Alien life could be found within 40 years - really?

nocoverart

I don't think alien life will be found in the next 40 years, but is there intelligent civilizations in the universe? I say DEFINITELY YES!

Duggys Housemate

TheIrishGrover wrote: »

I firmly believe so. I think the idea of there NOT being any other life out there is science fiction. I mean, I don't think there's going to be any UFOs landing on the white house lawn but I do believe there will be conclusive proof of some form of life on other planets. Be it microscopic bacteria on Mars or the discovery of organically produced gasses in extra-solar planets. I would be perfectly happy with this and would not conciser it a let down in any way. If one planet about a very average star was not only able to support life but that life was able to discover even the tiniest life on another planet then that would suggest to me that the universe is teeming with live in some form or other. I also don't rule out receiving a signal at some point in the future, again I don't expect "Contact", but some form of obviously artificial signal. However I don't see this happening in my lifetime as the resources behind this kind of search is miniscule. Do I think we'll actually travel to planets outside our solar system? No. Unless there is some mad lead forwards and sideways in our understanding of the universe that turns everything we thought we knew on it's head. Something as radical and bizarre as quantuum mechanics at the turn of the last century.

Bacteria on Mars wont prove anything about the rest of the universe, as the Earth and Mars have been exchanging rock in the billions of years we have co-existed.

karma_

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

Bacteria on Mars wont prove anything about the rest of the universe, as the Earth and Mars have been exchanging rock in the billions of years we have co-existed.

Yes, yes it would.

Duggys Housemate

karma_ wrote: »

Yes, yes it would.

No, it wouldn't.

Duggys Housemate

Well. I suppose if they could prove the microbes they found on Mars originated there, it would mean something. But if not, it doesn't prove anything, as asteroid hits have - particularly in the early part of the existence of the solar system, blasted rocks from here to there, and vice versa.

But they aint found nothing yet.

Mickeroo

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

No, it wouldn't.

It would show that life is possible on a planet very different to earth making it that little bit more probable of finding it else where, so it would. You are right that it would be less remarkable what with a few (thought to be) meteorites from mars showing up here.

Having said that though I think we have a better chance of finding life on Enceledus or Europa than we do on Mars.

There's also been thousands of "goldilocks zone" potentially earth like planets found in the last few years.

Duggys Housemate

Mickeroo wrote: »

It would show that life is possible on a planet very different to earth making it that little bit more probable of finding it else where, so it would. You are right that it would be less remarkable what with a few (thought to be) meteorites from mars showing up here.

Having said that though I think we have a better chance of finding life on Enceledus or Europa than we do on Mars.

There's also been thousands of "goldilocks zone" potentially earth like planets found in the last few years.

No, i mean life on mars could have originated here.

Mickeroo

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

No, i mean life on mars could have originated here.

picked you up wrong there sorry. Would have to be a case of finding a form of microbe thats also found here to prove that conclusively i'd imagine.

Sin City

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

No, i mean life on mars could have originated here.

Or vice versa

Duggys Housemate

Sin City wrote: »

Or vice versa

Or vice versa, but we know life happened here. so the exchange of rocks in the last few billion years is more likely to have brought microbes from here to there, rather than the reverse.

that said, were life on mars found to be original it would defintely mean it was very frequent throughout the universe.

rossie1977

admiralofthefleet wrote: »

i think its a load of bollox. if they were there we would have found them by now

someone doesn't quite comprehend the size of the milky way galaxy let alone the entire universe

the furthest a human has travelled is the moon about 240,000 miles

at present the furthest a human built object has travelled is 11 billion miles, thats Voyager 1 launched in 1977 travelling at 38,000 mph, even after 35 years travelling at that speed it still hasn't left our solar system at current speed it would take another 17,500 years to complete a light year..........the closest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri approx 4.2 light years away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RchHyJLRt8o

these are stars only within our own galaxy (there are billions of galaxies)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CubFmoRvwWQ

Duggys Housemate

Jaysus if there were that many of them we would point a transmitter anywhere and get the latest on the intergalactic empire.

