Posted on 02/06/2007 9:08:20 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Ya, I'm no expert and I've been way wrong before but I don't think we'll meet ET or find any wierd animals anytime soon. I wouldn't be surprised if we find some sort of evidence of ET single celled organisms or "chemical" selection/evolutionary processes in our own solar system but we won't get past the heliosphere for decades or centuries and the ET's we want to meet would have to have lifespans in the hundreds of thousands of years per individual to get close enough for us to notice them.
Your background is similar to mine in that respect. Rumsfeld said something about knowing what we know, knowing what we don't know, not knowing that we don't know. I check my yard for space aliens every day, but so far nothing. Some day though, who knows.
...the ET's we want to meet would have to have lifespans in the hundreds of thousands of years per individual to get close enough for us to notice them....assuming our knowledge is complete -- and it never is.
Very true, there may be ways to move we don't know about yet, hell we're still unable to describe or see 2/3 of the material that makes up the universe!
So as we currently understand the nature of time and space and life the likely hood of 2 intelligent civilizations from different worlds coming into contact is virtually impossible.
"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold, 'Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence' (Sagan, ed)
BFLR
I think they would be able to communicate with us since we use EM waves to transmit data and we are using optical transmission systems so they would be able to at least detect the patterns and formulate some response. They'd never get off of thier world without a strong understanding of the EM spectrum.
I just think that distance, time, and the violent nature of the universe in generalare the limiting factors.
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