Some large stars are visible in other fairly nearby galaxies. There's a type of variable star called a Cepheid Variable. How it varies its output depends on its size so measure that and you can work out how bright it actually is. Compare it with how bright it appears (allowing for interstellar dust) and you can work out how far away it is. They are giant stars, bright enough to be individually identifiable in other nearby galaxies - so that tells you how far away the galaxy is. The first discovered one, Delta Cephei, is there in the game (which has also added a black hole to the system).
Are all known stars supposed to be in the game?
- Thread starter Andovar
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How do we know that what we are looking for is how we think it is though?
I just yesterday saw an article about this topic, and the way some have put it is that if we are like ants in a colony, they are within their own "scope" of understanding fairly intelligent beings. But if humans build a highway next to them, they are oblivious to that. And no human is going to go over to them and befriend them or try to explain this. The point being that if someone really is much more advanced than us, which is likely, then they can either have come and gone, be so different that we'd never know, or never be even remotely close. But why would they bother with us
I think that's a fair point too.But my biggest reason is the time scope, and how insignifant little time we've been around.
Exactly. The Earth is over 4.5 billion years old and we have been able to produce radio waves for 141 years. That's a very small window of opportunity.
I use to say.
Iam not scared if there is intelligent life out there.
What scares me is ,,, Are we the only life in this infanity vaste huge universe,,,,,,
And I doubt it. Iam sure there is life in many different ways. Highly evolved, intelligent, from our perspective, to the small single cell. The universe is full of life
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. - Arthur C Clarke
One of the more probable explanations is that sufficiently advanced civilizations are not using radio waves to communicate. Neutrinos, or some other exotic particles are more likely goes the thinking...
to the OP:
No. There are very few stars in the ED world, only 400 billion, give or take 300 billion (at different times the company has given differing numbers, but in a document they produced to comply with government regulations they said 100 billion and that is probably the most accurate judging from why they said that number and to whom they were giving the information.)
There are other games that have many more places to visit, like the 18 Quintilian planets in No Man's Sky for example.
It isn't an accurate representation of the real galaxy, it is procedurally generated based on some rules they made up to make it look good to them. Just because something is in a certain place in ED doesn't mean it's really like that. It is a game and based on what they think looks good, not what is real.
No. There are very few stars in the ED world, only 400 billion, give or take 300 billion (at different times the company has given differing numbers, but in a document they produced to comply with government regulations they said 100 billion and that is probably the most accurate judging from why they said that number and to whom they were giving the information.)
There are other games that have many more places to visit, like the 18 Quintilian planets in No Man's Sky for example.
It isn't an accurate representation of the real galaxy, it is procedurally generated based on some rules they made up to make it look good to them. Just because something is in a certain place in ED doesn't mean it's really like that. It is a game and based on what they think looks good, not what is real.
Funny enough, I put out a video on this very topic yesterday:
[video=youtube;LuuCHqNtJa4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuuCHqNtJa4[/video]
[video=youtube;LuuCHqNtJa4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuuCHqNtJa4[/video]
If curious, google the star name or the catalogue ID, in the case below the HD & HIP
Say we take Kapp Fornacis for example
Looking up HIP 11072 or HD 14802 and "star" so you don't get some weird
we get site such as below.
http://www.astrostudio.org/xhip.php?hip=11072
Real star, might not have psychedelic onions however
Say we take Kapp Fornacis for example
Looking up HIP 11072 or HD 14802 and "star" so you don't get some weird
we get site such as below.
http://www.astrostudio.org/xhip.php?hip=11072
Real star, might not have psychedelic onions however
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How do we know that what we are looking for is how we think it is though?
I just yesterday saw an article about this topic, and the way some have put it is that if we are like ants in a colony, they are within their own "scope" of understanding fairly intelligent beings. But if humans build a highway next to them, they are oblivious to that. And no human is going to go over to them and befriend them or try to explain this. The point being that if someone really is much more advanced than us, which is likely, then they can either have come and gone, be so different that we'd never know, or never be even remotely close. But why would they bother with us
But my biggest reason is the time scope, and how insignifant little time we've been around.
The problem with the ants is they don't have the capability of understanding what a road is or even what it might be. We do have the capacity for visualising and imagination, yet nothing we attempt shows any trace of alien life anywhere.
If there was just one more advanced alien species anywhere in the Milky Way, they'd surely be vastly more advanced and be leaving some kind of trace that we could detect. If there was some hugely advanced alien species anywhere in the universe that was capable of colonising and utilising all the stars in their own galaxy (think Dyson spheres or similar) then we'd surely be able to detect that. Or more likely - we'd have detected galaxies where there were large patches of these "Dyson spheres" blocking out or interfering with the spectrum of the stars. That would be a clear give-away that some unnatural event is occurring on a massive galactic scale. We've found nothing of the sort in hundreds of billions of galaxies. The only unusual stuff is the huge scale, natural cosmic stuff.
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I have to add that if this game interests you in astronomy at all, do yourself a favor. Go to the library and see if they have a copy of Burnham's Celestial Handbook by Robert Burnham on the shelves. It's not uncommon. Just check out volume 1. Yes, it's horribly dated for certain topics, but for others, especially the star lore and basic information it's still the most engaging and enjoyable armchair astronomy handbook there is.
That's a huge assumption. Why would they be vastly more advanced than us? And why would they leave traces? After all, there may be sharks around. And even if they exist and are vastly more advanced than us it's still possible that the speed of light cannot be exceeded which is a huge downer for any wannabe space-faring civilisation.
Again, no. Apart from the fact that Dyson Spheres are pure science fiction (where would you get enough matter to encapsulate a star?) other galaxies are much too far away for us to define single stars in them unless they are quasars (which we can detect but still can't "see") or they happen to go supernova whilst we are looking in that direction. Space is big, see my sig.
