High time we kicked this about again,
to let newcomers have their shout.

Most enlightened people, given the numbers, would probably come to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that we are the only sentient species in the Galaxy. In the Milky Way, Nature has had 200 billion attempts to get a planet the right distance out from it's star to be in the habitable zone where water remains liquid. Whether life begins there, or is seeded by molecules from space, panspermia, and allowed to evolve, is all down to the game of chance and probability. Throw in a couple of billion galaxies into the cosmic cooking pot as well. Given that the Galaxy/Universe is mostly made out of the same stuff, and the fact that we are here at all, as rare as intelligent life might be, the numbers are in our favour.
They will most likely be too far away to visit, or even contact by regular means, but it doesn't mean that they are not there. Or there could yet be breakthroughs awaiting in science that will allow instantaneous communication without the propagation delay of radio, which allow us to communicate with, and ultimately join, the wider stellar community.
As to what eti's may look like, this will be down to what nature can deliver for their respective evolutionary habitats, and luck. Dinosaurs were here on earth for a very long time but deliverd little that we know about in the realms of advanced scientific intelligence and appeared to have been an evolutionary dead end for the amount of time and resources they took up.
All we have left of them are a few smart birds :)
Time is also a variable, some ETI's may be thousands of years behind us in their development, others may be millions ahead and may have cracked interstellar travel.
Finding out what evolution can ultimately deliver, if a species like us is allowed to develop unfettered for a few million years, is a fascinating concept.

In the cosmos, We are not alone.

G

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*** Those who know, don't speak,
those who speak, don't know ***

It has taken this planet billions of years to evolve our species. Only for the last century or so have we learned enough to send messages to the stars. There's no way of knowing how long we will last. We are using up the planet's resources at a prodigious rate, and it is quite likely that we will become extinct in a few centuries.

There's nothing inevitable about a technological civilisation evolving, I suspect most earth-like planets evolve all sorts of life forms, but nothing like ours. After all if technology was so advantageous to a species, why are we the first to evolve it ?

The few that do and get round to running their own SETI projects probably have no success as these searches miss each other by millions or billions of years.

Good points.
As well as the problems of distance to overcome,
timeframes must match.

it is quite likely that we will become extinct in a few centuries.

How do you figure that?

Global nuclear warfare, famine, global warming, or anything else would be practically incapable of causing the extinction of 6+ billion people, not even accounting for technologies at our disposal which have helped us not only survive but thrive and would continue to do so in fundamental ways.

At the very worst, civilization could be temporarily interrupted on a global scale, but I can't envision one single plausible Earthbound scenario in which humanity goes extinct.

After all if technology was so advantageous to a species, why are we the first to evolve it ?

Technically, we evolved intelligence and that intelligence birthed our use of technology.

But we aren't the first to use technology. Chimpanzees and even Crows use technology in various ways.

The few that do and get round to running their own SETI projects probably have no success as these searches miss each other by millions or billions of years.

I've always felt that since the timescale of the universe is measured in millions of years, not decades or centuries or even millennia, any advanced technological civilization who wishes to inform another potential civilization about its own existence would realize that such an endeavor would take millions of years.

In the cosmos, We are not alone.

G

Well, somebody has to be the first advanced civilization in the galaxy. Maybe we are the first.

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it is quite likely that we will become extinct in a few centuries.

How do you figure that?
[/quote]
It's just my optimistic nature ! <G>

Global nuclear warfare, famine, global warming, or anything else would be practically incapable of causing the extinction of 6+ billion people, not even accounting for technologies at our disposal which have helped us not only survive but thrive and would continue to do so in fundamental ways.

At the very worst, civilization could be temporarily interrupted on a global scale, but I can't envision one single plausible Earthbound scenario in which humanity goes extinct.

After all if technology was so advantageous to a species, why are we the first to evolve it ?

Technically, we evolved intelligence and that intelligence birthed our use of technology.

But we aren't the first to use technology. Chimpanzees and even Crows use technology in various ways.

Yes, but they do not transmit to the stars (no doubt some naturalist will release footage of chimps or crows making their own radio sets !<G>)

The few that do and get round to running their own SETI projects probably have no success as these searches miss each other by millions or billions of years.

I've always felt that since the timescale of the universe is measured in millions of years, not decades or centuries or even millennia, any advanced technological civilization who wishes to inform another potential civilization about its own existence would realize that such an endeavor would take millions of years.

That's a thought, I wonder what version of SETI and BOINC software our descendants will be using when we make contact then ?<G>

Soory, chaps, got the quoting a bit mixed up !

The possibility that we are the first civilization in the galaxy is occasionally suggested. The odds against this seem very steep indeed. Conditions favoring the origin and evolution of life were apparently just as good a billion or more years ago. The history of human thought is marked by repeated instances of our thinking ourselves unique in some way or other. Earth was once reckoned to be at the very center of the universe! When we got over that, some thought we were at the center of the Milky Way galaxy for a while. 'First in the galaxy', or 'Only one in the galaxy' would seem to be the current forms of this tendency. Michael

For life we need: The right sized planet at the right distance. Also an outer large mass planet to shelter from asteroid and comet collisions, enough comet collisions to supply an ocean, and a moon that is tidally locked at the right distance to stabilize our spin. We also need nearly circular orbits to prevent planets from crossing orbits and flinging planets all over the place. There are surely other delicate balances --I don't know how prevalent these conditions might be.

Today, I hear that they have confirmed living organisms a few inches under the Martian soil. I wonder what fossils might be found under the surface--in 200 years Rome has been covered over by perhaps a dozen feet of soil.

That's a thought, I wonder what version of SETI and BOINC software our descendants will be using when we make contact then ?<G>

Unless we are the very first technological civilization in the entire galaxy (or the *only* one interested in communication), then our descendants won't have to use SETI@home; SETI should succeed within our lifetimes, or by the end of this century.

