We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves.

And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out.

The issue is that, for it to have any hope of ever visiting or communicating with us the intelligent life would have to be in our own galaxy. Which is a lot less likely (going down from billions of billions to just billions of stars.)

Even then the task is far from trivial. But I think it's a certainty that if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us.

Also based purely on what we know about life on earth intelligent life which is capable of developing technology is exceedingly rare when compared to life in general. It's not necessarily required that any planet which gives rise to life ever eventually develops intelligent life. If not for the extinction of the dinosaurs we'd never exist. So personally I tend to think it's most likely there are other planets with life in the Milky Way, but possibly none with intelligent life. And even less likely for it to be more advanced than us.

We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them.

And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers.

No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc.

The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.)

So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by.

Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely.

But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place.

The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves.

[1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.

I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology.

If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets.

No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.

Unless there's no one.

The rest of us would never know and just go on wondering "where is everybody".

The problem with the assumption is that our sample-size, as far as our species is concerned, is one. The very concept of society may not exist for an alien that is a single collective intelligence or for one that has simply developed a very advanced set of instinctual responses without higher-level thought.

Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic?

> if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us.

More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.

Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our affection are those that are extremely close to us on the evolutionary scale. This wouldn't be the case with a civilization advanced enough to visit. Not even close.

If someone somewhere discovered a new breed of cockroach, would you care?

Your examples involve creatures that we already know about and have interacted with and "integrated" into our lives (one way or another).

But I suppose the counter-example is "it depends who finds us" -- if it's an intergalactic scientific exploration team of aliens, they'll probably be as nice as can be. If it's an intergalactic mining company, maybe not so much.

The equivalent here would be the contrast between a scientific expedition to explore new species in the Amazon Rainforest (i.e. people who would be benign and take an interest in new species) vs. a bulldozing crew out to find more land in those same rainforests ("Oh look, a bird. Ok boys chop down that tree").

As human as it is, most exploration has been grounded in financial and egotistical needs, not scientific exploration. Maybe the civilization is just as curious as we would be and thus would come for selfless reasons, but that's a pretty big assumption.

At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach.

There's not much difference between one species and another here but we still study all of them in great detail.

Don't mistake your lack of intellectual curiosity about a certain subject as being a trait shared by everyone else. I don't care about football but that doesn't mean nobody else does.

Similarly, as I said already, if you're going to go cruising about the galaxy, you're going to put people on that ship who are interested in what they're going to find. Otherwise there's no point.

See my response to the other guy who brought up a similar analogy.

Society, as a whole, probably doesn't care about a new cockroach species. But there is someone who does, just on Earth.

Similarly, among any civ that has the basic biological impulses required to become an interstellar civ, there are going to be people who want to branch out on their own, who want to study something on their own, who want to be the first to contact something new. It's all those millions of edge-case members that will do the amazing stuff.

If, on the other hand, they didn't respect other life not as advanced as them, why would their actions be any different than that of humanity for thousands of years when dealing with less intelligent life forms?

Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life of some form. How interested are you in going there and study that life or even just check out what life there is? None? Right. That is the whole point of the article. You already know there is life there, it is not unique. Why bother?

Your are making the exact mistake the author cautions against. We think we are important, most likely we are a dime a dozen in the vastness of the galaxy.

The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship.

Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere.

On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so.

Your argument is extremely, extremely weak. As I said, it's obvious, if aliens were cruising around the universe the whole purpose of it would be to find other intelligent life and inhabitable planets and interesting stuff. If we were doing it, that would obviously be our purpose, there's no reason to think that wouldn't be the purpose of any other intelligent life.

No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.

So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.

But has every single pond been studied no matter its size. Do people rush to study a new discovered pond 5 meters in diameter? Is it that novel that people will rush to it? No, because there are millions of ponds just like it. That is who we are, a little pond maybe 1 meter in diameter (probably should call it a puddle), nothing extraordinary about it. There are a millions of other 1 meter ponds/puddles around the world, why would our pond/puddle be singled out? What is so special about our tiny pond/puddle? That is the point of the article. You are not thinking big enough.

You insist we're nothing special, there's no reason to believe that.

If that were the case and there's human like intelligent life all over the place in the galaxy then we should start picking up their signals pretty soon.