Logical Fallacy

admiralofthefleet wrote: »

i think its a load of bollox. if they were there we would have found them by now

Indeed. I mean we have explored most of space, right??

frozenfrozen

It's very unlikely that we're the only living things in the universe. The universe is HUGE. I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

Wibbs

Colmustard wrote: »

Its a lot more stable then you think, there was life on earth pretty much from its onset, even when it was a molten mess.

Not quite. It had cooled down for many millions of years before we see any evidence of life.

But multicellular "higher" organisms maybe rare, intelligence rarer again, perhaps we are the only intelligent ones.

Think about it. The Earth has so much going for it to be packed with life as it is and for 4 billion years it had life, yet culture and intelligence only happened once. And that is with us.

I'd agree on that one. Of all the novel adaptations evolution came up with, there's only one example of intelligence as an adaptation and even then the kind we exhibit today only happened to the degree it did with our Homo Sapiens species. If you rolled the dice again it could have turned out very differently and you could have ended up with Neandertals and not us. Given apex predators like us tend to be small in number in the landscape*, chances are good we might have died out. We very nearly did. Modern humans at one point got down to only a few thousand individuals because of natural disaster(Volcano 60,000Yrs ago IIRC?).

Until we find an example of life outside earth we simply can't know if it's out there, nor can we begin to guess at the likely numbers out there. Yes the universe is vast, but in a near infinite universe of near infinite possibilities within the laws of nature "one offs" occur. Unique single events unrepeated elsewhere. Life, certainly intelligent life could well be one of those, or could be ridiculously rare, like one per galaxy. Plus given the huge time factor, you could well live at a point where there's only one every ten galaxies.

Actually if we can find an example of different life here on Earth that would up the odds. So far we haven't. All life today and so far discovered is related and is of the same "type". You, me, a fungus, an amoeba and a giant redwood are all the same type of life. So this suggests either that's the only kind of life possible on a planet of our kind and/or that it's an incredibly rare event.

Then look at the history of our planet and how we ended up here. It was a long list of ingredients required. Right distance from star(unlike Venus), right size to hang onto an atmosphere(unlike Mars), presence of the right sized moon(a biggie), right collection of elements. Big cosmic Hoover in the shape of Jupiter to mop up flying rocks that would otherwise hit us. Even so for the vast majority of the history of life on earth it was unicellular slime and such. It seems we then needed the whole planet to freeze(snowball earth) to really kick off complex life. If that hadn't happened... Then we had various mass extinctions to reset the mechanism and force new adaptations. That's just scratching the surface. You could have a near identical "earth" where the big freeze never happened and complex life remained very rare.




*One reason why human fossils like T rex fossils are so rare.

Sponge25

The truth is, alien life almost certainly exists BUT the distances are so vast that even a race advanced by millions of years ahead of us likely couldn't make the distance between them and Earth, even if they did there are possibly billions of inhabited planets so why choose Earth.

All UFO sightings on Earth are almost certaintly false unless they are some kind of manmade object or natural space objects, they're not alien spaceships!

Nothing can travel faster than light and the time it takes to travel to the nearest starsystem is so vast even at the speed of light would take four years and their's almost certainly not life in that system! Most star systems that MAY have life if not all are EXTREMELY vast distances away, so vast it's difficult to fathom it.

We haven't even heard radio communications yet which we would certainly here before we saw them, or some other communication or evidence of their existence!

Mickeroo

There's also the idea that a civilisation advanced as ours needs the billions of years to come about and therefor it would be impossible for there to be more advanced civilisations out there which could mean never making contact with anything. Thats not a particularly water tight hypothesis though of course.

re the make up of life, they have found organisms that are very different to everything else: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.html

ArtSmart

Wibbs wrote: »

Not quite. It had cooled down for many millions of years before we see any evidence of life.

