Oops, I must have stumbled onto the wrong message board. Where I'm from, PCRPG, intelligent conversations don't exist.
Just because it's impossible to find ET NOW doesnt mean that it wont be possible LATER. As you know, computer processing power doubles every 18 months, making it possible to search more at one time.
Microprocessor speed increases as a result of an increase in microtechnology ventures by large corporations. So unless you're referring to SETI, this point is kind of moot, since the bottleneck lies in collecting data, not processing it.
Just because Alpha Cent. is 4.5 lightyears away doesnt mean that ET doesnt exist.
I wasn't using distance as a argument against the existence. I was using distance as a argument against possible location and communication.
In our galaxy alone, there is a cluster of multi-billions of stars. Our galaxy is part of a small globular cluster filled with hundreds of other galaxies, and our cluster is part of a bigger cluster of clusters, and then the ever-expanding universe. Thats more stars that you could ever hope to count. In all of those stars, how can you say that only one was suitable to host a planet containing the ONLY sentient life-forms?
Here we go. Earth is an unbelievably rare combination of unbelievably rare things. Allow me to introduce you to the four conditions a planet must have for sustaining any kind of life at all.
- a constant and relatively mild temperature
- an abundance of water
- a sufficient quantity of the gases, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, necessary to sustain life
- an atmosphere of sufficient thickness to protect living things from a star's ultraviolet radiation
There four conditions exist in such a perfectly balanced and intricate combination that it's basically impossible to be duplicated an any planet either here or in a billion light-year radius of us. Earth hangs the perfect distance away from a small star, with a perfect axis and period of rotation with the perfect amount of necessary gases in the perfect atmosphere. Earth has the perfect mass for the gravitational field to hold gases in the aforementioned perfect atmosphere. Earth's perfect magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation and foreign particles. You may think I'm overstressing the fragility and perfection of our planet, but I haven't even scratched the surface. If you had any idea how tentative and ridiculous even our own existence is, you'd know that any chance of duplication, even with billions of planets, is next to nothing.
Keep in mind: that whole spiel was about life in general. Those are the odds of even the most basic prokaryotic organism existing elsewhere. The idea of evolved,
sentient creatures like ourselves is basically laughable and ludicrous.
Dont forget, we did have 900 years of scientific regressing during the Midieval Period......
Nine hundred years is the downstroke of a blink of an eye. Nine hundred years is a nanosecond.
The speed at which light moves prevents us from seeing such things for a very long time, so unless the other theoretical civ's make a faster-than-light speed mode of transportation it would be very very difficult for us to be seeing them at this point in our history, considering the rate of the galaxy/univers expansion and the speed of light.
It is absolutely impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light. Period. Not unlikely; totally against and contradictory to the laws of physics.
I have heard talk of people trying to go the speed of light, using a HUGE "parashoot", it would me made of an ultra light fabric and would deploy in space. It would take a year to speed up, what makes it fast is the LIGHT bouncing off it, actually pushing this ship though space gaining speed all the time, thats just one idea, humans have not made anything space dinamic enought to travel that speed in a straight line.
Photons do not have mass, so they can't push anything; be it an atom or a starship.
considering that the end of the space is estimated to be about 85 BILLION light years away and expanding.
I hope that by "estimate" you mean a wild guess, since there's no way anyone could have any possible idea as to the size of our universe.