports this month, however, throw cold water on such easy optimism.

An international group of scientists looking for evidence of planetary systems formed more or less like ours has come up empty-handed. After five years, the PLANET team (Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork) has yet to spot our first twin.

At the same time, two University of Washington scientists contend that animals and people may well be unique to Earth, given the complex set of conditions necessary for their evolution.

The PLANET report is surprising, given the rash of extrasolar planetary " sightings'' in recent years. It was presented during this month's American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta by OSU graduate student Scott Gaudi.

Wobble-watchers are seeing evidence of very large planets -- Jupiter-size or bigger -- hugging close to their stars in orbits resembling those of Mercury or Venus.

The PLANET group, however, found nothing when it combed nearby stars for evidence of Jupiter-scale planets in far orbits, the pattern we'd expect from our solar system.

"The fact that we're not detecting any planets bigger than Jupiter (in Jupiterlike orbits) probably indicates that there aren't many Jupiters out there,'' Gaudi said.

And that's bad news for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In the evolution of the solar system, Jupiter likely shielded Earth from bombardment by comets, allowing life to evolve, said OSU astronomer Andrew Gould.

The Washington scientists, astronomer Donald Brownlee and paleontologist Peter Ward, say in Rare Earth that this is indeed the Garden of Eden. "The Earth is a very charmed planet,'' Ward said. "We know of no other body that is even remotely like Earth.''

Primitive life may be widespread in the universe, but the odds of its evolution into higher forms are staggeringly low, they write.

First, the solar system had to be in a protected area of the Milky Way. Then Earth, Jupiter and our moon have to be the right sizes and in the right positions to produce a temperate environment with seasonal changes but no comets.



Only thus could life evolve from slime to scientist over 3 billion or 4 billion years.

"You need to have a vast amount of time to let evolution ramp up to animals, and we think there are only a small number of planets where that could happen,'' Ward said.



Aliens Don’t Exist

Alien life doesn’t exist—too many unlikely events like gene mutations must occur for intelligent life to form


Falconi, writer, physicist and consultant in computing and electro-optics, 1981 (Oscar, “The Case for Space Colonization—Now!-and why it should be our generation’s #1 priority,” http://nutri.com/space/)

<Every bit of life on earth, be it plant or animal, bacteria or whale, monosexual or bisexual, is identical in the deepest sense in that they all use nucleic acids for storage and transmission of hereditary information. All organisms use the same basic genetic code. All use proteins in their metabolic processes. The structure of human sperm cells is almost identical with paramecia. It's difficult to escape the conclusion that all life on earth evolved from one single instance of the origin of life. Now about that single instance - that chance combination of chemicals - it almost certainly happened only once on the earth's surface in all those billions of years. It was clearly a very fortuitous event, possibly never duplicated in all the universe. In labs the world over, many are trying to duplicate it in very ideal conditions. Scientists are injecting into sealed containers all sorts of combinations of amino acids; ammonia; water; gases; heat; sparks; UV, gamma and particle radiation; - whatever they can conjure up. They've come up with interesting organics, some simple proteins, but certainly nothing even closely resembling the most primitive form of monosexual life. Even when this monosexual life appeared on earth, another giant step had to be taken: bisexual life had to be created. A monosexual species, though it undergoes mutation, can improve its species only at a very slow rate. Mutations must take place serially, whereas with a bisexual species, mutations in different members can both be passed on into the offspring. Thus improvement by mutation and selection can take place in bisexual species at rates many orders of magnitude faster than in monosexual species. In order for advanced forms of life to appear on earth, a bisexual species had to appear. This is no mean task and must be considered another very fortuitous event in man's creation. One could make a long list of very improbable mutations necessary for an intelligent species: hands that grasp, legs that transport, sight, hearing, speech, etc., plus that one lucky development in the brain that differentiates us from the apes. But for that one mutation we could have been spending the next ten billion years foraging, grooming, and swinging from trees. Because of the long sequence of beneficial mutations required, intelligent life may not be as ubiquitous throughout the universe as most think. If life is so easily created, and so easily develops, spontaneously, all over the universe, then: Why isn't there any indication that life on earth developed from anything but ONE very lucky beginning? Why don't we see untypical lifeforms spontaneously developing in our world that's so overrun with organic matter ? Why can't man manufacture life even under very artificially conducive conditions? Why do only the familiar carbon-based amino acids and simple proteins ever result from man's attempt to create life in a jar? Apparently these compounds are the ONLY building blocks that could ever result in life anywhere in the universe. That just one path is available for life to evolve is indeed a severe constraint. So instead of the Stanley Miller experiments proving how easy it is to create life, they have in fact added another limitation, another impediment, to the possibility of any other life in the universe, and have added one more argument to back up those of us who feel the probability of our uniqueness is quite good. Why haven't we ever been contacted, visited, invaded, or colonized by all this other life that's supposed to exist? Why have all attempts by Americans, Canadians, and Russians to detect radio signals from extraterrestrial beings been fruitless? ("Where are they?" asked Fermi.)Why have our Viking I and Viking II missions completely failed in their search for life on Mars? Why, out of more than 2,000,000 species of life on earth, has only one (man) succeeded in developing his brain and his culture to such an advanced degree? The answer to all these questions is that life just isn't all that easy to come by, particularly intelligent life. Too many extremely fortuitous events and conditions all must have taken place, the likes of which may never have been duplicated in all space and all time. The fact that there is a complete lack of any indication of any other intelligent life has led Trinity University's Dr Michael Hart, using a clever and logical line of reasoning, to conclude that we are unique - at least in our own galaxy. (Quart. Jour. Royal Astr. Soc., 1975) He has also shown that most classes of stars aren't capable of maintaining a luminosity constant enough, for a period of time long enough, to enable life to develop to an intelligent level. Even our own sun was barely able to qualify. If the earth were just 5% closer to the sun, or 1% farther away, mankind could not have evolved.>


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