Posted on 06/22/2016 12:51:26 PM PDT by Heartlander
There may never have been another intelligent, technologically advanced alien species in the entire history of the Universe. Last week, in the New York Times, scientist Adam Frank emphatically wrote that Yes, There Have Been Aliens, concluding that given all the potentially habitable worlds we know must be out there from our astrophysical discoveries, intelligent life must have arisen. What he fails to account for, however, is the magnitude of the unknowns that abiogenesis, evolution, long-term habitability and other factors bring into the equation. Although it’s true that there are an astronomical number of possibilities for intelligent, technologically advanced lifeforms, the huge uncertainties make it a very real possibility that humans are the only spacefaring aliens our Universe has ever known.
[SNIP]...But that’s where our optimism, if we’re being scientifically honest and scrupulous, ought to end. Because there are three big steps out there, in order to get a human-like civilization, that need to happen:
[SNIP]...And even if life does occur, how fortunate do you need to be to have it survive and thrive for billions of years? Would a catastrophic warming scenario, like Venus, be the norm? Or a catastrophic freezing scenario ...
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
“The anthropic principles (from oxygen levels, to gravity, to water vapor, to the expansion of the universe) are all so fine tuned as to suggest this IS the place God chose for humanity”
Sorry, that is romantic and poetic and all, but in reality, if an evolutionist was correct, and we came into existence because of our environment, then exactly where else would you -expect- to find us?
It is an extremely self centered point of view that we require conditions “X”, so clearly everything was made as it is, solely to support us. It is just as logical to think that life that evolved in this environment would be perfectly fine tuned for this environment because it couldn’t evolve in a place that is hostile to it.
For example, we couldn’t have evolved as we did on a planet with an ammonia atmosphere, so of course we will be found on an earthlike planet.
We know for sure that there are Vulcans, Romulans and Klingons, just to name a few.
With current technology, we could populate the galaxy in a few centuries. Slower-than-light ships establishing colonies on any habitable worlds they find, with colonies then sending out more ships as they reached the required level of technology, and so on.
If there are other intelligent species out there, they could do the same.
So far we haven't seen any of them.
Yeah, Starman, ET, Contact, 2001, Close Encounters, there are plenty of movies about peaceful aliens. It just takes great writing and directing to make them interesting, but any idiot can make an alien invasion spectacle at least halfway entertaining.
Yeahhhh,,,, no. With existing technology we could not populate the milky way galaxy in a few centuries.
IF you have a speed of light spaceship, you will need around 1200 centuries to cross the Milky Way. And we milky wayans are living in one relatively small galaxy.
There are about 100 Billion other galaxies in the observable universe.
Yes, they are out there, and no, we will never find them.
It’s so very lonely.
Billions walk the earth and you’re lonely???
That argument only works if you can establish that there is at least a remote possibility that life can spontaneously spring from non-life, which science has never been able to establish.
What a huge waste of space it would be if it were so
Your people I do not understand, and you’ll never hear surf music again.
“But if you think the human race and all the life on earth evolved because of our conditions here, then it has done it hundreds of thousands, or even millions of times.”
Nonsense. Evolution doesn’t deal with the problem of where life came from, only what happens to life once it already exists. What you are speaking of is the notion of abiogenesis (life arising from non-living materials), which is not a scientifically established idea, but mere speculation at this point.
The peaceful loving aliens never formed a government. So no need to invade or explore very far. The aliens with governments however eventually kill themselves off. Our clock is running.
Those signal monitoring aliens will show up one day and demand us to “Bring back Firefly!”
“A thousand years in Your sight are as but yesterday”
is probably no different than me saying: "My son grew up in a blink of an eye." People know what I mean, but don't take it literally.
Some of the theories that might be solutions:
Something notices when a race start moving around and sterilizes the area with a directed gamma ray burst/or killer robots. This is the berserker scenario.
They invariably fall into a virtual reality hole and never care about climbing out.
The drive to explore is actually a very rare trait among sapient life. So no one explores.
Once you get have tech to make reproducing probes you want them to be very quiet as well or maybe not even send them, because you don’t want to attract notice.
Freegards
Exactly! Richard Dawkins makes the same point.
I am sure there is intelligent life in the universe, it just doesn’t want to come here anymore.
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