HomoSapien

I was looking at that famous poster, A Pale Blue Dot. It is a picture of Earth taken by Voyager from some far off distance among a a sea of stars.

We look so tiny, so insignificient.

So the questions arises....are we alone?

The Rare Earth Theory says yes. That we are a freak of nature, with the extreme good luck of having exactly the right amount of sun and water and atmosphere to breed complex life forms..like us.

Drake Theory: Given the age of the Universe if there were ET's out there, by now they should have visited us. But where is the hardcore proof except if you buy into the X Files/Art Bell fringe crowd explanations. (We are hybrids of aliens and primates..oooooo...)

Genesis Theory: We are the unique act of creation by God. We may not be his only creation, but for all intents and purpose..we will never know.

No One Knows We Are Here Theory: We are in some boondocks of our own supercluster galaxy. Plus mabye space travel...even faster than the speed of light makes it just not feasible.

Is Anybody There.....?

Cthulhu

"Just you, me, and a lot of floatin', smeggin' rocks."
- Dave Lister

Lord Asriel

My take on this is that any industrialized civilization will eventually exterminate itself via warfare or pollution long before it develops an FTL drive or hyperspace capability (if indeed such things are even feasible). So alien civilisations are rising and falling all the time, but we know nothing of them, and they nothing of us. And this is how it will remain.

Marduk

I'd agree with Lord A.
Unless it turns out that we are some odd alien experiment (The Gods of Eden) or Zoo.

Jayhawker Soule

I lean towards Mayr rathare than Sagan in this <a href="http://www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/Contact/debate/default.html" target="_blank">discussion</a>. My guess is that life is ubiquitous, while intelligent life is astronomically unlikely.

American Agnostic

Ah! Fermi's Paradox!
Maybe they found us long ago and have just decided to leave us alone. Maybe they have some sort of "Prime Directive" like in Star Trek. If they have survived long enough for them to find us then the chances favor them having a lot more common sense than we do as a species! Intelligent life is probibly quite aboundent in the Universe. The question is, does the average civilization survive long enough to get in touch with anyone else? Remember that we have only one example of life and civilization to base or speculation off of. We may be one of the more blood-thirsty civilization out there, but I have a feeling that we fall somewhere in the middle. Don't forget that some civs will be ultra-violent (and hence stand very little chance of lasting long after nukes are discovered) and some may well be very pacifistic.

Jayhawker Soule

Probably? Why do you think so?

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

LeftCoast

Are there other intelligent races out there? I would say that there certainly are. Given the size of the known universe it is a bigger stretch to say that we are unique.

Are there other intelligent races in our own galaxy? That becomes a little muddier but with 100 billion stars in our galaxy, (I don't know how many of those are G-class stars) there are still many opportunities for planets with just the right set of conditions for "life as we know it" to evolve. However, even granting that, as has been pointed out, the development of intelligent life was the result of some rather fortuitous occurrences, but as we have only one data-point (ourselves) we have no way to empirically estimate just how likely or unlikely those occurrences were.

Now, even if you grant that there are other intelligent races in the galaxy, there is still no indication that they would even know that we exist or that they should have visited us. Even if one assumes that there are 100 other intelligent races in our galaxy, given the spatial extents involved it is unlikely that the home star of more than one or two of these races would even be visible from Earth. As it stands now, there is no theoretical basis upon which to postulate the existence of a FTL drive so anyone traveling between the stars would be forced to deal with round-trip travel times that are measured in decades. Given that limitation why they would waste their time coming here is beyond me.

Jayhawker Soule

What percentage of life-bearing planets would expect to produce intelligent life? I suspect that it's vanishingly small.

Jamie_L

Yes, but vanishingly small multiplied by mind-bogglingly huge may result in significant number. It's been shown that, in general, people have no ability whatsoever to estimate the liklihood of something occuring when you are dealing with really, really big numbers.

But really, we don't have any good data on the chance of life-bearing planets.

Personally, I buy into the idea that traveling faster than the speed of light may just be a complete impossibility, no matter how far a species progresses. Given the prospect of thousand and million-year journeys, I wouldn't find it at all surprising that we aren't visited by aliens all the time.

Plus, we've only been around as a noticeable civilization (from interstellar/intergalactic distances) for less than 100 years.

Jamie