I'd agree on that one. Of all the novel adaptations evolution came up with, there's only one example of intelligence as an adaptation and even then the kind we exhibit today only happened to the degree it did with our Homo Sapiens species. If you rolled the dice again it could have turned out very differently and you could have ended up with Neandertals and not us. Given apex predators like us tend to be small in number in the landscape*, chances are good we might have died out. We very nearly did. Modern humans at one point got down to only a few thousand individuals because of natural disaster(Volcano 60,000Yrs ago IIRC?).

Until we find an example of life outside earth we simply can't know if it's out there, nor can we begin to guess at the likely numbers out there. Yes the universe is vast, but in a near infinite universe of near infinite possibilities within the laws of nature "one offs" occur. Unique single events unrepeated elsewhere. Life, certainly intelligent life could well be one of those, or could be ridiculously rare, like one per galaxy. Plus given the huge time factor, you could well live at a point where there's only one every ten galaxies.

Actually if we can find an example of different life here on Earth that would up the odds. So far we haven't. All life today and so far discovered is related and is of the same "type". You, me, a fungus, an amoeba and a giant redwood are all the same type of life. So this suggests either that's the only kind of life possible on a planet of our kind and/or that it's an incredibly rare event.

Then look at the history of our planet and how we ended up here. It was a long list of ingredients required. Right distance from star(unlike Venus), right size to hang onto an atmosphere(unlike Mars), presence of the right sized moon(a biggie), right collection of elements. Big cosmic Hoover in the shape of Jupiter to mop up flying rocks that would otherwise hit us. Even so for the vast majority of the history of life on earth it was unicellular slime and such. It seems we then needed the whole planet to freeze(snowball earth) to really kick off complex life. If that hadn't happened... Then we had various mass extinctions to reset the mechanism and force new adaptations. That's just scratching the surface. You could have a near identical "earth" where the big freeze never happened and complex life remained very rare.




*One reason why human fossils like T rex fossils are so rare.

i regard the series of 'exceptional circumstances' a little too similar to the intelligent design argument.


when there are enough actions, probability becomes moot.

and the amt of possible actions out there are well, essentially infinite.


in that context life very similar to our is quite possible and indeed likely.

other forms of 'life' may well be outside or visible spectrum, but that's a different conversation.

Sponge25

Mickeroo wrote: »

There's also the idea that a civilisation advanced as ours needs the billions of years to come about and therefor it would be impossible for there to be more advanced civilisations out there which could mean never making contact with anything. Thats not a particularly water tight hypothesis though of course.

re the make up of life, they have found organisms that are very different to everything else: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.html

For all we know, life could be viable in methane in a different planet! Unlikely but it wouldn't surprise me haha!

Duggys Housemate

Wibbs wrote: »

Then look at the history of our planet and how we ended up here. It was a long list of ingredients required. Right distance from star(unlike Venus), right size to hang onto an atmosphere(unlike Mars), presence of the right sized moon(a biggie), right collection of elements. Big cosmic Hoover in the shape of Jupiter to mop up flying rocks that would otherwise hit us. Even so for the vast majority of the history of life on earth it was unicellular slime and such. It seems we then needed the whole planet to freeze(snowball earth) to really kick off complex life. If that hadn't happened... Then we had various mass extinctions to reset the mechanism and force new adaptations. That's just scratching the surface. You could have a near identical "earth" where the big freeze never happened and complex life remained very rare.


*One reason why human fossils like T rex fossils are so rare.

And of course the dinosaur extinction, another fluke, necessary for us. Why was snowball earth so impotent.

aidan24326

Sponge25 wrote: »

The truth is, alien life almost certainly exists BUT the distances are so vast that even a race advanced by millions of years ahead of us likely couldn't make the distance between them and Earth, even if they did there are possibly billions of inhabited planets so why choose Earth.!

