"Could There be Undetected Sentients in the Solar System?" Topic

I know we have been spilling radio and other transmissions into the cosmos for decades.

For the sake of gaming this, could an advanced sentient culture be lurking in outer planets and moons of our solar system for milennia, communicating among their colonies but going undetected by us?

CC

Given our typical news broadcasts…would YOU want the local barbarians to KNOW you were in the area?

I know I wouldn't…*wry chuckle*

So, yeah…I think they're out there…just waitin for us to outgrow childish things…like whole sale slaughter of our species for whatever excuse is the flavor-of-the-day.

No. I think we are alone in our region of the universe.

Remember the movie 'Contact'….where aliens transmitted back images of HITLER (along with a message to humanity on building a 'transport device'???)…and I SHUDDER to think what other intelligences in our OWN solar system, let alone other STAR systems…think of US, based on 'I Love Lucy', 'Gilligan's Island'…'My Mother the Car'…wait a minute…that 'gag' was already PLAYED in 'Galaxy Quest'…but what if aliens saw GALAXY QUEST and thought IT was 'real'???? *shudder*…

Do you think an 'advanced culture'…EVEN in our own solar system would WANT to 'contact us'…or make their presence 'known' if they could help it??? (maybe they tried to 'slip us the reason why' thru the PRIME DIRECTIVE in 'Star Trek'???? 8-/

If Kirk and Piccard and Sisko and Janeway, et al, COULDN'T abide by it…(how many times did each 'break' it during their tenure, either 'accidentally' or 'on purpose'???)…(and we won't even TOUCH the 'temporal PRIME DIRECTIVE' that got SMITHEREENED in ENTERPRISE, among others….)

Why would any other civilization WANT to contact us…unless it was either to 'buy our planet for a handfull of trillium and gold-pressed latinum'….'civilize us' by making us a 'protectorate'/take all the sharp, pointy things away from us that we might hurt ourselves with…or we are 'cannon fodder/lawn mulch/food storage'????

I don't think the 'galaxy' is BIG ENOUGH for us and any other 'civilizations' at this point…but if I say much more, I'll end up getting lost on the CA board…

What if there are 'intelligent seaforms' under the ice of Europa…(or my Tentacle chaps on Titan???)…or in deep caverns under MARS…(still asleep waiting for 'spring' in 25,000 years or so???)…or Great Cthullu is 'sleeping' in the planetary oceans of Neptune????

on the other hand…maybe WE are the 'aliens'…ourselves and just don't know it yet and DNA is the only real 'life' in the UNIVERSE????

Carpe' Ponderingum,
Sgt DWW

They would have done something about it by now. I know I would.

They would have destroyed us years ago except the Empress is addicted to soaps and would give the emperor hell if he turned off the TV so to speak.

They have been here all along, much closer than you think, and have been remarkably patient, even through the making of "Flipper".

Allen

Undetected sentients? Possibly. There could be some odd things out there, say, in certain levels of Jovian (and similar) atmospheres. If anything, they might be something similar to Earth dolphins in some respects; pretty smart, but non-technical.

A space-faring species? No. Anything with enough power to move things around in the outer system would be really, really noticeable. Even a low-power, long-term emission, like an ion drive; an object moving with constant, steady acceleration and an ion-plume tail? Screams 'spaceship', and nothing else. Let alone that their crew compartments would still be warm enough to be detectable, even if they are Freaky Gasbag Jellyfish from Jupiter.

What makes you think they'd be easily detectable? We keep getting surprised by big chunks of rock coming round for a visit.

LOL. Do we even know where each piece of our own space debris is?

CC

Yes, pretty much.

Allen

Hmmm … cold-blooded solar sails that lived long enough to travel interplanetary distances at sub-G accelerations might be hard to spot. Not to mention all those sci-fi standbys like teleportation, non-energy-emitting warp gateways, and so on.

Of course, no alien intelligence (or any other intelligent life form, for that matter) is likely to manifest itself in Louisiana, so it's all one to me.

LT

Then, this must be excused as pilot error:

link
link

"Some Basic Facts about Space Debris

The U.S. Air Force currently tracks about 13,400 objects in space, of which only between 6 and 7 percent are active satellites. The rest is debris.

Not all space debris can be located and tracked with current capabilities. The Air Force's Space Surveillance Network – the best in the world – can see objects down to 10 centimeters (the size of a baseball) in diameter in LEO, where the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), most Earth imaging satellites, and satellites providing mobile communications reside); and down to about 1 meter in diameter in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO, where most of the world's communications and broadcast satellites reside).

There are more than 100,000 pieces of smaller, untrackable debris, down to the size of a marble (1 centimeter in diameter) in orbit; and possibly trillions of pieces smaller yet. Scientists estimate that there is about 4 million pounds of space junk in LEO alone.