Even more so, we should have picked some up already (because certainly some of them should have been ahead of us.) But we haven't found anything. We are quite possibly alone in the Milky Way in terms of intelligent life, and if we aren't, the advanced aliens are very far away indeed.

The original author went to great length to justify his arguments, I think a lot of his are flawed, but they are at least fully thought out/hashed. You cant play this thought experiment game without playing by the same rules...

You believe intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, also you believe inter galactic distances are so vast that even with mature FTL travel those regions will remain inaccessible. I dont really see a strong justification for the second postulate, the first i am on the fence about

Of course, there's no reason to assume that life on different planets is more diverse than different ponds, but it seems more likely.

Your premise is invalid.

The whole point is that we are probably average, just like the life in the pond is probably average, which is the reason nobody will put us on their priority list.

Remember, civilizations are composed of billions of beings. You only need one being to decide to come study this pond, or otherwise enforce a rule against anyone doing it.

But on the whole, not a viable collection of answers to the Fermi Paradox, even with the usual qualification that it is most likely a machine phase civilization that would come knocking rather than its biological ancestors. All it takes is one faction within one species to decide on self-replicating probes that can recreate its own biosphere at each stopover, and the whole galaxy will be visited in a time that is very short compared to its lifespan.

That species will be us unless the Great Filter makes itself known sometime within the next century or two; I haven't seen any compelling suggestions as to what it might be at this point, however.

Further, the article fails to consider the value of data, which I think is the most likely trade good for any sort of interstellar commerce. I think one could make good information-theoretic and game theory arguments as to why you really have to send an intelligent data extractor/compiler of some sort to a very remote source in order to maximize the rate at which you can obtain the data that's most valuable to you.

This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question.

Personally I think the real reason we'll never meet aliens is that such travel is physically impossible.

No it doesn't. The hypothetical alien race remains hypothetical throughout the argument. Not so with the Ontological Proof.

1) the idea that God exists

2) the idea that aliens will never come visit us

Both start their proof with an assertion that contains within its concept the very conclusion that they are trying to prove.

Both attempt to leverage an opinion that is personally held ("I think God is perfect", "I think alien science will obviate the need to visit") into an objective statement that applies universally ("God exists","aliens will never come visit").

The biggest impediment in my mind to alien contact is time. Intelligent life could have evolved any time in the past 13 billion years or any time in the next googol years. The probability that we would cross temporal paths in our few thousand years of viable existence seems low.

From our perspective 'Alien life' will be either the faintest traces of ancient ruins or pond scum.

First, go read Accelerando by Charles Stross:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

And for the bits you don't understand, you can also check out the woefully incomplete but still helpful technical companion:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companio...

Then you'll want to read up in general on molecular nanotechnology. K. Eric Drexler has updated Engines of Creation, and its also free online:

http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503

So if we get visited by "aliens" there's an even chance it will be some runaway Von Neumann replicator seeds shot out from a nearby solar system, bent on converting our entire solar system to computronium. Or if we're lucky, some relatively benevolent replicator seeds merely intent on cataloging all the myriad of life that has arisen around the galaxy without actually intending to destroy said life.

There is just about zero chance than any recognizably biological (I prefer the term "squishy") life coming to visit us, just because sending any sizable chunk of matter across interstellar distances at any reasonable speed so so damn expensive, even for Kardashev type 2 civilizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Hell, thousands of years wouldn't even feel like a long time for human-built computers.

Remember though that we've already seen that people in rich nations are not driven to reproduce and expand like bunnies. Is there some evolutionary pressure on you that drives you fuck woman and have children with them? Is the impulse so strong that you cannot help yourself? We can have as much sex as we want, but without the children because of birth control. Why would it be any different for Aliens?

It may be true for many, even most. But you would need to expand it to all. Otherwise those who do want to reproduce and spread will continue to do it.

Also, we may be in a lull. There may be some gene that either makes people not want to reproduce, or makes people really want to reproduce. That gene is about to experience a whole boatload of selective pressure.

I have no problem believing the equivalent of the Daleks or the Ori might one day demonstrate a variant of the replicator hypothesis at our expense.

Why must they have a coherent logical basis for all their behavior? We certainly don't.