But we can't say that alien life almost certainly exists as we really have no idea. As Wibbs alluded to there is a possibility, however crazy it may seem, that life on earth is a bizarre fluke. A one-in-a-zillion very very unlikely accident.

Another possibility is that advanced aliens are already aware of us but have no particular interest in trying to contact us, maybe as we're too primitive (by comparison) to be of much interest to them. I doubt that's the case but it's possible.

My own guess is that there probably is intelligent life out there somewhere but they're just so far away that contact is not feasible. Our own galaxy is about 4.5 X 10^17 miles from end to end. Even the voyager probe, travelling at about 35,000 miles per hour, would take millions of years to travel that distance. And that's just one galaxy out of billions.

Wibbs

Mickeroo wrote: »

There's also the idea that a civilisation advanced as ours needs the billions of years to come about and therefor it would be impossible for there to be more advanced civilisations out there which could mean never making contact with anything. Thats not a particularly water tight hypothesis though of course.

Possibly, though imagine an earth where the dinosaurs never died out. There were small predator dinosaurs with grasping hands and forward looking eyes and big brains(for dinos, but they're essentially birds and birds can be very smart so..). One of them might have started to evolve in the direction of intelligence. If that happened you might have have had dino sapiens 60 million years ago.

re the make up of life, they have found organisms that are very different to everything else: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.html

Well they're not really M.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/02/nasa-could-announce-arsenic-eating-bacteria_n_790954.html
Yea they substitute one element for another to survive(and don't do as well on it, which shows it as an adaptation after the fact), they've got DNA etc. They're just another "bug" albeit an interesting one.

Sponge25 wrote: »

Nothing can travel faster than light

Well theoretically at least you can get around that limitation(wormholes, space "warps").

We haven't even heard radio communications yet which we would certainly here before we saw them, or some other communication or evidence of their existence!

We've only been using radio for a bout a century. Increasingly we use the microwave type stuff which doesn't travel so well. In another century we could well be as radio "silent" as the 10th century even if another planet was listening to us. There may be only a brief window when a planet is showing up on the radio waves. Plus they may use other forms of communication. If you went back to the 10th century and there was a radio civilisation on Venus, you couldn't have heard it.

ArtSmart wrote: »

i regard the series of 'exceptional circumstances' a little too similar to the intelligent design argument.


when there are enough actions, probability becomes moot.

and the amt of possible actions out there are well, essentially infinite.

Well no they're not infinite. The universe is effing huuuuuuge and essentially infinite in size looking at it from within, however the possibilities are not. All possibilities are restricted by the laws of physics and probabilities within them and this likely includes unique events and/or impossibly rare events. All we can currently state for sure on life in the universe is that it happened here and happened it seems just the once. Ditto for intelligent life. Until we find evidence, any evidence at all that life no matter how mundane happened elsewhere that's all she wrote.

Mickeroo

Sponge25 wrote: »

For all we know, life could be viable in methane in a different planet! Unlikely but it wouldn't surprise me haha!

It would surprise me, particularly since Titan should be teeming with it if that were the case

Mickeroo

Wibbs wrote: »

Possibly, though imagine an earth where the dinosaurs never died out. There were small predator dinosaurs with grasping hands and forward looking eyes and big brains(for dinos, but they're essentially birds and birds can be very smart so..). One of them might have started to evolve in the direction of intelligence. If that happened you might have have had dino sapiens 60 million years ago.

Well they're not really M.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/02/nasa-could-announce-arsenic-eating-bacteria_n_790954.html
Yea they substitute one element for another to survive(and don't do as well on it, which shows it as an adaptation after the fact), they've got DNA etc. They're just another "bug" albeit an interesting one.

Ah i see, I took it as a given they didn't use Phosphorous at all rather than just adapted to be able to substitute it.

