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| Personal background |
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| I'm 31, and have been interested in science and computers since I was a kid, and typically read one book a month that is related to one of my areas of interest (genetics, space science, physics, anthropology, primatology, etc). Unfortunately I'm a layman and don't work in a scientific field, and if I had it to do all over again, I'd have majored in some area of science in college, I think. It'd be hard for me to focus on any one science enough to become very good though, I think, since I have so many areas of interest. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I think it is almost certain that extraterrestrial life exist. How much and at what stage of development is another question. Since we're as yet unsure what chain of events brought about life on earth (how does one go from simple carbon compounds to nucleic acids to dna?) it may well be that life as we know it is unique to earth, a freak accident. Or it could be that by chance life has appeared on a select few worlds throughout the universe. Then again, given the abundance of carbon compounds and other elements of life that are known to exist even in comets, it could be that life is quite common, and some form of life exist on as many as, say, .1% of planets in the universe. To me, this seems the most likely scenario, but then there's the question of how much *advanced* life is out there. I don't mean intelligent life, but something beyond single celled organisms, bacteria and the like.
It seems likely to me that the majority of planets that have life will not have much more than microbial life. And of those few that have developed what we would recognize as plants and animals, I'd guess that not many have animals of any real intelligence. I say this because even on Earth, I think we were lucky to have acheived intelligent life -- survival of the fittest seems to tend to spend the majority of resources on worrying about not being eaten, not leaving a lot of resources to develop the intelligence to develop tools, language, mathematics, etc. On the other hand, perhaps it's inevitable -- we're not the only species on the planet that has tool use, some form of language, or even some form of cultural learning.
Assuming that there is other intelligent life in the universe, it seems certain that some will be far more advanced than we can imagine. I like to think that there are type II and even type III civilizations out there, in some of the galaxies that formed the longest ago. But even in our own galaxy it may be that we humans are late bloomers and that there are beings technologically millions of |
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