Quote:
Originally Posted by Angry Jew Cat
gfy = the internet's foremost gathering of earth's top physicists, scientists, doctors, psychologists, and experts on just about everything. good work boys, you've all seemed to cracked the code. someone call nasa. it's obvious that there are no aliens, if there was gfy would have been the first group they contacted in an effort to understand mankind's deepest secrets...
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It's an interesting convo nonetheless.
If there is life out there, Bill Bryson said it best in "A Short History of Nearly Everything"
"Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire of frighting the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.
Still,
statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way- estimates range from 100 billion or some to perhaps 400 billion -and the Milky Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960's, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life in the cosmos based on a series ob diminishing probabilities.
Under Drakes equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally- yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.
What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at lease two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these being know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs- people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "dear sire," and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our master of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us..."