What if one of those evolve to inteligence on a low gravity planet. It would be much easier to travel through space.

Curiosity more than anything is what drives our need to know. I think that's what would drive such visitors. In fact, because they would be more technologically advanced and would likely have solved resource problems, etc., they would naturally have time to spend exploring and answering questions.

Finally, we can assume such explorers are more advanced than we, but not necessarily by orders of magnitude. I think people have a tendancy to attribute god-like qualities to them because they have solved some problems that we have not.

But, the idea of splitting an atom was outlandish until a handful of dudes, inspired by another dude's theory did it in a relatively short span. Similar with other breakthroughs. At any given time, a single discovery can advance our knowledge far beyond what we thought possible, and even moreso with the accelerating pace of technology.

And, BTW, many of our own "resource problems" are completely solvable and should not exist. For instance, we have an obesity problem in the U.S. while millions starve elsewhere (and in the U.S.). It seems that our biggest obstacles are a product of human nature. If anything, an alien species' appearance might be indicative of an advancement in philosophy or organizational behavior (ex. hive mentality vs. individual) moreso than a far superior intelligence.

We can't speculate on the motives of aliens at all. Look at how hard it is to discern the motives of other humans, and now tell me you're going to discern the motives of something biologically completely unlike us? You can't assume they're rational motives either. Why should aliens be incapable of something like religion, egotism, mass delusion, or hedonic desires?

As far as the feasibility of star travel: it's hard, but not impossible. The thing that makes it hard really isn't the propulsion problem. You can go to the stars using technology contemporary with the Beatles white album:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...

A thermonuclear Orion could achieve around 10% the speed of light... according to figures computed using 60s assumptions of vehicle mass. With very lightweight materials and more efficient thermonuclear charges higher fractions are certainly achievable. (Though the acceleration would be rough!)

What you can't do with 60s-70s tech is survive the trip. The biological, structural, psychological, and engineering robustness challenges outweigh the challenge of propelling yourself at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. But those are all things that will yield to incremental progress.

(BTW: the same is true for Mars. The Apollo rig could have, with very minor modifications, sent astronauts to Mars. They would have been dead when they got there. The life support tech to keep a human in a can alive that long did not exist. Propulsion isn't the hardest problem.)

The fact is that we simply don't know. We don't even know if there is other complex life in our galaxy, let alone what it might be capable of or what it might do.

I think the question would be if irrationality, egoism, delusion, and hedonism allows (or prevents) a species to advanced to FTL travel.

They might also have an idea that the only life that should exist in this universe is theirs. Or they might believe that connecting with all other sentient beings is a primary goal in existence. Or they might be incredibly altruistic and want to help and benefit all others.

Though the author's other points are all valid... There is no reason to invade this planet for its resources when a few asteroids in their own solar system contains everything they need.

Another frequent mistake is that ET would travel direct from home to earth. As far as we know FTL is impossible. So it makes better sense to travel by small hops from one solar system to the next one. It could be more a ant like colonization process. This would imply that ET visiting earth would irst build one or more bases in our solar system and visit earth from there.

http://www.olivenri.com/conquer_space_files/Conquer_space.pd...

which lays out just how vast outer space is, and how time (with travel being strictly limited by the speed of light) as much as distance limits the feasibility of voyages between stars, especially back-and-forth voyages between stars.

A blogger on a planetarium website

http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/why-we-will-never-conquer-s...

and the maker of a Prezi based on Clarke's essay

http://prezi.com/uxc2owcv5ekp/well-never-conquer-space/

both emphasize that traveling to a nearby star is already a huge task.

The probable density in the universe of intelligent living things (the "aliens" of the title of the submitted blog post) among all the many stars is low. All those aliens run into the same hard physical laws we run into if they attempt to make a voyage to another star. To the most relevant correct approximation, our probability of meeting interstellar voyagers is even lower than our probability of being interstellar voyagers, and our probability of being interstellar voyagers during the lifetime of anyone now reading Hacker News is nil. Remember, we have not even visited Mars, not even on the proposed one-way trip,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390730

and humankind has delayed in traveling to Mars far beyond my imagining (I thought that the trip would be made in 1980s, and even dreamed of being on the landing crew) because humankind has higher priorities and better claims on our shared resources. So the submitted blog post title is correct, even if you quibble about the blogger's reasoning (as I do). We won't meet the aliens, because the aliens won't make a trip here before we all die.

