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Thinking in the posibility of extraterrestrial life,

I think that gravity could be a fundamental factor for evolution,

I mean, in darkest zones of universe, where is dust, little mass accumulation, and perhaps low bright, low energy stars, there must be low gravity, and finally, would be high clock rates..(relative to earth)

So the bigger mass (perhaps brighter stars) it is subject to more intense gravity

Finally we could be (relative to other zones of universe) in a high clock rate zone or a in a very low, and that relative difference of clocks could be a clue for our search of intelligent life.

Perhaps the search of low gravity zones, could be the search of (relative to us) faster rates of evolution, to exaggerate: a millon years in what it takes a year here.

Life could need Carbon, Life could need star light, but I am deeply sure that first of all, Life need time.

Could it be a possible guide to search intelligence, stop searching earth like with sun like stars, and start looking at the dark (or whatever that indicate less gravity) ?

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I want it to be comunity wiki, how to? please edit, thanks – HDE May 17 '11 at 14:46
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Look back at your question concerning time dilation and voyager. Get ambitious and add the gravitational potential due to the galaxy, and figure the highest fractional difference available to make zones where the clocks run faster than they do here. Go ahead, I'll wait. – dmckee May 17 '11 at 15:08
@dmckee I re read your comment here but I can't understand, are you suggesting that adding galaxy G-potential to same equation there will be no big differences? it's still not clear for me (as I ask in the other question) if it's possible to use that simple equation for the complex galaxy distribution, and I read your comment there, that you calculate stating cero gravity at infinity, I don't see that as a posibility, saying "infinity" is already supossing a lot of things, perhaps I misunderstand the message, reword if possible, thanks – HDE May 17 '11 at 15:36
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@dmckee probably meant the same thing - but sorry, there is no significant slowing of "clock rate" on the Earth, or in the Solar System, or at our point of the Galaxy, or in this place of the local cluster, or here in general. It's totally wrong to think that the clocks are, relatively to the cosmic CMB time, ticking much faster at other places of the Universe. So I suppose this also means that your proposal where to search for E.T.s is wrong even if we neglect other speculative aspects of your ideas about the E.T.s' homes. – Luboš Motl May 17 '11 at 16:55
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I think this is too speculative to be appropriate here. – David Zaslavsky May 17 '11 at 18:01
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closed as off topic by David Zaslavsky May 17 '11 at 17:55

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1 Answer

Although Dmckee has already answered your question (allowing for a bit of leeway for you to figure that answer out yourself), the fact of the matter is that in order for the time differential to be a million times faster, you'd basically have to have one planet sitting on the surface of a black hole, and the other planet sitting out in a void between galaxies. And even then, I don't think you'd get up to a million times - probably more like a hundred times or maybe a thousand times, but I'm just pulling numbers out of my butt.

It's also worth noting that the tidal effects of a black hole will rip the planet apart (and every other bit of matter, right down to the atomic level) before it gets anywhere near it. So "evolution happening a million times faster" is totally out of the question.

If you want to be creative about crazy methods of civilisations being far older than ours, this isn't the way. A much better way would be if purely by chance, intelligent life had evolved on a planet in only 3 billion years, instead of 4 billion. Even that's pretty crazy, since life on our own planet was basically dominated by nothing more complicated than single-celled bacteria and other sorts of goo for about 3 billion years. But replace "dinosaurs" with "intelligent civilisation" and you have a decent timeline that's millions of years ahead of us, and just about as likely to happen, IMHO.

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By the way, the search for intelligent life has other huge hurdles to overcome. In our own technological evolution, we were only broadcasting uncompressed and unencrypted radio signals into space for about 40 years. These days, our own radio signals would be indistinguishable from background noise to a foreign civilisation searching for us. – Ernie May 17 '11 at 16:47

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