KI4MVP
formerly LJ4MVP
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2005
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Just a little bit of talking points and food for thought
I would bet my life savings on there being extra terrestrial life in the universe. It is almost an impossibility for there not to be. The question is, what type of lifeform is it? Is it biological? Is it self aware? Is it just a bacteria of some sort? Who knows.
Now the question posed here assumes some type of sentient life that has visited Earth in the recent past. I would bet my life savings against it. Let me give you guys a good mental experiment on just how difficult it would be to locate life on Earth. Go to a beach and paint one grain of sand orange. Bury it and leave. Find Earth would be harder than a friend finding that orange grain of sand.
And that is just referencing the spatial improbability. There is also the temporal improbability. The universe is extremely old, and we are extremely young. Our presence has been but a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. So now take that orange grain of sand, and have your friend try and find it. However, this time the grain of sand is only orange for less than one second during the course of the day. Pretty difficult proposition isn't it?
imagine just one civilization in the milky way that is 1 billion years ahead of us. That's a billion years to catalog every star and planet in the milky way (200 billion or so), find the ones with evidence of life (i.e. search for evidence of atmospheric oxygen, which is caused by life and which earth has had for 3 billion years - considerably longer than the blink of an eye), and then send probes to those planets.