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originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People
If we came across a planet without intelligent life, but with a shark-like creature who had roamed that planet for 250 million years basically unchanged, then I'd say evolution was pretty darn successful in the case of those shark-like creatures.
originally posted by: Rainbowresidue
a reply to: MysterX
Star for you!
How right you are!
We could achieve so much more even today if we weren't limited by rules etc. by TPTB. They have a reason for holding us back,I just haven't figured out yet completely what it is ... control perhaps? They already know of aliens visiting earth, and are gaining knowledge/ technology from them...
Anyways,one way or another we will be traveling/inspecting other stars and their planets in the future.
( Whatever will happen in history to cause TPBT to fall.)
That''s the next step,and it's inevitable.It's our destiny.
We've been building up to this for many decades.
To infinity and beyond!!!
originally posted by: Ross 54
We know that intelligent life is possible, because we have gone down that road ourselves. Even if a convergence of all the factors necessary to bring this about is very improbable we must acknowledge that even very improbable things can happen. Given a large number of coin tosses, occupying a long period of time, that coin will, upon occasion, land on its edge. Multiply the tosses into the billions. Those edge landings will begin to count up.
There has been a tendency in human history for some to fancy that we are unique in all the universe. First we imagined that our planet was the only one, and that the rest of the universe was a sort of stage set, placed there for our benefit. Next, some proposed that systems of planets were very uncommon, created by rare near-collisions of stars. Still later it was thought that we resided at the center of our galaxy, and that it was the only one in all of space.
All of these instances of assuming a 'uniqueness of viewpoint', as it's called, have been proven wrong, in time. Shall we then repeat this error yet again, supposing ourselves very rare, or even the only, or the most intelligent form of life in our galaxy?
The fact that there is only one civilization-building intelligent species (us) in our solar system is scarcely an argument against other intelligent life in the galaxy. One solar system is simply too small a sample, against the huge number of such systems that can be expected to exist in our galaxy. If only a tiny fraction of these harbor intelligent life, the number of such civilizations in the galaxy will still be huge.
originally posted by: jonnywhite
a reply to: Ross 54
We're the most capable life on Earth, are we not? Where else in the solar system is there more intelligent life? Nowhere, right? So there's a good case to be made we're rare. And you know how the stars and planets and the moon revolve around us at night, creating the impression we're the center of everything? Come on, don't be so hard on us. We have a limited array of sensory data and our theoretical understanding is restricted by the data we can gain access to. Our data says life is only on Earth and we're not even certain how life started on Earth or even if it did at all. We're being cautiously optimistic when we say life is rare elsewhere.
We really just don't know yet. We're being practical with our estimates. If we said none, it doesn't jive with the numbers. Where there's one there's usually another. How improbable is it we're the only one? If we said it's extremely common: on what basis? We know we're rare in our solar system, so... extrapolate that to the galaxy and play it safe.
originally posted by: Ross 54
The fact that there is only one intelligent species (us) in our solar system is scarcely an argument against other intelligent life in the galaxy. One solar system is simply too small a sample, against the huge number of such systems that can be expected to exist in our galaxy. If only a tiny fraction of these harbor intelligent life, the number of such civilizations in the galaxy will still be huge.
originally posted by: jonnywhite
a reply to: Ross 54
We're the most capable life on Earth, are we not? Where else in the solar system is there more intelligent life? Nowhere, right? So there's a good case to be made we're rare. And you know how the stars and planets and the moon revolve around us at night, creating the impression we're the center of everything? Come on, don't be so hard on us. We have a limited array of sensory data and our theoretical understanding is restricted by the data we can gain access to. Our data says life is only on Earth and we're not even certain how life started on Earth or even if it did at all. We're being cautiously optimistic when we say life is rare elsewhere.
We really just don't know yet. We're being practical with our estimates. If we said none, it doesn't jive with the numbers. Where there's one there's usually another. How improbable is it we're the only one? If we said it's extremely common: on what basis? We know we're rare in our solar system, so... extrapolate that to the galaxy and play it safe.
originally posted by: Ross 54
Arguments about the difficulty of rapid star travel are really beside the point. The Fermi paradox considered the case in which travel speeds remained well below that of light. The colonization of the entire galaxy was still considered possible in a time span very much shorter than it has existed. Given the age of the galaxy, relative to that of our planet, such colonization would already have been accomplished long, long ago.
originally posted by: Ross 54
a reply to: stormbringer1701
Dr. Enrico Fermi was a very able scientist. He considered a number of variables in posing his quite valid question about the lack of the obvious presence at Earth of a highly advanced galactic civilization.
Any of these variables might act against the chances of a number of prospective colonizing civilizations carrying out this aim. He held that it was very unlikely that these variables would prevent all galactic colonizers. He noted that even one or a few such civilizations could fill the galaxy in a astronomically trivial length of time.