Every issue related to the existence of aliens must answer that paradox first. My favorite interpretation: we are the most advanced civilization in the galaxy.

"Why would they want to visit us?" - this can have trivial answers: the same reasons why we study ants today.

There could simply be a technological ceiling. Once civilization reaches the ceiling, it hits it's head on the ceiling, and falls down the stairs either destroying itself or at very least losing most the progress.

Of all the implausible ideas in sci fi movies and books, the one which always rubbed me most wrong is not mentioned: How military encounters would play out. Consider:

Most naval battles in space are modeled after 2 dimensional naval war fare. Not only is space 3D, but there is no reason to suppose technology geared around combating vessels floating in water has any relevance to space combat.

However, the most important variable determining the outcome of first encounters with (quite possibly) hostile alien races has nothing to do with the military gear and tactics. It has to do with relative technology level. Greg Bear's "Anvil of the Stars" which looks at it from this angle and here are some notes I distilled:

In most sci fi movies and books, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought the most interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:

1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.

2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.

3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.

The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.

* The aliens who possess the technological ability to reach Earth are the ones who built it and evolved alongside it. Who's to say they didn't take it by force?

* FTL is something that must be developed through technology. (i.e. discounting the possibility of naturally occurring wormholes)

* The aliens have no inherent desire for exploration

Yes, I've watched too much Sci-fi :)

a) Aliens who can get across space to us would be far in advance of us in all dimensions of technology.

b) They would also be far smarter than us because technological evolution would act much more than biological and therefore give them machine-brain interfaces.

c) With their great science they would be able to know what we're like (so far below them) and have no need to come here.

except as far as I can see, c) is overruled by b)

If aliens have got so far by technological evolution and use machines to augument their bodies and minds, they're not really that far in advance of us - they just have better tools. They wouldn't see us in that case as insects - rather as cripples who just need a wheelchair. If they used their science to augument our bodies and minds in the same way as they do with their own, we'd be perfectly able to have conversations with them.

Consider the question of whether there is any alternative biochemical basis for life. It is quite likely that even an alien super-intelligence finds the question impossible. Sure, it can invent synthetic biologys that are variations on its own biochemistry, but is there anything genuinely different out there? Given the size of chemical space it is probably easier to travel ten thousand light years to the nearest planet with life on it and look to see if its basis is the same or different.

>there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers.

There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc). Very smart people have looked at the Drake equation and it yields a very wide range of values [1].

>Christopher Columbus first landing on North America (not a good event for native Americans)

The main reason Europeans were able to take over America was disease. The Aztec effort to kick out the Spanish was hampered by smallpox [2], and colonization of North America had to wait for over a century before the native population was sufficiently depleted by disease to stop offering resistance. [3] Needless to say, disease worked unintentionally and because both sides were the same species.

> So, screw it, all movie alien races invented artificial gravity.

Or, you know, maybe they built ships with rotating crew habitats that simulate gravity by centrifugal force. (I belive 2001 does a pretty good job of showing the concept.)

> If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", we're a 2 which is not comparatively far ahead of say, poodles - who are probably at a 1.

First off, poodles are at a zero. Second, if 10% of world GDP was dedicated to building an interstellar, multi-generation ark, we pretty much have the technology to do it right now. The technological problem is to reduce the cost to the point where the political will to do it can be summoned (probably around 0.01% of GDP).

>Maybe they want to trade with us. Well, yeah, right. If you've gotten this far it's obvious we have no tech that would interest them.

[4]

>How many years before we have a brain interface to Google? You'd know everything.

We already have Google in our pockets. But instantly finding any quote by Darwin doesn't mean I understand the theory of evolution.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Range_of_values

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuitl%C3%A1huac

[3] See timeline in http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

If anything, your post is yet another manifestation of this. It simply doesn't matter what happened to native americans, when the entire Columbus story does not apply.

And what do your comments about googles in pockets and drake equation have to do with anything? Do you have anything to say about actual point the OP is making?

Ugh...

