Alien life found?

[highwaystar101]

Kasz216 said:

highwaystar101 said:

Kasz216 said:

Yeah, I gotta agree.  Unless someone comes to see us anyway.  Unless there is some big "space fold" discovery.

Crap, even then, the odds of finding life are VERY unlikely.

I remember either on the Next Generation or a show about it, explaining how crazy and impossible it would be to explore all of the space near us if we did it unguided.

I remember watching a documentary once on what would be the best way to explore the galaxy. The proposal that sounded best to me was self replicating probes. Basically you send a probe to a planet, it makes observations, transmits the data back and then find suitable natural resources to produce ten identical probes. Then each probe goes and finds another planet and makes ten more probes. And so on, and so on, until you have millions of probes exploring the galaxy for you.

The problem is, even in that unguided yet efficient way of exploring the galaxy it would still take a long time to explore even a tiny portion of the galaxy. Exploring the galaxy is a huge task in itself, let alone finding life (which may be common, yet maybe not). We would certainly need some guide if our goal was to find life.

Plus... god knows what kind of damage those probes could do if programmed wrong, or if they encounter some kind of life it doesn't recognize as life, but does recognize as probe making matierals.

Although not likely, it would be an amusing cosmic joke if alien life didn't exist.

Or if they evolved. If they can self replicate at a fairly swift pace, it's feasible that they could evolve out of our control.

For example if there is an error in the replication of the programme that allows for a probe to make eleven probes instead of ten (I'm assuming these probes will be capable of independant thought which will lead to occasionally adapting the programme, unlike present day computers), then the probe that makes eleven will replicate at a faster rate and become more dominant. Then the same happens for twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and so on. In millions of years, perhaps after humanity has long been gone, you'll have these resource hungry probes going to planets and using vast amounts of resources to build thousands of probes, which could be damaging to the life they find there.

I mean that's just a scenario off the top of my head, but it's not hard to see how things can go wrong.