Habitable planets easier to find than previously believed

[Vdubchaos]

I hope we don't find other life out there. We can't even take care of ourselves so we would almost certainly fuck up another planet/species.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

I hope we don't find other life out there. We can't even take care of ourselves so we would almost certainly fuck up another planet/species.

Kinda strange how we've seen no evidence yet. I can understand the difficulties in traveling the vast expanses but you'd expect other life to at least beam a laser towards us or sending radio waves?

 

[Paratus]

Kinda strange how we've seen no evidence yet. I can understand the difficulties in traveling the vast expanses but you'd expect other life to at least beam a laser towards us or sending radio waves?

If you aren't familiar with it look up Fermi's paradox and the Drake equation. They go into how to calculate whether we are alone and reasons why we might not have heard anything from another species.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Kinda strange how we've seen no evidence yet. I can understand the difficulties in traveling the vast expanses but you'd expect other life to at least beam a laser towards us or sending radio waves?

Chances are lot of these planets might not be developed to a point where we are.

And some might be well beyond where we are and already killed themselves off hehe

OR they do a good job of hiding as they probably have a long crappy history like we do and know what would happen if they are found by other species/planets.

:biggrin:

 

[Jeff7]

Kinda strange how we've seen no evidence yet. I can understand the difficulties in traveling the vast expanses but you'd expect other life to at least beam a laser towards us or sending radio waves?

Not everyone else might be interested in that kind of behavior.

We're a gregarious species by nature, and some of us have the idea of waving our arms at other planets to get attention, and now neat it would be to establish peaceful relations with someone else....or just plunder their planet for resources or colonization.

Other advanced species might:
- Be more solitary, and not really give a damn about other life in the galaxy. They have no Facebook friends, because they don't care. "If other life is out there, good for it."
- Be more predatory, and only want to attack or consume other planets if it's worthwhile.
- Be really advanced, to the point that ransacking or hurling neutron stars at another star system is done for entertainment. (We can throw rocks at above-ground bee hives, or plant fireworks in underground ones - that's technology that's millions of years ahead of insects.)
- Communicate very differently. We have some languages on Earth, from members of our own species, just several hundred generations ago, which we can't translate. Just decoding the data on a DVD would be difficult, even if you knew ahead of time that the elaborate pattern of tiny pits and grooves on two internal surfaces was some kind of data. As an alien race, how do you decode the checksum data properly? What's does "byte" mean? Have they received any documentation on how to decode MPEG-2 or PDF data?
Our wireless data transmission methods aren't much simpler, assuming you want to fire out a lot of data in a hurry.


So in some of those cases, us trying to draw attention to ourselves might be like a mouse running across an open field while wearing a neon-orange vest with bright yellow letters that read "I want to be your friend!"
Some other species might take notice, but not care. Or they don't know English.
An owl flying overhead will take notice. Even if it can't read, it sure knows where to find an easy breakfast.



The other issue is simply one of power.
If we transmit an omnidirectional signal, and want it to be heard, covering all of Japan with fusion reactors might give us adequate power to do that.
Or we could do a laser, and focus the signal. With Earth's rotation, its revolution about the Sun, the Sun's motion through the galaxy, and the motions of the receiving planet, the laser's swath would move past their planet so quickly that they might record a short blip of a signal, maybe something like this.
"Huh...I wonder what that was?"