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Originally Posted by tedrick79
Life is a hard thing. It is hard to get to line up correctly. Suffice to say that the conditions are a rarity and it has been KNOWN to occur just once ever. On Earth.
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Let's fiddle with some numbers: We've only really been able to inspect 5 other planets and a few dozen moons. Although we can certainly say that there's no "intelligent" life on those planets or moons, we can only really show that no life at all ever existed on Mercury and our own moon. Every other planet we've visited is still inconclusive.
And in the case of mercury and our own moon, its really more based on the notion that we know that they have never had the ability to sustain life because they have little or no atmosphere.
SO if we keep things simple by really just looking at the planets we've been able to inspect reasonably well, using basic statistics we can say that that one planet out of 6 has intelligent life.
1:6 is pretty good odds in my book!
If you disagree with this statistical analysis, I'd encourage you to refute it with your own.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tedrick79
Now say stellar time is rocketing forward at 1 million years a click.. No life - No need to slow it down any - Let say a technological civilization evolved in Andromeda 14 million years ago. Where would the be 14 million years into technology?
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I don't know. Do you have any facts upon which to base any such conjecture?
Quote:
Originally Posted by tedrick79
Now barring any space bending technology - space colonization is going to be slow. They say we could hit 10PSOl with current technology - That means Alpha Centari in 43 years. Better bring the kids.
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There's a number! Now Alpha Centari is about 4 light years away, so we're talking about 10 years per light year, or about 1 million years just to get across our galaxy.
And that's assuming we don't bother to stop anywhere to smell the roses.
Now what you've missed here is the *cost* of such travels. Ability to travel such distances does not translate into actually doing it. We certainly could have been colonizing Mars 10 years ago, but we haven't yet, largely due to the enormous costs of getting there, but more than anything the lack of any motivation to launch such a daunting venture: there's no profit in it!
It's hard to *assume* that all civilizations will somehow expend more than all of their available resources to get to such a level of colonization?
To see why, you might take some time to look at not just the time required, but the *energy* required to actually get to Alpha Centauri, even under the rosiest assumptions of fuel efficiency.
The more interesting issue that you ignore is the issue of survival. Considering what we've done--even if you want to argue that the world is only 5000-odd years old--in our history, coming very close to anhilating the planet ourselves, in addition to the many other forms of natural extermination out there (very large comets created by hydroplate squiring if you'd like), it will be a miracle if we're able to get ourselves to a--hopefully habitable--planet orbiting Alpha Centauri (which is
possible, but by no means certain) before we disappear.
If you do grant evolution and the fact that most species transform rather dramatically in time spans measured in millions of years, and that's assuming that we're in one of those branches that doesn't simply become extinct. But if we did we might not recognize ourselves, or be able to necessarily assume that we'd be more intelligent then than now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tedrick79
Point is that unless alien species evolves preciesly when we did - they are just not there. Or we will pave over them in the next million years.
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So this conclusion isn't in fact really reasonable based on the limitations you've ignored, but why don't we just add a few more orders of magnitude and consider some of the limitations on creation of life.
As Carl Sagan said, "we are star stuff": the carbon we are built from and the higher elements that are necessary to construct "terrestrial planets" are all the result of many generations of stars going from mostly hydrogen and helium and transforming it through stellar fusion into higher elements such as carbon and oxygen and uranium and all the other denizens of the Periodic Table, and then exploding to litter their viscinity with matter that could at some point become life and ultimately intelligent.
It can be shown that it takes a *lot* of generations to do that, and with "typical" stars like the sun having life times on the order of 10 billion years, its not too difficult to do the math and see that yes, indeed, it's likely we're one of the "earlier" denizens of this galaxy.
The last point I'll bring up is the whole idea that if there are others out there, that they've gone out of their way to even make themselves known. As has been discussed earlier in this and other threads, if you subscribe to the notion that you can't really count on those aliens being benevolent, do you really *want* to be broadcasting your existence? I know I don't want to get to know Species 8472 well any time soon....
For further reading, I'd suggest you might want to look into the
Drake Equation which deals directly with this topic, bringing in many concepts that you have not mentioned but which are quite important. We've also discussed it in
many threads here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tedrick79
There are no aliens out there - we would hear them -- and we would be overrun by them. You can hope and wish upon a star. Won't make it so.
P.S. lights in the sky are just that - lights --- you think ET flew 4.3 lightyears with his landing lights on?
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Well, that's not venom, but it is disdain...
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day,
Buffy
