Are we alone ?

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....... and the advent of eukaryotic life-forms like ourselves in the last 500 million yrs is merely an interesting sideshow.
Click to expand...

A sideshow?

Ummm, not a good corollary.

The last 500 million years has been the main event for the story of life, with the last 10,000 a special event.
 
I was re-reading this for a bit of fun, and thought that some of the answers seriously underestimate the time and distances involved.

We have SETI, scanning the galaxy for alien signals, but imagine how long ago they would have had to be broadcast if their origin was at any significant distance from our own little corner of the Milky Way.

We have been broadcasting for about a hundred years. If we assume that radio waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum (as far as we know they do!) then there will be a bubble of our radio waves about 200 light years in diameter. Surely someone must have heard us?

Errrrr, not really.
This image shows a 200 light year bubble around the earth in respect to our Galaxy.



It is NOT that box. It's the little blue bubble in the middle of it.

Of course there are billions of other galaxies, but they are so far away that the distances mean nothing to our tiny minds.

Food for thought methinks.
 


This explains the message I got - " There was a problem downloading the firmware upgrade for your transmat device, please wait 3.5 billion years
while Windows Alpha Centauri reboots....."
 
Interesting topic. It seems just by the sheer number of planets out there( almost infinite )(,with better technology there learning that many stars do indeed have planets) that there must be life somewhere.
That being said I heard a report on the news last week that one of the organizations that searches for alien radio signals was hanging it up at least for now as they had searched everywhere within there capabilities and found nothing.
I imagine as more capable equipment becomes available they will resume.
One thing that has occurred to me is that it may not be in our interest to broadcast our presence. The universe seems to be governed strictly by physics and therefore would favor the development of strong, ruthless, self interested life forms. There is of course a chance that the development of intelligence could temper this evolutionary advantage as it has done with mankind to SOME degree but there is certainly no guarantee or I would argue even probability. We to often equate intelligence with "good" but any highly intelligent life form is at least as likely to be aggressive as benevolent.
 
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I think you are right that everyone under estimates the time and distances but that is to be expected as I don't think the human mind can really grasp them.
 
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In my senior year in High School I wrote a Science fiction short story that had 2 development paths but with similar endings.

In one the universe was of the intelligent design/creationist variety. In the other the universe was of the randomly developed-order/Darwin type. In both universes, for one reason (Judeo-Islamic-Christian based) or the other (comet-asteroid seeding), the only type of higher intelligence was of the human variety.

In the intelligent design/creationist universe the reason for the speed of light limit and the vast distances with no close neighbors was intentional, due to the recognition by the Creator that humans needed to be kept separated to prevent one group from destroying their neighbor. Termination by the Creator and self-Darwination were non-factorable variables.

In the randomly developed-order/Darwin universe, whenever a close neighbor occurred, one destroyed the other, both destroyed the other, one or both self-Darwinated. The vast distances between neighbors was a randomly ordered-result, with the speed of light limit being a non-factor.
 
I think Douglas Adams summed it up in a nutshell with his Total Perspective Vortex concept.
You're an invisible dot on an invisible dot. The universe is just infinitely beyond all comprehension of the hairless monkeys that populate this world.
The same monkeys that consider themselves so "advanced"...
 
Stephen Hawkings was a big proponent of stopping beaming "hello" messages out into space because, he reasoned, any race that could receive those messages had the possible capability of coming here as well. And, well, they may not want to be friends with us, Elliot. Ouch.
 
WARSPITER said:
This explains the message I got - " There was a problem downloading the firmware upgrade for your transmat device, please wait 3.5 billion years
while Windows Alpha Centauri reboots....."
Click to expand...
So they're running Windows 10 as well...?
 
I heard an interesting discussion on the radio (or podcast) the other day on this that the challenges of finding other intelligent life forms is related to the fact that there is almost always conflict when they come into contact. Therefore in evolutionary models intelligent worlds that came into contact would destroy one or the other or in some cases would dissolve through internal conflict. This would perhaps in part explain some of it but there's almost certainly something out there.
 
Yes, the darling of the media, his doctorate is in fruit fly reproduction. Michio Kaku, appears to have an opinion on everything. I've followed his antics for years and he's certainly no friend of anyone who disagrees with his wacky, leftist opinions.
 
Two points;

1. All other civilisations in the cosmos who advanced far beyond us to the stage of being able to instantly produce whatever they wanted
and had also progressed to not having to have meals due to advanced tablets etc are extinct.

Why? because they were depressed and lost all creativity. Stopped building models of anything - shock horror.
And worse - no more bacon.

Having to live somewhere like that would be enough to make anyone give up.

2. Star Trek etc has a lot to answer for. Many people are actually shocked when they find out how far 100 light years is in distance
and that warp drive etc isn't "just around the corner".

Question - where did Kirk et all go to the toilet on the Enterprise ? A friend had the 'official' plan book. Missing - toilets. Not one.
Beam it out Scotty ?
 
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