We are talking about the vastness of an entire GALAXY and a level of technological advancement that comes with consequences that no one can even begin to imagine let alone predict. The entirety of human science fiction doesn't even scratch the surface as to what is possible (and due to our own biases and the need to entertain a television audience/readership is probably far more tame and boring than what is really out there) at those levels.

You're talking about quantum limits but you have to realize, to make the vast majority of science fiction watchable/readable, you have to almost entirely throw out our knowledge of modern physics. For example, every real world attempt at theorizing FTL travel has lead either to needing ridiculous amounts of energy (equivalent to the mass of Jupiter for the original Alcubierre drive which would be about a billion billion billion kilograms each of matter and antimatter) or particles with properties which we have NEVER come close to seeing (and by never, I mean not a shred of experimental evidence or even a suggestion that it exists outside of a theoretical framework). If an alien race has FTL, it's knowledge of the universe is well above ours and any attempts we can make to predict the limits of their technology is useless. For all we know, FTL travel might be as difficult as building your own solar system from scratch.

In order for us to have an alien visit that is even close to any imagined encounter in science fiction, many things that we can't speculate on would have to work out. We're not talking one black swan, we're talking about an unknowable number of factors and events that would have to work out just right.

It's might be possible (we don't even know if FTL is possible), just like it might be possible for wild pigs to evolve to fly without any artificial intervention in a few thousand years, but it's so unlikely that it's worth putting into the "Just not going to happen pile," all the while working to prove yourself wrong :)

Exactly. Few of the points the OP makes have anything to do with his main argument, and most of them are illogical in some way.

I don't see how you can make a valid point when your facts and supporting arguments are wrong. The article itself mentions Columbus, Google and (implicitly) the Drake equation. The "main point" that you mention - "we think too small" - is either tautological or self-defeating, depending on interpretation. If this was all there was to the article, it might well have consisted of that single phrase instead.

Throwaway points as to how likely it is for advanced aliens to even exist and whether they might be willing to trade with us? He's attempting to refute all possible motivations that aliens might have to communicate with us.

I don't think anyone disputes that any of those things on the list are "possible," just the odds stacking up in our favor.

Article: Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers.

Zeteo: There's no obstacle to working with large numbers once you understand powers and logarithms (i.e. pre-calc).

Me: The article said "fully understand" and "humans". Some scientists may indeed easily work with aspects of large number. Many people are lost. I'd say you're wrong but it's a disagreement on arguable, hardly settled points. Calling your disagreement with the author a "misconception" on the author's part is implying a hard factual accuracy on your side - and here you are both wrong and disingenuous.

The rest of your post is about like this.

Heck, there might be cloud-squid in Jupiter we're not even aware of who make better conversationalists than us. The aliens might even show up after a thousand year trip and ignore the Earth entirely.

But let's forget that. Let's grant that in the future we'll be able to quadruple the human lifespan to 480 years. For the sake of argument, I'll even grant that manned interstellar flight at 0.1c is achievable. At this rate, it will still take most of our very long lifespans to reach the three nearest systems that are candidates for habitable exoplants. You'll still need a generation ship unless you want a colony of geriatrics. (Also, once you do get there, you're very likely to find that the potentially habitable exoplanets turn out not live up to that potential in much the same way the potentially habitable Venus turned out not to, so you'll spend the rest of your extended lifespan moving on to the next system.)

But yeah, that is one possibility.

You... need to work on that.

There are plenty of stars within 14 light years. https://www.google.ca/search?client=ubuntu&hs=HNq&ch...

If you took 100,000 years that would be a speed of 0.00014c. That is pretty pessimistic - we have put objects into space that are travelling away from earth faster than that already! (Yada yada accleration :).)

At 0.1c you can go 14 lightyears in 140 years. There are stars closer than this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars#Map_of_ne...

Citation needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 travels now at 17 km/s which is cca 6e-5 of c, twice slower than your 1.4e-4. However the bigger the object, the inertia is bigger too, so it is harder to speed up the bigger things, especially anything that would sustain life long enough for more generations. Then don't forget, as much as you speed up something, you have to speed it down too and you need the same amount of energy for that.

70 km/s. I personally wouldn't want to take that specific trip, but regardless :)

Inertia is a much smaller problem than subjecting humans to acceleration :) You can't afford to accelerate fast anyway. Thankfully spacecraft speed up and slow down quadratically with respect to acceleration.

