Posted on 09/07/2017 5:58:03 AM PDT by Raymond Pamintuan
Ever since I was a child, I presumed the universe would be teeming with alien life. Star Wars and Star Trek reinforced this belief, and I yearned for the day when we would meet and communicate with other intelligent beings.
But as every potential alien discovery turned out to be natural, and our initial assumptions about the chance that life can naturally emerge from non-living materials turned out to be wildly optimistic, perhaps it is time to honestly reappraise the likelihood of us ever detecting, let alone communicating with other technologically-intelligent extraterrestrial species.
In this vast universe, there appear to be around one septillion stars (one trillion trillion stars [1 × 1024]) spread out across trillions of galaxies, vastly more numerous than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. If there is only one planet for every ten stars, then there are 100 billion trillion planets in the visible universe.
Given how enormous the universe is and how many planets exist, where is everybody? Even if we assume only one planet in a thousand is Earth-like, and only one in a thousand of those developed life, and only one in a thousand of those developed intelligence; and only one in a thousand intelligent species developed space travel and exploited their stellar neighborhoods by creating megastructures; there should be at least a hundred billion intelligent species who’ve developed megastructures that are visible across the universe.
And yet, we find nothing, no matter how hard we look.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
40th Anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind! In theaters now.
Would ants find humans in New York City?
They would not because they are too f___ing stupid to know what a human being is, much less where they are, even when a human steps on them.
Aliens are _alien_.
We probably wouldn’t recognize them even if they stepped on us.
Im sure there is life out there. I watched a documentary the other day, it showed the galaxy, there SO many stars in just one little section you couldn’t even imagine how many... and that was just one part.
But, the likelihood of finding them or them finding us are probably pretty slim given the distances involved...
Mainly inside the Beltway!
In this vast universe, there appear to be around one septillion stars (one trillion trillion stars [1 × 1024]) spread out across trillions of galaxies, vastly more numerous than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. If there is only one planet for every ten stars, then there are 100 billion trillion planets in the visible universe.
If the writer wants to be serious on this subject of detecting intelligent aliens, he has to talk about the chance of detecting them in our galaxy (maybe including our local cluster of 54 galaxies, most of them small). Anything beyond that range is ridiculous. We aren’t going to detect civilizations millions of light years away that are speeding up away from us at an accelerating pace.
And to be strongly realistic, he should limit the discussion to within our own galaxy (though someday, far in the future, the Andromeda galaxy will join with ours).
Maybe he does that. I’m going to read on now. I just want to stop and say, counting all the stars in the observable universe is certainly interesting from a cosmological point of view, but it has almost no bearing on the question of “where are all the aliens”.
They’re out there, but it’s probably better they don’t know we’re here, as technologically superior civilizations overwhelm less technical. Or, they see us as backwards and uninteresting and possibly dangerous
Phoenix lights
But, the likelihood of finding them or them finding us are probably pretty slim given the distances involved...
That.
Plus some aliens that may have developed may be long gone because of a supernova or some other catastrophe on their planet. Or they may still be living in caves.
There should be some races, in whole or in part, that would prefer physical existence in this universe and engage in exploration and expansion using von Neumann-type probes travelling at .1C – an ability we will have before the end of the century, and one that will need less than a million years to develop a presence around every star in the galaxy, even without further technological improvement.
In fact, such probes do not need to be a civilizational or national effort. Given the anticipated state of nanotechnology, AI, and system resource exploitation by the end of the 21 st century, it will be possible for just one person to produce the requisite self-replicating master probe to trigger a galaxy-wide presence after just a million years and less than a billion years for entire superclusters.
This makes the overwhelming silence of the universe all the more puzzling. The silence is unthinkable, given what we know and where we can project technology will be in just a few decades.
My gut instinct guess is: an average of 1-per-galaxy.
That leaves a lot of empty real estate out there for us to expand into. To me, that’s a good thing. Who needs extra competition? We have plenty of competition right here at home.
Berkeley, Portland, Ithaca...
Come on.
If you were so smart that you can conquer the vastness of time and space and you make it to Earth and you see and hear Joy Behar, would you stop in to say “Hi!”?
With Joy Behar, and Hillary and Al Franken, we’ll be lucky if they don’t hit us with a planet destroying ray.....every 15 minutes for forever.
It is an interesting question. Great trilogy, The three body proble, and Dark Forest. It provides one possible expalanation.
Fact is, there is no evidence any one is “out there”.
A couple of options. One, there really isn’t anyone out there. It takes about te billion years to “become” and we are the first. Two, the reason in Dark Forest. Another, everything is just too damn big.
Hence, the Dark FOrest explanation. The smart ones understand.
True, some could have already come and gone long long ago... or are still crawling around like bugs..
Given the times and distance involved... its really hard for the human mind to comprehend.
Before we assume that, due to the vastness of the universe, there has to be extraterrestrials out there somewhere, we need to know that it is possible for life to arise from non-life. Where is the scientific theory to explain this? Sorry atheists, but the only explanation may be (the G-word).
These calculations (speculations, really) fail to take into account time. Even if a hundred billion intelligent civilizations arose in the universe, they would be spread over billions of years of time. Only a few would exist at the same time, spread over the entire universe of billions of stars in millions of galaxies.
God didn’t create life on any planet around any of the other trillion trillion stars.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.