Rant about Aliens...

its about statistics. Most , almost all are uninhabitable. But their number is huge. I mean if 1 in 100.000 is habitable, but their are trillions of them.
For me we are not alone. But they are SO FAR. That communication is not possible. Even at speed of light. Add to it ever increasing expansions of universe, not only increasing but also increasing speed. For me we go into a dark night.
 
Phishfry said:
That sounds exaggerated. I see catalogues with 500,000,000+ stars
So billions might not be out of the question.
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The dimension that is so often ignored in making these kinds of estimates of the number of habitable planets is time. Consider the 4.5 billion year old age of the earth. For most of that time, the planet has not had an ecosystem that could support a human agricultural production as we know it, which is the foundation of our modern civilisation. If you landed your spaceship on the earth any time before the last 5 million years, would humans have been able to settle it? Perhaps one could argue we would be able to establish agriculture in the cenozoic, but is it realistic to think we could do so earlier than that? If we limit it to the cenozoic, that's 100 million out of the 4.5 billion year age of the earth when humans could conceivably settle here, which is only the last 2% of the earth's lifespan. If we take a more realistic estimate and say that we might conceivably be able to establish agriculture if we landed on earth some time within the last 10 million years, that is a window that is just 0.2% of the earth's lifespan.

This means that if we did develop a technology that made it possible for us to travel to other star systems, we would have to arrive there at just the right small period of time in those planets lifetimes (if their evolution followed a similar pattern to earth), to be able to settle them to establish a viable human culture. Landing on earth as it was, 1 billion or more years ago, ie during 3/4 of it's history, likely wouldn't have helped you very much; especially in the first approx. 2 billion years when was no oxygen in the atmosphere.
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The Drake equation states:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

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Each of the terms in the equation become progressively smaller as we read towards the right. While fp and ne may be relatively large numbers, and perhaps even fi, if we then consider the appearance of Homo Sapiens, perhaps 300000 years ago, as the fraction of the lifespan of the earth that has sustained intelligent life, we are talking about a time window that is 0.006% of the earth's 4.5 billion year lifespan. So I think at any one point in time, the value of fi is likely to be small. Similarly if we consider the time since the development of radio astronomy, which is less than the last 100 years, then we are talking about a truly tiny time window as a proportion of the age of the earth. Of course we don't know if a technological civilisation elsewhere might survive for 1000 or 100000 or 10 million years, but the evidence we have from earth is that a mass extinction is currently underway and hence the lifespan of technological civilisations may be rather small before they self-destruct, if our experience here on earth is representative of other planets. So the solution value of N may turn out to be a rather small number, at any given point in time.

There may well have been hundreds or even thousands of technological civilisations in existence in the milky way galaxy during the last 14 billlion years of its existence, but the numbers of them co-existing at any one point in time may be rather small.
 
penguinslayer said:
Reminds me of the Kirok episode of Star Trek, "The Paradise Sydrome."
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That's a good episode, but I was thinking about something different.

What happens to birds after they manage to migrate to an island where there isn't any predators? Eventually some of them give up on flying, because it they don't have to do so anymore, and they can then use the calories they would have spent on flying towards something else, like reproducing. Maybe the same thing might happen to people forced to spend thousands of generations in a slower than light star ship. The human brain consumes roughly one forth of all the calories a person eats, so maybe having smaller brains and being less intelligent might be a good survival strategy under such circumstances.
 
i see it every day, my labrador dog is the result of 1.300 years of selectioned breeding. It has flat ears why ? The absence of aggression leads at the same time to flat ears. It barks , why in order to communicate with humans. It even looks into your eyes.
Grey wolves , the grant parents of all dogs, don't do these things...
 
Maturin said:
The vast majority of all planets is uninhabitable just because of the very narrow conditions needed to become inhabitable:
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Also, maybe there needs to be mineral ore near the surface of the crust for the inhabitants of said planet to experience first a bronze age, and then later on an iron age. Earth has a lot of metallic deposits near its surface, most likely due to the big whack which formed our Moon. However, if that big whack never happened, then their might not be enough easily available minerals for us to escape the agricultural age. Maybe the galaxy is full of intelligent species, but they are stuck at farming with stone plows, because they cannot manage to make a plow out of bronze or iron. Also, what if someone is stuck on a planet without much coal, that would also make it difficult to produce steel.
 
blackbird9 said:
The idea that you'll be able to jump in a little x-wing fighter and fly off to the dagoba system is pure fantasy
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I agree, very highly improbable, but yet not absolutely impossible. My guess is that faster than light travel is probably impossible, but if we can someday reach 99.9% the speed of light, then we might be able to reach a few stars within the span of a human lifetime. However, most likely we won't reach ninety nine percent within the next century.
 
I think I read somewhere that dogs with floppy ears are that way for two reasons. Firstly, wolf pups have floppy ears and it's a sign of keeping themselves immature, a sign on neotony, the retaining of infantile character traits.
I also think I've read that with water dogs it aids in keeping water out of their ears. I might be wrong about both of these. Wolves also bark though it is something that gets developed more in many dogs--such as the ones that bark when following a scent. But barking does seem to be something that comes from wolves and/or jackels. I've not been into dogs for many years, but I believe that they're broadly divided--not, as Lorenz said, into wolf and jacket but into different types of wolves. But all this is from stuff I read in the 80's so i could be wrong and there is almost certainly more recent information.
 
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