To get to a speed of 0.00014c if you were accelerating at 9.8m/s^2 ("Earth gravity") you would need to wait...

https://www.google.ca/search?client=ubuntu&hs=2dC&ch...

1 hour and 15 minutes to reach top speed. (The same to slow down (ignoring relativistic effects.)) This is a drop in the bucket vs. 100,000 years, or a human lifetime :)

By studying the actual quantities involved?

>It's a back of the envelope, order-of-magnitude thing.

No, that's not how you get "any number". Just some of them, the more sloppy ones.

The nearest star is like 5 light years away. With 1/10 of the speed of light that's like 50 years. Wanna make it 1/100 and 500 years?

In any case much less than the 100,000 years estimation.

>We don't have anything close to faster-than-light spacecraft and there's no reason to think we will in the near future, except for pure religious hope.

First, we don't need "faster than light" to make it to there to less than 100,000 years.

Second, we actually DO have some ideas about that, too:

http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-...

2 - disease aside, the intent is important, the argument is that when technologically advanced meets less technological society the outcome is as much exploitation as possible

3 - artifical gravity is pretty tangential

4 - poodles being 0 or 1 is not your call to make, you as a 2 have no idea how a society at 100 would slice and dice it, its totally tangential but honestly maybe single cell lifeforms are 0, some kinda social structure ability to learn is 1, and 2 is less than a world wide society

Is there a chance that another intelligent lifeform would share ANY mental or emotional similarities with us? This assumes that they even have mental or emotional capabilities in the first place.

An alien intelligence could express itself collectively like an advanced ant colony or they could communicate in ways so different than us that we would each appear like brute beasts to each other.

If a giant amoeba colony that developed intelligence by acting as individual neurons in a collective brain we wouldn't even know unless its actions betrayed higher level planning and thinking. This would require that its motivations were at least marginally similar to our own.

I do have a problem believing that there is lots of alien life and all of them will come to this guy's "it makes sense to me so it must make sense to advanced aliens" conclusions to say home.

92.35% of human population is religious, in every religion there are gods that can be easily associated with aliens.

Looking at some religios beliefs the coming of gods means all kind of things, some religions interpret them as the end of the world, the return of christ etc.

Aliens showing up will have a big impact on people beliefs, most of us will be very scared, many will believe the end of the world version and panic.

The social impact of alien existence on our current society is huge and if advanced aliens really discovered us then they sure know this and wait for our society to get more mature to be ready to meet them.

I think we've learned enough about complexity and sensitive dependence on initial (and later) conditions to say that, unless we're wrong about complexity, the outcome of all these historical accidents wouldn't be predictable. They would still have to observe, meaning explore, to see what ended up actually happening around the universe and, in addition, they would never know for sure if they had already found all the Black Swans out there.

The "alien" in Solaris is a sentient ocean that covers the surface of the planet. All kinds of structures form and dissolve on the surface. The being can communicate with visitors by accessing their minds and seems to alter reality itself to entertain their fantasies.

Whose to say that other lifeforms would be single units (like human egos), or would operate on time scales that we can even comprehend ? Or operate consciously only in 3 dimensions.

that said, there are probably more like us.

Even if we miss the window of contact, galaxy should be teeming with shadows of alien civilizations if only we know where to look.

Why the obsession with life?

If our space ships landed on a distant planet containing an advanced civilization of intelligent robots, would we shrug, say “no life here,” and head home?

In fact, if you think about it, life is the most boring thing we could discover. We already know a lot about life, and how life may evolve, but we know absolutely nothing about how civilizations and intelligence may come from other substrates.

I hope we don’t find life, but something far weirder.

I'm now looking for a cofounder who will shake up the L2L (lifeform to lifeform) market with a new disruptive social media platform for unmotivated hypotetcial advanced beings to share pictures of intergalactic felines.

Opening line of the elevator pitch - 'It's like Google, but for goo'.

Uh, we just pivoted to a Facebook for homogeneous omniscient beings of pure energy.

Another option is an alien race seeing us as a potential competitor for resources after millions of years more development and wanting to stop us now.

Speak for yourself.

We literally are who we seek.