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Originally posted by Now_Then
Originally posted by AlwaysQuestion
@Now_then - thanks for the video, nicely done.
Just to say that's not my vid!! (don't wan't people to think that's my work!! - although I wish I did do that sort of thing)
Just remembered it as soon as I saw the pic.
And about the alien dudes finding us... We may be small... But you also got to factor in how much we have being shouting at the universe in the past 100 years!!... You just have to swing past when everyones in bed - our planet is lit up like an xmas tree...
Then you got the all radio waves and there are a couple of man made items that have actually left the solar system by now... Voyager and Pioneer probes off the top of my head.
Originally posted by Watcher-In-The-Shadows
reply to post by OmegaPoint
Actually they now think that the signal degrades to the point of unintelligibleness before it even reaches the nearest star.
Originally posted by ZeroGhost
Behind the Deep Field images of galaxies we can see, with enhancement, they found what they called the "Blue Wall". So dark in the distance only faint blue light gets through. It is a solid wall of nothing but galaxies.
Solid galaxies all around us, billions, with billions of stars each as far and farther than we can see.
Big just is not a big enough word.
Infinite comes close
ZG
Originally posted by ZeroGhost
Behind the Deep Field images of galaxies we can see, with enhancement, they found what they called the "Blue Wall". So dark in the distance only faint blue light gets through. It is a solid wall of nothing but galaxies.
Solid galaxies all around us, billions, with billions of stars each as far and farther than we can see.
ZG
Frank Drake formulated his equation in 1960 in preparation for the Green Bank meeting. This meeting, held at Green Bank, West Virginia, established SETI as a scientific discipline. The historic meeting, whose participants became known as the "Order of the Dolphin," brought together leading astronomers, physicists, biologists, social scientists, and industry leaders to discuss the possibility of detecting intelligent life among the stars.
The Green Bank meeting was also remarkable because it featured the first use of the famous formula that came to be known as the "Drake Equation". This explains why the equation is also known by its other names with the "Green Bank" designation. When Drake came up with this formula, he had no notion that it would become a staple of SETI theorists for decades to come. In fact, he thought of it as an organizational tool — a way to order the different issues to be discussed at the Green Bank conference, and bring them to bear on the central question of intelligent life in the universe. Carl Sagan, a great proponent of SETI, utilized and quoted the formula often and as a result the formula is often mislabeled as "The Sagan Equation". The Green Bank Meeting was commemorated by a plaque.
The Drake equation is closely related to the Fermi paradox in that Drake suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations (the Fermi paradox) suggests that technological civilizations tend to destroy themselves rather quickly. This theory often stimulates an interest in identifying and publicizing ways in which humanity could destroy itself, and then countered with hopes of avoiding such destruction and eventually becoming a space-faring species. A similar argument is The Great Filter,[1] which notes that since there are no observed extraterrestrial civilizations, despite the vast number of stars, then some step in the process must be acting as a filter to reduce the final value. According to this view, either it is very hard for intelligent life to arise, or the lifetime of such civilizations must be relatively short.
The grand question of the number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy could, in Drake's view, be reduced to seven smaller issues with his equation.
N = R^[\ast] \times f_p \times n_e \times f_[\ell] \times f_i \times f_c \times L \!
where:
N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
and
R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.