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Chose One Making You Better Feeling

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TopHatCat
I Has A Star
I Has A Star
TopHatCat


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PostSubject: Contact   Contact Icon_minitimeMon Sep 07, 2009 4:57 am

Who thinks that humans are not alone?

and who thinks that we will ever make contact and when(near future, or far future)?
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Thinker
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PostSubject: Re: Contact   Contact Icon_minitimeMon Sep 07, 2009 5:46 am

From what I've gathered, it is extremely likely that:

1. There is life elsewhere in the galaxy, and it is probably relatively common.
2. There almost definitely WAS and almost definitely WILL BE intelligent (read: conscious like us) life in the past and future.
3. There probably is not intelligent life RIGHT NOW, but if there is, it is almost definitely not close enough to us that we would ever be able to meet them before we or they went extinct.

Basically, the entirety of sentient animal history (read: human history) on Earth is less than ten thousand years. The Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is about 13.5 billion years old. This means that sentience has existed on Earth for only the TINIEST fraction of the time the Earth itself has existed. It took 4,499,990,000 years for consciousness to arise on Earth.

Think of that fraction. Intelligent life has existed on Earth for 0.0000022% of the time that the Earth itself has existed. Now, in the past two hundred years, we went from being technologically retarded to having the ability to utterly annihilate all life on earth in less than an hour with nuclear weapons. We have come SO CLOSE to self destruction, that statistically speaking, we are almost guaranteed to wipe ourselves out within the next 500 years tops.

But lets say for the sake of conservative estimates that it will take us 10,000 more years to go extinct (we\'ll go extinct eventually). That would mean that for 0.0000044% of the time the Earth existed, it had intelligent life.

While the rise of intelligent life in the universe may be a relatively common occurrence, the likelihood that such intelligent life would exist at the same time as us is insanely low. If life on some other planet arose just 0.001% sooner than it did on Earth, that species would be LONG extinct even during the time of the dinosaurs.

Given this, in order for intelligent life to exist in the Galaxy at the same time we do, they would most likely have to have existed for insanely long periods of time (like, at least ten million years, if not significantly longer) to exist with us. If this is true, consider how far we have come technologically in 10,000 years. Given 1,000 times MORE time, their technology must be unfathomably advanced, and they should have certainly colonized the galaxy by now.

This may be possible, but seems unlikely, given that if they were as advanced as they'd have to be, we would almost certainly be able to detect SOME sign of intelligent life in the cosmos, and we have seen NONE.

However, 0.0000022% isn't quite as small as it seems if you apply it to the entire universe. Given this, it ought to be almost certain that there exists intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. The problem here is a matter of distance. The nearest galaxy to our own is 2.5 million light years away. Needless to say, without superluminal travel (something that, for now, is deeply nested in the world of fiction) or some kind of wormhole travel, we could never dream of reaching such places.

Assuming superluminal travel IS possible and some intelligent hyperadvanced alien species exists out there somewhere, we could very well make contact tomorrow morning. However, at least in Human history, whenever two cultures with vastly disparate technology meet, it has always ended in the weaker culture being conquered or subsumed by the stronger one.

In other words, lets hope we don't make contact lol.


Last edited by HisMajesty on Mon Sep 07, 2009 6:29 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Paradox
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PostSubject: Re: Contact   Contact Icon_minitimeMon Sep 07, 2009 5:05 pm

There is definitely life on other planets, how advanced and proximity to us is unknown. There could be some really advanced races out there and some not so advanced ones.
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Thinker
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PostSubject: Re: Contact   Contact Icon_minitimeMon Sep 07, 2009 6:29 pm

TLDR here are some articles you can read that will bring you to the same conclusions I have reached. However, reading this articles will take longer than just reading my post!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox <-- Most important one
Quote :
Advanced civilizations may periodically arise and fall throughout our galaxy, but this may be such a rare event, relatively speaking, that the odds of two or more such civilizations existing at the same time are low. There may have been intelligent civilizations in the galaxy before the emergence of intelligence on Earth, and there may be intelligent civilizations after its extinction, but it is possible that human beings are the only intelligent civilization in existence now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
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PostSubject: Re: Contact   Contact Icon_minitime

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