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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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The Total Perspective Vortex
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This will make you feel small. Unless, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, you believe you are the most important being in the universe.
http://dailyvideo.googlepages.com/hubble-deep-field
Give a hungry man a fish and you have fed him for a day, but give him a case of dynamite and soon the entire village will be showered with mud and water and hard-to-identify little chunks of fish. -unknown
It's true that the extreme numbers of galaxies and stars out there that could potentially host non-terrestrial life seems to imply the existence of such. But the distances involved also seem to imply that we won't make contact with any of them in the foreseeable future, without some technology being developed that completely alters the nature of our relationship with the universe. IMHO, finding other intelligent life out there would be like finding a needle in a haystack the size of our solar system.
Zed-F Wrote:. . . without some technology being developed that completely alters the nature of our relationship with the universe. IMHO, finding other intelligent life out there would be like finding a needle in a haystack the size of our solar system.Stephen Hawking received an award recently and had this to say at the award ceremony: "Science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination. Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light," he added "but matter/antimatter annihilation" could make it possible to travel at speeds just below the speed of light. The title of the article is "To avoid extinction humans must colonize space says Hawking" http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1130-hawking.html
Give a hungry man a fish and you have fed him for a day, but give him a case of dynamite and soon the entire village will be showered with mud and water and hard-to-identify little chunks of fish. -unknown
We would not only need to be able to travel or at least communicate at speeds much greater than lightspeed, but also perceive at speeds much greater than lightspeed, over nearly incomprehensible distances and an equally incomprehensibly large volume of space, assuming we even know what to look for in the first place. The images we see through Hubble are not of those galaxies as they are today, but as they were 78 billion years ago. In order to interact with another form of life, we need to be able to perceive it in the present and communicate with it in the present.
Travel at near-lightspeed is almost certainly insufficient for first contact in the forseeable future. Even assuming there are extra-solar planets nearby that are worth colonizing, and that we are capable of building a suitable colony ship that will keep colonists alive for the duration of the trip, we can barely colonize a small portion of our own galaxy that way. This is not to say it wouldn't be worthwhile doing anyway; every ambitious endeavor begins with a first step. But I don't see exploring our local stellar neighborhood leading to a first contact scenario -- it could reasonably be argued that there are likely no other sentient life forms within the whole of our own galaxy, for that matter. It's only when we start thinking about the staggeringly huge number of stars in the universe as a whole, and the correspondingly huge volume of space that represents, that the likelihood of other life being out there starts seeming to approach unity.
Humanity in the future will either have to really change the basic way we think as humans or else will live a sad life. Simply put, we will eventually reach a point where further expoloration will be impossible, due the above mentioned issues of distance and our reletively slow speed of potential travel. We can fill the solar system, but they we're going to have to start focusing inward. I'm glad I won't live to see that day, since I believe much of the good in humanity comes from searching outward for new frontiers to explore and claim (and much of the evil as well, I will admit).
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