Life In This Dangerous Universe

[Moontanman]

FWIW, I don't expect to make contact with any other intelligent life forms during our lifetime -- sort of like the Cubs winning the World Series... :D There likely is some kind of intelligent life, but any signals they're putting out will likely be very weak and diffused, and millions of light-years away. Intelligent organisms are unlikely to survive the millions, if not billions, of years it would take any species to travel to our planet safely.

 

I agree about the weak diffused signals, even our planet becomes difficult to impossible to detect even at the distance of nearest star due to diffusion but the assertion that any star travel would take millions if not billions of years seems excessive.

 

Meanwhile, the observable universe is around 46 billion light-years wide, there may be 10¹⁵ planets in total, and perhaps 10 billion of those are habitable by some kind of life form. Of course this would be spread out over billions of years as well; e.g. we could kill every mammal on the planet, and in a hundred million years another intelligent species may well come into existence. Organisms are also very tenacious; iirc there's already indications that microbes can survive extreme environments. possibly even the vacuum of space.

 

 

Can you tell us where you got those numbers?

 

That said, I don't see any reason to pin my happiness on whether or not life as we understand it exists anywhere else.

 

 

Several interesting assertions but while I won't pin my happiness on contact happening anytime soon I'm not quite as pessimistic as you seem to be. Technology not too far in advance of our own, certainly not anything we know to be impossible, such technology would allow the entire milky way galaxy to be colonized in less than one million years, a cosmic eye blink for sure... the actual time depends on speed but even at very low speeds it is still a small finite time compared to the life of a star.

 

http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/index.php?page=future05