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I think Enrico Fermi had it right. We should have seen something by now. It makes us rare and special.
by therealbilly 6y ago
I think Enrico Fermi had it right. We should have seen something by now. It makes us rare and special.
- meowface 6y agoI sometimes wonder about the odds of the most chilling questions. What are the chances we're the only intelligent life currently in existence? ("We" including other primates, dolphins, etc.) The only intelligent life to have ever existed? The only intelligent life to have ever existed and that will ever exist? Even the first and last instance of any kind of life at all? For a long time, I thought surely these probabilities must basically be zero, due to the sheer amount of dice that can be rolled (tons of space + tons of time), but after hearing a lot of smart people talk about it, I think all of these things do carry a non-zero possibility. Of course, we'll probably never know, though. There could be some galaxy clusters teeming with life and visible structures but they could be so incredibly far away from us that they basically don't exist from our perspective, and vice versa.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoI'm not so sure. I recall seeing calculations that show that, unless an intelligent species was deliberately sending out very high energy, very well targeted signals, it's really unlikely we'd detect them.
- boltzmann_brain 6y agoExcuse me, I may be dumb, but I never understood this. Given the sheer size of the universe, and accepting the fact that we cannot overcome speed of light, wouldn't it be more plausible that indeed, the universe is teeming with life, but everything is so far away that the chances of two civilizations ever making contact is miniscule. Even the light we see in our sky is millions or billions of light years old, so it's quite likely the "observation window" to spot somebody out there is just too damn small.