As our system is barely 4.5 billion years old and the Milky Way is nearer 13.3 billion years old, there were almost 9 billion years for another alien species to rise in our galaxy before we even had a chance.
If they existed for a vastly longer time, why wouldn't they be vastly more advanced?
You don't need to travel at the speed of light to colonise the entire galaxy. We could set out today and do it in a couple of hundred thousand years to a million years - every single star. Given how many advanced aliens *could* have arisen in the 13.2 billion years age of the Milky Way, how many chances is that for one of them to have done so? Just one out of thousands of opportunities is all it would take - the alternative is believing that every single advanced alien species chooses not to colonise the galaxy? That seems really far fetched to me.
Aliens are pure science fiction, at least "super advanced" ones. There is not a single shred of evidence of any advanced species in the Milky Way or the whole universe bar our own.
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I thought the answer to the question was yes.
So I was just reading an interesting article about this star (HL Tauri) with a large protoplanetary disk:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/18/s...nets-waiting-to-be-born.html?ref=science&_r=0
Sounds like a really cool place to explore!
Unfortunately searches for HL Tauri in the game come up empty.
What FD has created so far with the 400 billion star galaxy is mind bogglingly amazing. So I'm not complaining here, just wondering...
Was HL Tauri just missed? Or maybe the universe isn't complete yet? Will additional stars/systems be added over time as the scientific community discovers them?
Search for Tauri Nebula, that can be found in game, and there might be the star you were looking for.
Fair enough but by the same token, why would they be? Crocodiles as a species are far older than humans - are they more advanced? There are 8.74 million species on Earth - how many of them are technologically more advanced than us?
Why is it far fetched not to want to colonise the galaxy? It seems to me that humans don't want to colonise the galaxy - the people who could make it happen, or at least finance progress toward that goal, are quite content ruling the world. Just because we space fans have romantic notions of being space cowboys doesn't mean that's what everybody wants - we are a tiny minority.
The existence of aliens is probable (though meeting them is not). Dyson Sphere's are physically impossible for the reason I mentioned in my post. Let's take our solar system and scoop up all of the matter in it that isn't our Sun. If we form this matter into a sphere that is strong enough not to implode due to the effect of the Sun's gravity, how big a sphere do you think you'll get? So where does all of the required matter come from? Where does the food come from to feed the workers (do you think 7 billion people could build it?). Oh, hang on, you can't eat that, we need all the matter we can get for the sphere. I haven't even touched on the amount of energy that the Sun produces, let's just say that you wouldn't want to be in a room with it if the windows were shut.
Well look at the flipside - why are we advanced? If anything we should be more backward given how many times life has nearly been extinguished. Relatives of those crocs may well have ended up becoming sentient 100 million years ago, progressing us far further than we are today.
The point would be that just ONE alien species is required to be so. Only one of the thousands of alien species that existed before us would need to become sentient before us in order to progress further.
Going into space was a government project way back when it first started, now it's a corporation project. This will be the same - or if the drive to move out doesn't occur naturally by the population it'll be a result of resource scarcity - or just plain old species survival to prevent us from being wiped out..
Again, it only ever needed ONE alien race to decide to do this, in all the many thousands that supposedly came before us if sentient life was common.
So where are they? (Enrico Fermi)
Why aren't they leaving any evidence? Why aren't we detecting anything at all - no signals whatsoever. We may only have been broadcasting for a few decades but the messages should have been coming towards us for millenia. With so many supposedly advanced aliens around, surely just ONE would have compatible means of sending signals that we could understand, at the right time?
Again the point here is that in the vastness of the Universe and Milky Way, we haven't detected *anything* that couldn't be explained as a natural phenomenon. We're talking about a sufficiently advanced species - just one - that is capable of some kind of stellar manipulation so that differences appear in spectral lines or obvious differences are made on a galactic scale. Given the extreme number of galaxies involved something surely would have been detected had it existed. Maybe some way to manipulate stars so that they don't act the way that physics says they should? But there's nothing out there acting weird that can't be explained by physics.
The problem is that even life as we know it is often so weird and unexpected --even now we're stumbling across it in the most unlikely places on Earth-- that if we ever come across alien life, we may not even recognise it. As for the many different ways sentient intelligence can manifest, well, I can't even conceive of that, and I'm a psychologist, so I've tried.
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Hence we also struggle with inferring their motivations. Would alien life want to contact us, and why? Have they tried already, but we weren't technologically or psychologically ready to hear them (we only know about radio waves since the last century or so --a mere blink on galactic timescales)? Or would they be old and wise enough to recognise the need for a Prime Directive, and keep us in deliberate isolation until we're mature enough to handle knowledge of the existence of other species without going into meltdown (we're not doing such a great job handling the small differences amongst humanity)? I'd favour the latter myself: let that small tribe of backward primitives come to us when they're ready...
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Similarly (and neatly explored in the SciFi novel Natural History by Justina Robson), we may not even recognise alien advanced technology when we look at it --which by that stage may well be indistinguishable from the aliens themselves. What looks like natural phenomena on the surface may actually be alien technology. Pulsars? Who knows. What we should be looking for is huge clouds belting out infrared radiation... maybe. Science is a great tool for explaining things, but it is also a filter for perception.
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Or here's a mind blower: maybe WE are the alien technology. It has been seriously suggested that our universe --as we perceive it, and ourselves included-- is a virtual reality simulation running in some badass advanced computer somewhere. Now considering that in theory we could eventually develop such a computer simulation ourselves, we would be talking about a simulation running inside a simulation... and that in turn could build its own simulation, and so forth. Simulations all the way down, like Babushka dolls, each increasing the statistical probability that what we call "reality" is in fact a simulation.
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