The Hunt for Intelligent Life
I think that looking for intelligent life on distant planets is largely a waste of time. Why? Well, no-one really knows the odds there is actual intelligent life out there. Sure, the famous Drake equation gives you an estimate for the likely number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy if you feed in the correct numbers. The thing is nobody knows what the correct values for these numbers are. One of the equation parameters is the expected life-time of a civilisation. Um, how do you guess that one? Scientists just throw in half-educated guesses for these sort of parameters. Not really an exact science.
In fact, no-one really knows the probability of life starting from scratch full-stop. I can tell you though it's something extremely small since life is truly a miracle. But we're lucky it did happen. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to have this discussion ;)
You could argue that the size of the universe favours the chance that there is intelligent life out there, somewhere. True. The univerise is, to put it very mildly, exceedingly large. So large in fact most people, like me, cannot comprehend how large it truly is. If there is an intelligent civilisation out there speaking or listening to us, it will be an incredibly long wait until we've heard from them (or they've heard from us) and we've decoded their messages (or they've decoded ours). We'll probably be space dust by the time one of us hits the reply button.
Hence, I think it's all bit of a lost cause. I'd be interested to see a counter argument though. I might be persuaded to join the other side. For now we're better off looking for intelligent life here on Earth.
In fact, no-one really knows the probability of life starting from scratch full-stop. I can tell you though it's something extremely small since life is truly a miracle. But we're lucky it did happen. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to have this discussion ;)
You could argue that the size of the universe favours the chance that there is intelligent life out there, somewhere. True. The univerise is, to put it very mildly, exceedingly large. So large in fact most people, like me, cannot comprehend how large it truly is. If there is an intelligent civilisation out there speaking or listening to us, it will be an incredibly long wait until we've heard from them (or they've heard from us) and we've decoded their messages (or they've decoded ours). We'll probably be space dust by the time one of us hits the reply button.
Hence, I think it's all bit of a lost cause. I'd be interested to see a counter argument though. I might be persuaded to join the other side. For now we're better off looking for intelligent life here on Earth.
posted by Engels at 4:59 pm
5 Comments:
Intelligent life on Earth?
I think it's slowly dying off mate....
Pity. It was fun while it lasted.
It would appear so. The stupid ones are just too good at breeding.
Probably because they're too stupid to do anything else.
It would be very cool to meet aliens. They can tell us how their God created them in the form of himself. And how their God is the right god, and we will go to hell for not believing in their God.
Sorry, I was just extrapolating from history.
I did go to that site. I think I have to re-read it.
Janbo, you're probably most definitely right. Although, some are pretty good at killing themselves (and us).
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