Ok i have posted some real dumb stuff in the past so first off i would like it if you would take me for real and if not fine.
We all have seen Alien of E.T but are we alone. I say yes but i say no I mean if you were the most intelagent would you like to do this little thing called CONTACT humans, but then again we are a very violent race i mean we have had 2 world wars and a war between brother and brother. This would be a little set back but hey what the hell that is all over with. and now we are going in to space with iss now that should do somthing fo us to the aliens eyes. any why make youre own decision.
“There are test every day you fail you get slow then you die.”
The real billy the kid
Are you referring to any Straight Dope column in particular? If yes, please post a link to the column. If not, let me know and I will move your thread to a more appropriate forum such as “In My Humble Opinion.”
This is more of a Great Debates type question. I don’t read GD, but I’d be very much surprised if there haven’t been several threads on this topic there. Try searching for “Fermi paradox” and maybe “Drake equation”.
I was wavering between IMHO and Great Debates, but Great Debates gets it (with an assist from dtilque). This thread is being moved to the Great Debates forum, under the tender care of DavidB and Gaudere.
Yep, the Drake equation tries to estimate the likelihood of other intelligent life in the universe and whether that intelligence would be capable of receiving a message from us. The question as to whether that alien intelligence would try to contact us is up for grabs. If humanity received an indication of life elsewhere, we certainly would try to make contact. But that’s just us.
Signals from Earth are still within the nearby neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy…there hasn’t been much chance for other civilizations, should they exist, to even know we’re here.
on a purely scientific perspective i’d say we’re just guessing on some of the variables in the drake equation but saying the universe is HUGE, is a gross understatement. so i think there has just about gotta be somebody out there.
from the metaphysical perspective, whatever motive a God might have for putting “intelligent?” life on this planet, that samy motive should apply thruout the universe. for a God to make that much stuff just for us to look at would be absurd.
now all this UFO nonsense. i figure it must be mostly nonsense, and i’m not interested enough to try to sort it out. maybe the aliens run a galactic sweepstake every year on whether the nitwit humans blow themselves up. could you imagine the great 3DTV show that would make. see 10 megaton bomb vaporize Paris. everybody in the crab nebulae would watch.
Dal TimgarI just read a fascinating book called, Rare Earth, by a paleontologist and an astronomer. In it, they argue that intelligent life arose because of a string of fortunate, but rare, occurrences–Jupiter’s stable orbit, the presence of the Moon, plate tectonics, just the right amount of water,
the right position in the right sort of galaxy. They also point out how close Earth has come to sterilization through episodes of extreme global cooling and the occasional asteroid strike. The authors posit that microbial life is probably common in the galaxy, but animal life is probably rare, and we may be the only intelligent species around, at least in our galactic neighborhood.
Goboy:
Rare life might be for many reasons including those you listed. Let’s say the chances of life forming are 0.0000000001% (or about 1 in 10 billion). I’m just pulling that number out of the air as a suitably dinky chance. If we go with that there are 9 other planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone that support life (I’m not saying intelligent life necessarily…just life).
Now extrapolate that number to the universe and that would make on the order of 1,000,000,000,000 (or 1 trillion) planets with life on them. If only 1 in a billion evolve intelligent life you get 1,000 planets with smart lifeforms. Since the Universe is HUGE we may never run into those beings but I think it’s a reasonable bet to assume they are out there somewhere.
1,000 planets with intelligent life in the whole universe doesn’t come under the heading of rare?