Duggys Housemate

ArtSmart wrote: »

in that context life very similar to our is quite possible and indeed likely.

other forms of 'life' may well be outside or visible spectrum, but that's a different conversation.

Guessing wild forms of life - outside the visible spectrum - is designed to be unfalsifable. We should reject that.

aidan24326

Wibbs wrote: »

Possibly, though imagine an earth where the dinosaurs never died out. There were small predator dinosaurs with grasping hands and forward looking eyes and big brains(for dinos, but they're essentially birds and birds can be very smart so..). One of them might have started to evolve in the direction of intelligence. If that happened you might have have had dino sapiens 60 million years ago.

The only problem with that is that dinosaurs had already roamed (and largely ruled) the earth for a very long time without ever evolving in that direction.

Sponge25

Good points Wibbs;

Maybe there's even forms of communication we don't yet understand and have no means to recieve and decode said technology! Even if we did recieve definite alien communcations how would we decode it?

Imagine coming across a remote Island never before discovered where a people developed language independantly from the rest of the world; We wouldn't even understand them, let alone aliens from a different planet who possibly speak in frequencies the human ear can't hear!

Wibbs

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

Why was snowball earth so impotent.

Well before it life was very basic, with about the most complex creatures being sponges and their ilk. After it there was an explosion of novel forms of complex life. It was about the biggest explosion in diversity life's history on this planet. They even call it the Cambrian explosion. So given how there was a before and after of such a massive scale it seems the snowball earth really put the foot down on the throttle of evolution and diversity. Without it life may have kept going along as it had for the previous near billion years, pretty dull and narrow in scope. Or it might have delayed the inevitable as some think. Personally I'd feel the periods of super ice ages likely pressured more changes than not.

Duggys Housemate

Sponge25 wrote: »

Good points Wibbs;

Maybe there's even forms of communication we don't yet understand and have no means to recieve and decode said technology! Even if we did recieve definite alien communcations how would we decode it?

Imagine coming across a remote Island never before discovered where a people developed language independantly from the rest of the world; We wouldn't even understand them, let alone aliens from a different planet who possibly speak in frequencies the human ear can't hear!

Thats more of the "we can never know" hypothesis, designed to be unprovable. we are not trying to understand a language, at any rate, but just find some communication. As for not using radio - that terms means anything which can be carried on an electromagnetic frequency - and nothing can go faster than light.

Duggys Housemate

Wibbs wrote: »

Well before it life was very basic, with about the most complex creatures being sponges and their ilk. After it there was an explosion of novel forms of complex life. It was about the biggest explosion in diversity life's history on this planet. They even call it the Cambrian explosion. So given how there was a before and after of such a massive scale it seems the snowball earth really put the foot down on the throttle of evolution and diversity. Without it life may have kept going along as it had for the previous near billion years, pretty dull and narrow in scope. Or it might have delayed the inevitable as some think. Personally I'd feel the periods of super ice ages likely pressured more changes than not.

ok, well wiki tells me the jury is out on snowball earth, but intersting topic.

Mickeroo

Sponge25 wrote: »

Imagine coming across a remote Island never before discovered where a people developed language independantly from the rest of the world; We wouldn't even understand them, let alone aliens from a different planet who possibly speak in frequencies the human ear can't hear!

This has actually happened, there's still tribes in the Amazon that haven't been contacted.

EDIT: Highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Sleep-There-are-Snakes/dp/1846680409/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347116123&sr=8-1

Wibbs

aidan24326 wrote: »

The only problem with that is that dinosaurs had already roamed (and largely ruled) the earth for a very long time without ever evolving in that direction.

Aye but so had mammals. Mammals were happily "dumb" for 60 million years. Actually if you consider our type of brains, the creative, technical civilisation building brains, that's only 50,000 years old, more like around 12,000 if you make civilisation a cut off point*.








Earlier humans do seem to show some hints of this abstract thinking but it's isolated and rare.

