and how many galaxies? Lets not forget the possibilities of other dimensions we are talking trillions and trillions of possibilities I just refuse to believe that out of all that there is no intelligent life out there
True. We can't be sure.
Brian Cox doesn't believe in life on other planets then as well as he doesn't believe in Ghosts but he does have a face and voice you could slap.
Interesting, I've hiked through Otford a couple of times and never noticed the reconstruction - next time I'm walking through I'll be sure to look!Are some UFO sightings the solution to the Fermi paradox and if so why, conspiracy theories aside don’t they make open contact?
I’d think, but I don’t know, that the effect of our atomic weapons anywhere else in the universe would be minimal at best. The worst we could do would be to trigger another extinction event on Earth which some claim we are doing already.
The dinosaur killer is estimated to be the equivalent of 10bn Hiroshimas, A technology not too far in advance of us could push one of these into the path of the Earth’s orbit, why would nukes trouble them?
The universe is vast and full of things like suns, novae, FRBs, GRBs; black holes, etc that make our nuclear capability look puny. I doubt that our current crop of instruments could even detect a nuclear war in the system of the nearest star to the sun.
We tend to overstate our progress in getting into space, without denying the achievement all we’ve done is get to the moon and launch a set of probes two of which have reached the boundary of our Solar System after half a century or so.
I’m lucky enough to live near a scale model of our Solar system. I’ve been interested in astronomy since I was a kid and even then I find it hard to comprehend the scale – and don’t forget this is two dimensional not three dimensional! Couple of links here:
https://londonist.com/london/beyond...stem-walk-sevenoaks-kent-location-where-route?
https://www3.astronomicalheritage.n...-sky?place=otford-solar-system-united-kingdom
It could be the effect of what we are doing isn’t anything we are currently aware of - similar to the Babylon 5 scenario where the Humans are losing a war to the Minbari when the Minbari surrender because they’ve found that humans and Minbari “share souls”.
Or
It could be that they’ve invested millennia tinkering with primate DNA and we’re about to destroy all the work.
Or
A moral dilemma in that they know that contact with a more advanced race would be disastrous for us. However they see us about to destroy ourselves. Do they intervene or not?
As @eburacum points out we don’t have enough data, which is true of most Fortean phenomena so we’re just guessing; but that’s half the fun innit?
I used to have a poster on the wall showing the Solar System. It was about a metre long and showed the edge of the sun at one end and the planets dutifully lined up to the Oort Cloud at the other end. I did a few measurements and the sizes of the objects seemed about in scale with each other, but it turned out at that scale, to show the correct distances between the orbits the poster would have stretched to a town several kilometres away. And then it would have shown only up to Neptune.
That's right. The Sun, for instance, puts out a million times as much energy as all our atomic weapons combined, every second.
Ha - you can't fool me. What about at night?
Well, consider we (humans) may not be normal but an aberration, a billions to one chance. After all the scientific explanation as to why oxygen breathing life itself exists relies on a tremendous amount of what I (as a non-scientist, although something of an engineer) would call an infeasible sequence of fortunate circumstance. To extrapolate that out to humans goes beyond to the realms of a one celled organism winning the National Lottery.
The problem is scale. It doesn't matter how vanishingly improbable it was, the universe is so incredibly vast that it should occur multiple times. I say that with the caveat that I'm not a statistician.
I do have sympathy with that view. After all, in infinity, everything must happen, right?
Maybe it wraps around on itself... but honestly, I've no idea... Yog-Sothoth?
A tricky question, this. The observable universe is not infinite; indeed, we know how big it is (or at least, we think we do). 92 billion light years in diameter, give or take a billion.
Strange as well that for many millions of years supposedly the dinosaurs, many different varieties of them, ruled this planet, along with many other animals.
Appx 186 million years and as far as we know never got close to developing technological "intelligence".
As far as we know.Appx 186 million years and as far as we know never got close to developing technological "intelligence".
Yes, I read somewhere that if they had developed cities like Eridu or Ur it would be very difficult for us to find the remains after all this time. Predator prey ratios and lack of species may point to domestication but given the chance involved in fossilization even that isn't sure.
Plastic? All plastic would have crumbled to dust over millions of years.
I thought that some plastics didn't degrade but eroded to microparticles that found their way into the food chain, sedimentary rocks, etc. Don't know how long they would be detectable for though. 66 million years is a long time!
And doesn't the Drake equation rather assume that all life is carbon based and reliant on liquid water, etc.?
Michael Crichton, before been a successful betseller writer, was a noticeable Sci-fi film director he did a very good film on the 70s called " the Andromeda strain" that speculates about the idea of a kind of alien life not based in carbon but on silicon.
Even the most durable plastics would break down chemically and physically over 60-odd million years.
Yep, Hoyle's black cloud see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud
