I have recently changed my opinion of what we will find "out there." If we find intelligent life, and that is a BIG if, we may not even be able to recognize it as intelligent or maybe not even as life.
Stumbling across an earth like planet that harbors intelligent life, that is close enough to us to find it, is remote in the extreem.
I have always been of the opinion that we are alone in the universe. I have been badly outnumbered by those who see billions of stars and think the odds favor intelligent life beyond earth, so I was surprised to see the book "Rare Earth" get even a polite reception.
I think NASA should not be spending money looking for ET, and I would rather they had a different mission such as opening space to development. Mainly that would involve cheaper transportation and a favorable legal environment.
If we stumble across ET sometime, fine, we will deal with it. Until we serendipitously find ET, it is a weak mission to go looking.
Absolutely. But look what Columbus found while trying to locate a shortcut to the Orient? I think finding life is a great goal, but it need not be the only focus of exploration. I'm sure we're going to discover many fascinating things that we never expected.
I would agree. The question for me has never been "does life exist elsewhere". The question for me has always been "what is the probability that we would cross paths with life that existed elsewhere in the universe”.
The universe is basically empty. The entire universe is virtually devoid of any matter. Look to any point in the sky and then extend that line to the end of the universe. The odds are enormous that you will never encounter an object in that path even though there are billions of stars. This is because the universe is spread over time and space.
The odds are staggering against ever encountering another life that is within one or two billion years of our own? We may not even be able to recognize life if it were too many billions of years ahead or behind us.
In my mind the universe may be teeming with life but the odds that we would ever cross paths is indeed remote in the extreme.