of potential earth like planets. [/sagan] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...terrestrial-planets-in-their-habitable-zones/ 2011 study that through the power of MATHEMATICS estimates there are on the order of 15 billion earthlike planets in the habitable zones of their stars in our galaxy alone. This is similar to a 2010 paper which had a slightly smaller number of 12 Billion. Of course, it's pure mathematics modelling, so it could be totally off, but it's an interesting mental exercise and it does speak to the likelihood of other habitable planets out there - which increases the chance that we have a few neighbors.
We only need one planet supporting life to prove that it's possible....Earth. In other words, if we are here, why couldn't there be more planets with life? The universe is pretty much the same wherever you go. Anyone ever seen "one" of anything? No such animal. Nobody can buck "infinity" odds. With all the planets (and more being created 24/7 somewhere in the universe) how could life have ever (or will ever) occure only one time in one place?
On the other hand maybe the origin and existence of life is so inconceivably improbable that it exists nowhere... except earth. Making earth literally the most unique place in the universe, because it is where the most mind bogglingly improbable thing actually happened. Or... life could be everywhere throughout the cosmos. We won't know till we get out there. I like to think life is everywhere... but we won't know till we go. And at the rate the idiots in charge are mis-prioritising, that will be a very long time.
Wow! Even if only 1 in 15,000 of these had life, there would still be a million in our galaxy alone! I'm beginning to think that intelligent, technologically capable life is very, very rare, but that life in general is very, very common.
The reason no intelligent extraterrestrial life has contacted us is that on all their star charts we're labeled "Planet Dumb-Ass."
I completely agree with this. If we take the most basic definition of life, just a few microbes, or even single celled living organisms, life is probably in quite a few places, including some asteroids and comets. If we're talking even a little more complex life, like insects, or even animals and fish, that number is reduced exponentially. Then when we get to intelligent life, it's much smaller still. Especially if we are looking at it in current time only, as in right now this second. If we count places where intelligent life evolved but was wiped out by something, be it an asteroid, or a dying sun, or even a nuclear war, throughout time then the numbers of course are a little better. The thing about other intelligent life is that it can easily be so far ahead or so far behind us just by the birth date of the planet it comes from. Think about the slow growth of technology over the last 50,000 years and how rapidly it picked up the pace in the last century alone. Once a people hit their technological stride and reach their space age they gain a massive advantage. If they reached our current level 1,000 years before us they would likely be capable of doing things that seem like magic to us. And since 1,000 years is nothing, imagine what they could do with a 10,000 year jump, or 50,000 or several million or billion if they beat the odds and survived that long. My guess is that if they're capable of FTL or have figured out how to use wormholes or something to explore the galaxy and universe and they are aware of us then they do not have any interest in interaction with us because we would have so little in common that we probably seem like cavemen to them.
I agree with the later - I don't think we have an accurate bellwether for the former. The fact we aren't detecting massive amounts of radio traffic out there isn't that surprising - who wants to send a message it would take a generation to get a response back to? If such a galactic civilization existed, it would likely be more advanced then we are (after all, we've had radio for a blink of the eye) and could very well be using other methods.
Isn't our location in the Milky Way though considered to be out in the middle of no where? Perhaps there are others out there but their transmissions are blocked by the core of the galaxy. Or they are so far from us that their transmissions have not yet reached us. I don't think we would detect messages. I'd think we would detect transmissions like TV and radio chatter first. The aliens version of I Love Lucy.
and Mars. We know it has water on it, frozen, and indications of flowing water from time to time. At several million or billion they could have colonized the whole galaxy by now. Or like single cell organisms.
Maybe, but there's tons of EM out there and stuff is often unexpected. For example the level of radiation when leaving the heliosphere for deep space was much more than scientists anticipated. Space isn't empty - and we have no idea really what signal degredation on a radio signal exposed to deep space for twenty light years would be - let alone 20,000. We don't know what we don't know. IMO that means there's a lot of possibilities still.
Maybe ET doesn't communicate with ordinary radio waves. Maybe he communicates with something very focussed like a laser or maser and, unless we happened to be situated on a link in his network, we'd never detect it.
As I recall, my best guesses (which may need to be re-formulated in light of recent evidence) for the Drake Equation put a small handful of advanced civilizations in our galaxy. Since ours is so very young, it would therefore stand to reason that the others are, by our standards, frightfully advanced. I don't know if FTL is possible or not (I actually kinda doubt it), but it wouldn't surprise me if at least one civilization in our galaxy has sent probes throughout the galaxy, and is maybe even aware of the existence of our world, at least as it was in the past. If the alien homeworld (or worlds, as the case may be) are likely to be thousands of light years away, the signals from their probes carrying the news of human technological civlization won't reach them for many centuries. Imagine, on some unimaginably advanced world five thousand light years from here, some intelligent beings may right now be just receiving data on the precocious pre-industrial society building massive pyramidal structures near a river delta on the otherwise unremarkable planet Earth...
That's the thing about listening to signals from space. Considering there are an infinite number of ways for any intelligent culture to evolve, there's no guarantee that radio was ever even discovered/invented. They may be extremely intelligent yet just have different technologies we can't really interact with.
If we go with the most basic definitions of life and consider some of the more extreme forms of life on our own planet that have only recently been discovered, then there is almost certainly more life out there... perhaps even in our own solar system.... The depressing thing is that none of us alive today will probably be around for the confirmation of it... I'd like to hear about it before I die, although I suppose when I'm dead I won't care about it anymore.
Got to disagree here. Radio waves, in fact all energy waves are natural. They would be discovered. By someone other then us. There are some progressions that are just natural and any intelligent society is going to have to conquer in order to move to the next level.