KenSwee

karma_ wrote: »

Not really. It's statistically probably there are other life forms that inhabit the universe. Is it not a tad self-centred to believe we are all there is?

The universe is big, really big.

Exactly. And may I add that it is probably just that bit too big for us to be in contact with any type of lifeforms outside of Earth. The distances between stars are so wide, and it doesn't even bear thinking about with regard to the distances between galaxies.

There is a slim possibility that there may be some form of life existing on other planets and moons in our solar system but it would probably be less developed then ourselves or maybe even as intelligent as us but not in a way that we can understand.

Will we encounter other life within 40 years? Maybe. But the variables are so wide that it's always going to be a maybe until the very last second of the day that is 40 years from now.

Will we eventually discover life in the future? Now that's a far more interesting question because it may take so long for us to actually discover any form of life that we may be extinct before we get the chance to do so.

But right now the sexy science is actually understanding how the universe works. If we can figure out all the variables and inner workings of the universe, then we can actually calculate quite accurately, that life can exist, where we can find it and how advanced it will be. That's the real exciting bit.

thomasj

Meh! You could be forgiven for thinking that that article was recycled from previous times. Researchers must be looking for funding!

You could also be forgiven for thinking aliens already live amongst us. Just listen to some of the folk in places like athlone, mullingar etc.

Other than that we must be overdue a relaunch refresh of the film et

Duggys Housemate

Is it time for Fermis paradox yet?

One thing I would say is that in these debates people are good on numerators - the number of stars in a Galaxy - but not so much on denominators - the chances of all the ducks in a row leading to a technological society we can discover.

The numerator is the number of stars in a Galaxy - lets stick with that. Denominators are the multification of these probablities.

1) Solar System has Earth like planet
2) Earth like planet in proper orbit.
3) Solar System has large Gas Planets to hover up debris.
4) Earth planet has similar sized moon.
5) Life begins on Earth Type planet.
6) Multicellular life begins on planet.
7) Life moves out of the sea
8) Intelligent life emerges - for most of Earths history that was unlikely to happen, the dinosaurs ruled the roost.
9) Intelligent life developes scientific society.

My purely arbitary guesss are

1/10 * 1/100 * 1/10 * 1/1000 * 1/100000 * 1/100000 * 1/100000 * 1/100000 * 1/100

= 10 ^ -29.

shadowcomplex

Colmustard wrote: »

Alien life yeah

But not intelligent life.

They are probably saying the same thing about us:rolleyes:

FutureGuy

The only thing stopping us from finding life is our ability to detect said life. I believe life is absolutely everwhere.

We have found life here on Earth in the most inhospitable places imaginable. Places that would make Mars look like a holiday camp. We have found life that went against everything that we thought was required for the existance of life. Not only does it exist, it thrives.

There are so many places even in our own solar system that could right now have life. Many of Jupiters and Saturns moon scream "life could be here".

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/et-life/

Regarding the dinosaurs, one particular species showed signs of brain folds before the extinction event. We are about a hundred years aways from possibly becoming a Type I civilization...imagine what those species could have gone onto achieve had they sufficient time.

Duggys Housemate

FutureGuy wrote: »

Regarding the dinosaurs, one particular species showed signs of brain folds before the extinction event. We are about a hundred years aways from possibly becoming a Type I civilization...imagine what those species could have gone onto achieve had they sufficient time.

So, where are they? /fermi

Strawberry Fields

FutureGuy wrote: »

Regarding the dinosaurs, one particular species showed signs of brain folds before the extinction event. We are about a hundred years aways from possibly becoming a Type I civilization...imagine what those species could have gone onto achieve had they sufficient time.

They were on earth for 165 million years

Depending on your definition of human we've been here 1/2 million.

Seriously how much time do they need?

crazy cabbage

Wibbs wrote: »

Aye but so had mammals. Mammals were happily "dumb" for 60 million years. Actually if you consider our type of brains, the creative, technical civilisation building brains, that's only 50,000 years old, more like around 12,000 if you make civilisation a cut off point*.

