Simple alien life is probable, but complex extraterrestrials inside the Milky Way are improbable.
Catastrophism wins again.Five Out of Five Researchers Agree: Earths Solar System SpecialThough researchers find more and more distant planets revolving around alien suns, the discoveries highlight that Earth and its solar system may be an exceptionally rare place indeed. That was the consensus here Wednesday evening among five planetary science experts who spoke at the 5th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate held at the American Museum of Natural History... Prior to the discovery of planets around stars other than our sun in the 1990's, scientists thought that alien solar systems must look something like our own. They presumed that just like our solar system, there would be small rocky planets like as Earth close to their host stars and large, low density ones a little farther out. But what they discovered were solar systems unlike ours with big Jupiter-like planets close to their host star... "I have a problem referring to our own solar system as unusual, because we haven't done that experiment yet, we haven't searched for our own solar system yet," said Turnbull. Thus far, the kind of data obtained and the type of observations made are tuned to search for Jupiters and not Earths, therefore that's what we find. "The experiments were designed for that," she explained. But with the vast majority of the alien planets found in eccentric orbits, Butler has a different view. "I think with the data at hand, we can say that our solar system is rare. Eccentricity dominates," said Butler. "It's just a matter of how rare we are," he added.
by Sara Goudarzi
March 31, 2005
Universe is too vast, times needed to contact intelligence outside of our heliosphere way beyond the scope of a single generation, probability of a stable environment for the few billion years needed for intelligence to develop way too high.
We may find a fossilized protoboint or self replicating molecules but we'll never meet an intelligent ET.
BFLR