Even tiny pieces of debris can damage or destroy satellites, the Space Shuttle, the ISS, or penetrate astronaut suits. Debris in LEO travel at 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet; a marble-sized bit of junk would slam into a satellite with the energy equal to a 1-ton safe hitting the ground if dropped from a five-story building. Indeed, a tiny paint fleck put a pit in the window of the Challenger Space Shuttle during Sally Ride's historic first mission.

The amount of space junk is increasing by about 5 percent per year; meaning that by the end of the century a satellite in GEO will have a 40 percent chance of being struck during its operational life-time.

NASA has found that of the 20 problems most likely to cause the loss of a Space Shuttle, 11 involve debris.

NASA data shows a current risk of a "catastrophic" debris strike to the Shuttle of 1 in 200. By comparison, the lifetime risk of a U.S. citizen dying in a car accident is about 1 in 100; the risk of dying in an attack with a firearm, about 1 in 325; the risk of dying in a fire, about 1 in 1,116.

While debris in LEO eventually de-orbits and most burns up in the Earth's atmosphere (unfortunately, sometimes very large pieces of debris actually hit the Earth intact), debris in GEO remains on orbit, and thus a threat to spacecraft there, forever.

The 1985 test of an ASAT missile fired from a U.S. F-15 fighter at a U.S. Air Force satellite named Solwind resulted in more than 250 pieces of space debris that took 17 years to clear out of LEO. One piece of that debris came within a mile of the ISS.

Most space-faring nations have incorporated into national legislation and regulations requirements for space operators designed to limit debris creation. NASA and the Federal Communications Commission have been leaders in this arena, with the United States currently setting the highest bar in the battle against space junk. Indeed, as noted above, the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is now working on development of an international code of conduct in hopes of slowing the creation of space debris." link

CC

Hey, when I drive down I-15, I have to be alert for road debris. No difference. But like the Air Force, other drivers will tell you where the big pieces are.

In fact, that's a mjor part of escorting oversize loads: telling the driver what big chunks of debris (tires, pieces of concrete, abandoned furniture, broken-down minivans full of illegal immigrants) are on the side of the road.

Allen

"… could an advanced sentient culture be lurking in outer planets and moons of our solar system for milennia, communicating among their colonies but going undetected by us?"

There are a lot of our probes to the moon and Mars that have "mysteriously" failed or disappeared. Part of the "coverup" is to ascribe such incidences to "human error" instead of (as scuttlebutt has it) that they were *shot down*…. ;)

The Air Force's Space Surveillance Network – the best in the world – can see objects down to 10 centimeters…

This is, almost assuredly, disinformation. I would be shocked if this number wasn't sandbagged by at least an order of magnitude.

What makes you think they'd be easily detectable? We keep getting surprised by big chunks of rock coming round for a visit.

Big chunks of rock don't have exhaust plumes, or change vector beyond what normal gravity dictates.

Debris in LEO travel at 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet;

Relative to things in the same orbit? I didn't think that was the case. Regardless, counter-orbiting junk is a screaming nightmare…

old-blooded solar sails that lived long enough to travel interplanetary distances at sub-G accelerations might be hard to spot.

If the sail is big enough to be effective, coming from the outer planets, occultation will probably give it away long before it reaches the asteroid belt.

Personally, for the 'undiscovered sentients' scenario, I prefer an interstellar 'Von Neumann mine' waiting out on one of Neptune's moons having arrived long before we got out into orbit. Once it detects a close approach by a manufactured object, it starts building…

I knew it!

picture
picture

CC

link

CC

Any culture in advance of our own by 20 to 30 years would be able to completely shield itself from our current methods of detection.

If they are able to completely eliminate their MOSB (Mostly Original Substrate Biology) then they will be able to Instatiate anywhere and in any form that they desire.

The ability to capture only 1% or 1% of the suns power at out orbit would be enough power to do pretty much whatever they want, and in 20 years we will far outsrtip this capability if we continue to work on the nano-tech that is needed to construct the collection arrays. A sentient species with the ability to collect even 1% of the sun's output would be able to harness incredible energies even out to the Mars and Jupiter orbits. Past that they would need significantly more of the sun's energy caputered, but then they could use the Magnetic field of either Saturn Jupiter or another Gas giant to create enormous power with no emmissions to detect simply by stringing out a wire into the field (and it would not need to be a big wire), with any kind of superconductor all you would need is a tiny peice of material exposed to the field.

And, all of this goes back to the MOSB. Personally, I will be ridding myself of MOSH (Mostly Original Substrate Human) components as soon as I can, because I want to leave this rock, and currently (and probably for some time to come) MOSHs do not do well in space, but digital equipment can be shielded much more chearly and efficiently. With nanites, this becomes even easier.

So, all it would take would be a few decades on us to be completely hidden from us and we would have no way of knowing it.