Earlier humans do seem to show some hints of this abstract thinking but it's isolated and rare.

Anyone ever hear of terence mckenna's stoned ape theory.... Anyone at all.....

ok i will leave now

Helix

admiralofthefleet wrote: »

i think its a load of bollox. if they were there we would have found them by now

well SOMEONE has no idea how big space is...

Helix

ArtSmart wrote: »

AFAIK the human size is the most efficient, so they'll prob be human size, and carbon based. probably fitter than us though. hmmm. hope they havent green skin...

the human size is only most efficient for earth

squod

Wibbs wrote: »

.......imagine an earth where the dinosaurs never died out. There were small predator dinosaurs with grasping hands and forward looking eyes and big brains....... you might have have had dino sapiens 60 million years ago.

Dino sapiens? Weren't dinosaurs big fuhken lizards? So, we're talking lizard men here right?

Say these yokes did evolve, didn't like the weather or the big stupid monkeys and just fuhked off into space. Then came back to control those big stupid monkey people??

David Icke was right!!!!!!!!

Cú Giobach

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

So, where are they? /fermi

Somewhere else and not here.
Somewhere else is very very big and here is very very small.

You could spend 100 years sitting on a rock in the middle of the Sahara desert and not meet a single one of the 7 billion humans on the planet.
And the space around us could be teeming with communications by a technology we have no inkling of, using the electromagnetic spectrum with it's limitation of light speed might not be even bothered with by other civilisations (it would probably be seen as efficient as sending a runner to pass a message between New York and LA).

Duggys Housemate

Cú Giobach wrote: »

Somewhere else and not here.
Somewhere else is very very big and here is very very small.

You could spend 100 years sitting on a rock in the middle of the Sahara desert and not meet a single one of the 7 billion humans on the planet.
And the space around us could be teeming with communications by a technology we have no inkling of, using the electromagnetic spectrum with it's limitation of light speed might not be even bothered with by other civilisations (it would probably be seen as efficient as sending a runner to pass a message between New York and LA).

I think everybody on this thread knows the size of the universe.

The guy I was responding to said there would be Type I civilisations out there, Type 1 civilisations would probable leave some footprint we could measure.

Please dont speculate about aliens using faster than light technology for communication. That can't happen.

Helix

squod wrote: »

Dino sapiens? Weren't dinosaurs big fuhken lizards? So, we're talking lizard men here right?

Say these yokes did evolve, didn't like the weather or the big stupid monkeys and just fuhked off into space. Then came back to control those big stupid monkey people??

David Icke was right!!!!!!!!

dinosaurs did evolve. they're flying around in the skies now

123 LC

there's definitely a chance that we could see them through some sort of very powerful telescope, but we wouldn't be able to reach them, i mean mars is the furthest planet that somethings been landed on, theres not really a chance that they could do this with a planet millions of miles further away?

crazy cabbage

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

I think everybody on this thread knows the size of the universe.

The guy I was responding to said there would be Type I civilisations out there, Type 1 civilisations would probable leave some footprint we could measure.

Please dont speculate about aliens using faster than light technology for communication. That can't happen.

I would think that if there is a vastly more intelegent speices (which i presume is what a type 1 species is) would leave almost no footprint. Why would they?

Helix

crazy cabbage wrote: »

I would think that if there is a vastly more intelegent speices (which i presume is what a type 1 species is) would leave almost no footprint. Why would they?

they could leave a bloody massive footprint and we still may never find it

Duggys Housemate

crazy cabbage wrote: »

I would think that if there is a vastly more intelegent speices (which i presume is what a type 1 species is) would leave almost no footprint. Why would they?

Because they would use so much energy for their civilization we could see it - a dyson sphere for instance would cause stars to change luminosity. In any case if the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life you would expect something to turn up.