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Any planet harboring intelligent life would likely be several hundreds (like this one) if not thousands or millions of light years away, making any contact impo
by spcoll 12y ago
Any planet harboring intelligent life would likely be several hundreds (like this one) if not thousands or millions of light years away, making any contact impossible at human scale. Even with this relatively close example of a possibly habitable planet, communications would take 1000 years to go back and forth.
As for actual contact... many earth civilizations would rise and fall before a spaceship going at even 2% of the speed of light could reach such a planet.
- rhizome 12y agoWell sure, that's the sci-fi part...
- lugg 12y agoUs humans, so self centered. What you say doesn't mean we can't send a probe that simply says hey what's up and you're not alone but probably are by the time you read this.
- camillomiller 12y agoThat's what we did, more or less, with the voyager
- joe_the_user 12y agoYou're making the mistake of confusing totally unknown with very unlikely. We simply do not know enough to prognosticate one way or the other. Perhaps every habitable planet develops life but only our plant has developed intelligent life. Perhaps only our planet among all the planet in the universe has life. Perhaps every planet develops civilization life and all such civilizations destroy themselves within about 10,000 years, leaving only hunter-killer robots. In any case, interstellar space is so vast we couldn't practically other civilizations even if they turned out to be quite common in other solar systems.
- V-2 12y agoThere's also the possibility that not all intelligent life goes on to develop high tech civilization.
- Houshalter 12y agoAnything could be "The Great Filter". The best candidates for Great Filters are things which took a long time to happen on Earth (suggesting it may be a fluke or statistically rare event.) Conversely things that happen quickly, or things that independently happened multiple times suggest they aren't rare or unlikely events. On Earth, high tech civilization appeared relatively shortly after humans evolved. Agriculture was independently invented half a dozen times in different places, and cities and civilization at least twice in the new and old world. We were also moving in the direction of science and technology even before we discovered coal power so the "other planets don't have fossil fuels" doesn't seem like a great candidate either.
- jeremyjh 12y agoNo, our sample size of one tells us nothing due to selection bias - we could not even ask this question without having already achieved high tech. Edit: I agree we do know that human brings on earth are likely to invent agriculture.
- V-2 12y agoIt may depend on the availability on various natural resources, such as big (domesticable) animals, as hypothesized by Jared Diamond in "Guns, Germs and Steel". This is why native Australians were pretty much stuck in stone age era for thousands of years. They might have never developed beyond that level. Not because they're inferior, but because they had no means to start an economy capable of accumulating resources. One could easily imagine an Earth where the only continent is Australia (surrounded by oceans) and humans - even biologically identical to us - remain hunter-gatherers for eternity.
- joe_the_user 12y agoYes, But I show add there is even a view with no "Great Filter" at all. That is the claim that life on the Earth has developed with a steady, linear increase in log-complexity whose zero-point is fairly close to the big-bang. And thus the human species developing now is developing about as early as it could have, as quickly as it could have and so there's no surprise that no civilizations earlier than us elsewhere exist even if we plausibly expect these civilization to be appearing now.