The point is, the burden of contact is on *them* not us. Our SETI effort isn't an effort to signal another civilization, it's an effort to listen for their signal.

The premise of SETI is that we are an infant civilization, and other older civilizations have been carrying on long-term communication efforts before our SETI program ever started.

We only have to *listen* to hear one of these older civilizations, which has presumably been signaling for a very long time.


If that basic premise is wrong then SETI is doomed to failure.

Horizon: We Are the Aliens (part 1of5)

ALIEN ORGANISMS INFECT RAIN IN INDIA

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We choose to go to the moon and to do other things, we choose to go to the moon not because its easy but because its hard. kennedy

...ALIEN ORGANISMS INFECT RAIN IN INDIA

That's an old one long since debunked.

The red organisms are just spores from the roofs of local buildings. No mystery there.

Next?

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

The possibility that we are the first civilization in the galaxy is occasionally suggested. The odds against this seem very steep indeed. Michael

Agreed.
It's all down to the numbers again.
The only first we are of anything
is our own unique species of intelligent biped.
There will be many variations on the theme most likely.
We will not be exacly the same as others,
but very similar to many.
Unfortunately, this is not proveable at the moment :)
G

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*** Those who know, don't speak,
those who speak, don't know ***

Thoughts about human extinction and the survival value of intelligence:

I was watching one of the "what really killed the disosaurs" shows the other day. Not a settled question by any means, it seems. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that they were terminal by the time the asteroid whomped into the Yucatan. Disease, supervulcanism, and climate change are all possible killers, and perhaps interacted to doom the dino-dynasty. They may kill us, as well. Our civilization is fragile and unsustainable in its current form. We're surfing on the expenditure of non-renewing resources. We know for certain that global catastrophe is inevitable. Yellowstone Basin is overdue to blow. An asteroid impact in the future is certain unless we ourselves can stop it. We're ripe for global plague. All this is old news.

My point is that, on a geologic or evolutionary time scale, our technology so far provides our species no survival advantage at all. And it won't unless/until we can sustain ourselves elsewhere--at least elsewhere in the solar system. So that's another factor to be rolled into the equation; the number of technological civilizations that manage to spread out from the home planet in sustainable ways before being hit by some culture-killer. I hope we'll manage to do it.

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"Good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living, that's something else." (Han Solo)

Does our technology really provide us with no measures whatever, against the threats you mention? Take asteroids impacts. We already have a rudimentary system for detecting some dangerous asteroids. Given a long enough warning period we could very possibly muster a defense based on available rockets and nuclear explosives. Some of the current thinking seems to be that it would be better to explode something near an asteroid, at the proper position to nudge it into an Earth-missing path, rather than try to shatter it. If we can contemplate such a plan at our primitive stage of development, it's probably a safe bet that more advanced civilizations in space have this problem solved. Michael

Many resources are renewable. The sun dumps a huge amount of energy each day on the earth. breeder reactors provide a pregnantly infinite amount of a fissionable energy source.

Therefore you will be able to have crops and use energy wisely.

We will still be at the mercy of massive volcanoes and earthquakes but the future is not totally bleak.

Moving our entire population to another hospitable world may never be feasible perhaps a small contingent could populate such a world when we find one and advance our technology a few thousand years.

There are over 6 billion of us able to exploit our environments in a way that no other organism on Earth ever has. We are also able to communicate instantly throughout the face of the entire planet and travel from one end of the world to the other at speeds faster than any animal in Earth's history.

Our technology and the unbelievably vast wealth of information and knowledge our civilization has accumulated is spread out across the entire planet, from the most densely concentrated urban areas to the most remote rural outposts.

Any catastrophe capable of destroying our current civilization and social structures, whether it's global nuclear warfare, some super volcano underneath Yellowstone, a Dinosaur-type asteroid impact...None of these is capable of completely exterminating *all* 6 billion+ people or every trace of the technology and knowledge I just mentioned.

....and the human race has the capability to acquire some foreknowledge of each of these catastrophes, whether they are preventable or not.


If you play out *ANY* of these disasters in your mind and let them run their logical course, it's impossible to imagine any plausible scenario in which one of them leads to the extinction of humanity.


Despite what some of the loudest Chicken Littles out there might say (ie; "We're killing the planet"), the ONLY major disasters capable of literally exterminating the entire human species are cosmic phenomena like gamma ray bursts, nearby supernovae, etc....


Luckily these are events which are few and far between on the scale of the galaxy, and by the time Earth's civilization *does* have to deal with something like that (possibly millions and millions of years in the future), I'm fairly confident we will have already colonized every world that *can* be colonized in our immediate vicinity.

I didn't mean to sound like a Chicken Little, and hope I didn't. My point was more of the academic kind. Our technology--at the high end--is certainly remarkable, but I fear we over-estimate whatever survival advantage it gives us, as a species, at this point it time. A self-sustaining colony on at least one other world would vastly improve our odds, I think. The odds of evacuating earth to Mars or Europa apprach zero with any technology we can imagine, of course. I'm talking strictly about survival of the species.

We are, in geological terms, on the brink of catastrophy. But "on the brink" means what, in geologic terms? A thousand years? Five thousand?

Taurus, I hope you're right. But remember that most of the people on this planet are a very long way from the "high end" of our technology. One CD can contain enough information to rebuild civilization from scratch, I suppose. But if the person holding the CD can't access it...well....it's junk. Yes? Without a power grid, and the infrastructure that gets food to our cities, we're back in the dark ages inside of a week. I dont' suggest this is about to happen, but I do think we should be concerned and realistic about how vulnerable we are.

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"Good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living, that's something else." (Han Solo)