Quicksand Fans

Story over at Hot Air

There some good points in the article, especially near the end where he points out we barely understand how gravity works, never mind exotic matter and realms of high-energy physics yet to be discovered.

But




Just sayin'

Giant signal lamp.

SOS STOP CRASHED SPACESHIP STOP STUCK IN TRANSPORTER STOP RETIREMENT SUCKS STOP

The comment section makes you despair for the human race , too

From there, radio waves either travel faster-than-light, or slower than light, but rarely AT lightspeed....and the lack of comprehension that whatever we seeing NOW, happened sometime around 1015 AD, maybe, assuming they got the damn distance correct. And at a thousand lightyears, thats not perfect either. And the SETI guys... " we already looked, there's no radio signals there" .. everything but saying 'so there!' and sticking out their tongues Which of course precludes the speculation that they might NOT be using radio. As one guy says, what if they all telepaths? Or , more science-like, what if they using pure optical based comms? Or have moved into using hyperdimensional communications wavelengths (thats not all SF bullshit, hyperspace, subspace, and a host of other dimensions are quite real as defined by Einstein) We just DONT KNOW. Thats what makes it fascinating. And it will NEVER be settled

There's a hundred billion (100,000,000,000) stars in our galaxy.
The odds of hitting the last powerball were roughly one in two hundred MILLION. (1/200,000,000 or 0.000000005 in decimal). If the odds were the same for finding intelligent life in our galaxy (just our galaxy, never mind the 200 billion GALAXIES out there) then that's 500 jackpots.
The crazy people are the ones who don't believe in ET's.

Mynock wrote:There's a hundred billion (100,000,000,000) stars in our galaxy.
The odds of hitting the last powerball were roughly one in two hundred MILLION. (1/200,000,000 or 0.000000005 in decimal). If the odds were the same for finding intelligent life in our galaxy (just our galaxy, never mind the 200 billion GALAXIES out there) then that's 500 jackpots.
The crazy people are the ones who don't believe in ET's.

Mynock's math is correct. However, those odds, as stated, refer to the probability of the existence of intelligent life in our galaxy. They do not apply to the probability of finding it. I vaguely recall it being explained by C. Sagan that the probability of FINDING intelligent life elsewhere involves other extremely important factors. One of the most important factors, as explained by Sagan, is the length of time an intelligent life form produces external evidence of its own existence. If, for example, a life form is able to conceal its existence (as, for example, by stopping the occurrence of outgoing radio waves) then there would be a very narrow window of time during which that life form could be detected by another. The same would occur if the lifetime of an intelligent life form is short, as would occur if such life forms tend to exterminate themselves through, for example, nuclear war. As these factors are unknown, the probability of finding such life cannot be calculated.

I do agree, however, that the probability of such life being anything other than all pervasive is an approximation of zero.

Well, our ignorance is is one thing. Humans can't seem to comprehend the fact that there is more than what we can see. And also that we're insignificant. The possibly of: many other dimensions, an infinity of realms beyond the Hubble sphere in this dimension, the Big Bang not being the beginning (maybe there never was one), etc. I find it difficult to say that we are the only ones. If there's an infinite multiverse, everything we have and haven't tried to imagine is probably out there, which means ET's. There are some things we will never know.

I don't know if it's ignorance so much as it is just limitation. You can say the numbers but I think it's just beyond the capability of the human brain to truly comprehend them.