"There are a lot of our probes to the moon and Mars that have "mysteriously" failed or disappeared."

You've seen the trailer for the new Transformers movie, then? :)

Wasn't there an ad for a printer (think it was when I was in Australia bit over five years ago) that showed the mars lander being tricked by some aliens using the brilliant true life quality of the printer? So, you never know.

Judas, When you do launch into space minus your MOSH, please remember to make a backup in case you land on Mars and get reformatted by the locals. And I also hope they're not rust monsters.

On the original point, sentient is defined elsewhere as:
1. Having sense perception; conscious.
2. Experiencing sensation or feeling.

If one ascribes something like heliotropism as a sentient trait then it is easily conceivable that there are undetected sentient species out there in simple forms. What makes a sentient "culture"? We're already surrounded by sentient life whose interactions we haven't fully understood or interpreted correctly yet.

CC, they're on the 13th planet. Too bad, as we only just added the 10th 11th and 12th to our list of known planets…

And, if they originated and evolved right here, in our own solar system, would they still be considered "alien"?

CC

I'm amazed we still haven't spotted life on/in Jupiter and Saturn, personally. They're so much bigger, and despite their orbital positions there's plenty of energy to kickstart some kind of organic evolution. Then again, they might very well be non-tech, and most of our searches for intelligence are really looking for signals produced by various tools (radio, mostly).

Then again, maybe the Jovian superbrains are already telepathically dominating our government officials to maintain the veil of secrecy. That *would* explain a lot.

Rich

"Then again, maybe the Jovian superbrains are already telepathically dominating our government officials to maintain the veil of secrecy. That *would* explain a lot."

That not a very impressive demonstration of their telepathic abilities! (Waves a wad of $50- bills "Here Senator, Senator, Senator! Come and get it…!" Pavlovian responses work every time! ;)

CC: 'And, if they originated and evolved right here, in our own solar system, would they still be considered "alien"?'

CC, I don't think we've even cleared all the possibilities on this planet yet. I watched a science show today that studied "killer" squid in the sea of Cortez. They turned out to be only hostile to the fishermen who were harming them, and when separated from that threat, turned into curious and intelligent creatures. One diver had her camera lens stolen right from out of her pocket while she was filming them. Those critters are probably working with the dolphins to leave the Earth just before it gets destroyed…

Uh, I meant to say "had her camera lens cover stolen…"

After the divers returned to the surface, the squids probably played underwater frisbee with it

heh, heh….the TLO 'strikes' again….soon you will hear of more 'drastic' events…when Jackie Chan movies start dissappearing from overseas container ships…and someday…the great 'Octopus-eater' himself…is picked up by a GIANT set of chopsticks…when Great Cthullu decides it's time for some 'takeout chinese'…(and your little dog too, Dorothy!)…

Marinara sauce anyone???

Sgt DWW-spokestentacle for the TLO…

You have to have seen the 'opening' of 'Medallion' with Jackie Chan to REALLY 'appreciate the irony'….but now I've 'spoiled the surprise'…

Sgt DWW

Isnt there supposed to be some Uber 5 point Telescope destined for 2025 with the ability to see plants surfaces in other Systems? IIRC from a program by either the BBC or ITV. Was on a couple of years ago called SPACE funnily enough with Sam Neil.

Well, I know we haven't detected any sentient life in your solar system but that blue planet is infested with something and we aren't coming near it. One never knows what's on those planets that may infect us. We prefer to remain healthy and free from infestation!

"Hey, Captain, this outermost planetoid might be a good spot to put the signpost."

"Which one, Kraga?"

"You know, the one that broadcasts 'No intelligent life here' and 'Quartantine Area! Major biological infestation zone! Keep Out!" on a rotating cycle."

"Hmmm, yes, that planetoid would be perfect."

;-)

Was on a couple of years ago called SPACE funnily enough with Sam Neil.

I'd be too creeped out thinking about Event Horizon to watch it, probably ;-)

There are days when the sentience of the people around me is undetectable. Does that count?

So, could that be it? We are being quarantined? :)

If we are that annoying, will a doomsday missile or re-directed asteroid be the answer for our loudness and plague-like nature?

CC

Personally, for the 'undiscovered sentients' scenario, I prefer an interstellar 'Von Neumann mine' waiting out on one of Neptune's moons having arrived long before we got out into orbit. Once it detects a close approach by a manufactured object, it starts building…

Hey, I saw that movie back in the late 80s… It had Walter Koenig in it trying to beat-down his Russian Accent with an uzi… Not a bad movie, but it was on the moon they found the Von-Neumann stuff…

There are some "sentients" here on earth, the Japanese and Norwegians assure us however that thanks to their continued scientific investigation they have determined that they taste best raw…

Now, now, some of them are also good when cut into small rings and batter-fried.