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SETI - Why look for Alien life when the odds are they have found us
Ed_McCarron:
I found this comparison more useful.
But, if you wanna feel real wanna feel small?
shmokes:
Yeah, seems to me the OP is filled with unwarranted assumptions. That another advanced species necessarily knows about us strikes me as pretty unlikely. That one has visited us strikes me as incredibly unlikely, borderline laughable. The universe is a big damned place. Even if an Alien species could accelerate a spacecraft to the speed of light (they probably can't), they'd have to be cooped up in the craft for many MANY years to make such a trip. Like, most likely tens tens or hundreds or thousands or millions of years. At light speed. That's a lot of time to spend on a spaceship.
To put things into perspective, one of NASA's probes reached Pluto recently. That ship, which was the fastest humans had ever created, took ten years to reach Pluto. When it was done there it continued on past Pluto toward the edge of our solar system. Staying at the same speed it would take another ten thousand years for that craft to reach the end of our solar system. Not to another solar system, let alone to another star, let alone to the edge of our galaxy, let alone to another galaxy. Just to the edge of our solar system. Ten thousand years.
An alien race isn't going to expend the kind of resources it would take to traverse the kind of expanse we're talking about to sneak around playing historical/political practical jokes on us. The Star Trek thing is also silly. We don't give monkey's hand grenades, but we certainly don't go out of our way to hide our existence from them. I don't think an alien race has some legal obligation to turn over all their technology to us by virtue of having revealed themselves to us.
While I think it tremendously likely that there are other intelligent races in the universe, I also think that for all intents and purposes we're alone and always will be.
Ed_McCarron:
--- Quote from: shmokes on October 02, 2011, 06:57:39 pm ---We don't give monkey's hand grenades.
--- End quote ---
Nope, but there are certain people we let post in P&R...
menace:
Eric Von Daniken--even if 99% of the stuff he talks about is utter crap, he has tons of pictures from all over the world that are not explained easily unless you invoke the "they did it for religious reasons" crap that some people spout when they can't explain it. Our modern archealogical equivalent of "god did it"
Nan Madol for one--given the location, materials on hand, use of outrigger canoes etc. its a feat of engineering to have constructed that vast complex..
Nazca--not the lines--the completely flat mountain tops surrounded by peaked mountains
vast underground caves in turkey--again, just the size of it makes it difficult to believe ancient man just went digging
lots more--ancient aliens believe it :soapbox: :dunno :cheers:
vcoleiro1:
To put things into perspective, the theory for intelligent life is based on there being over 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, this is an estimate based on the visible amount of stars, galaxies etc which seems to go up every year as we discover more with our telescopes etc. Granted that the conditions for life are small for each galaxy, however, when you multiply that very small number by such a vast number as 150,000 Blllion Billion, the number is vastly in favour of inteligent life existing in some numbers . I think the estimate is 50 intelligent races per galaxy (with each galaxy containing 300,000,000,000 stars , so 50 is a pretty small figure). There are 500,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. So the estimate for the universe is 25,000,000,000,000 intelligent races. But this is either nor here or there, my point was ( as per the title of the thread) , why are we looking for intelligent life when.
a) It exists in such numbers that they surely have discovered us, not necessarily traveled to us, but discovered us, and yet dont want to contact us . Think about how far advanced our science will be in 1000 years , we probably would have discovered every exo planet in the universe by then. I seriously doubt communication would still be using electromagnetic waves. Who knows what sort of quantum fluctuation crap they will be using by then, so these arguments about searching for light speed electomagnetic waves dont make any sense. Surely in a 1000 years we will be using something else. So why do we look for electromagnetic/radio waves when these are surely not likely to be the communication most advanced races would use. Its narrow minded based on what we know now .
b) Doesnt exist (as some have said) , so again why look
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