Posted on 07/16/2018 10:04:54 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
t’s something people tell me all the time, and usually in hushed tones: “With a trillion planets out there, we really can’t be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.” In other words, given the enormous amount of real estate in space, aliens are sure to exist. So why haven’t we found any?
I don’t dispute this straightforward idea because, after all, it underpins the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). But not everyone agrees. A recent paper by three researchers at the University of Oxford is throwing shade on those who feel confident that the cosmos is thick with extraterrestrials.
The Oxford academics were addressing a puzzle known as the Fermi Paradox, which describes the disconnect between our expectation of many worlds swarming with aliens and the fact that they remain undiscovered. Nearly 70 years ago, the celebrated physicist Enrico Fermi mouthed a deceptively simple question: “Where is everybody?” He made a quick estimate of how long it would take for any society bent on building an empire to colonize the entire Milky Way and realized it was only a few tens of millions of years, which is nearly 1,000 times shorter than the age of the galaxy.
This raised an obvious problem: There’s been more than enough time for aliens to spread out, and yet we don’t see them.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
It’s so very lonely
You’re two thousand light years from home.
Considering the distances involved across the milky way Galaxy I question that estimate of a time to colonize the entire Galaxy.
Carl Sagan use to say when SETI was up and running we could face it any any direction and hear the cacophony of the universe. Instead we faced it in all directions and heard nothing...
There is life on millions of other planets but only on Saturday night.
We only have one example of life. So why does all life everywhere have to have the same parameters to exists that we do? It could, for sure. And that theory is just as valid as proposing that the reason we aren’t visited is because all sentient life falls into a virtual reality hole or something when they become technologically advanced enough. When I see people looking at their phone walking into cars I think there might be something to it.
FReegards
Search for ‘active SETI’. A bunch of the SETI members quit if I recall when they just started tight beaming our location to potential interesting points in the sky with no debate.
Freegards
What? What? Are you saying 'warp drive' might only exist in science fiction novels?
Exactly. If they could say ‘of the 19 examples of life we have found, they all need the same narrow parameters to exist’, then fine. But they are basing this theory on an example of only one.
Freegards
Fermi, along with the others sitting around eating lunch that day, came up with the great filter idea. The theory being that any intelligent life would discovery weapons with which they could destroy themselves long before they came up with a way to travel the massive cosmos.
The question then became can anyone keep from killing themselves off long enough to get to the technolocical phase needed to colonize the cosmos.
LIFE...........Just one per galaxy........................
Too far, so I don’t really care.
And who says that anyone is going to “colonize the whole galaxy”? Why should they? Just because humans talk about it?
The aliens, if they exist, are going to follow their own plan, not the one that Earth science-fiction writers have made for them.
Silly conclusion.
Considering how many stars there are and that most of them have planet systems, many with earth type planets it would be logical that there is life in the galaxy.
However, the above being said consider that the galaxy is some 10 or so billion years old. Consider that we search for life, intelligent life by searching for electromagnetic radiation. Humans have only been on earth which is just over 4 billion years old, for about 10000 years in which they have made records. Of that 10,000 years or so it has only been in the last 100 years that we have used electromagnetic radiation. In another 100 years we may have abandoned that type of radiation for communications as being too slow.
We do not have the capacity to understand life beyond our own yet. If there were a planet only 1 million years older than ours that would mean the people are a million years ahead of us. If they don’t want us to see them we won’t.
Lets fix the illegal alien problem we already have before worrying about outer space aliens.
Funny, that's what Darwin said about transitional species. But NONE!
Yes, I have come to the conclusion that we ARE alone. Should you doubt me, then watch the TV series “One Strange Rock” to see just how unlikely it was for life to have developed on earth, not to speak of intelligent life.
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I don’t have to watch it. I’ve been convinced for some time that life is extremely rare. All the evidence we have so far supports it.
First there is the fine tuning of the Universe. Another is that there is only one tree of life: Even though life appeared early on Earth, it only happened one time. The eukaryotic cell evolved only one time. The ratio of biomass to mass on Earth is only about 3 parts in 10 billion. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. But for 4 billion years there was no life on land. There are many other examples.
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