| Fayceless said: The very fact that Earth is inhabited by humans, not some alien colonizers that settled a billion years ago, could mean a few possibilities: -We ARE, in fact, alone -It is impossible to circumvent, in any way, the limitation of light speed -Life capable of traveling from their own planet is exceedingly rare -Earth an alien experiment, or a sort of 'wildlife preserve' protected by alien powers (as in the nifty freeware game, Transcendence) A Star Trek/Wars type of universe with an abundance of alien species is extremely unlikely. I hope it is just that intelligent life is very, very rare and not that we're permanently stuck here in this solar system. |
It could also be that we're in a relatively uninteresting part of our local galaxy, on the outskirts of the milky way system. If we develop ftl where would you go first. Besides even if alien species were able to observe the entire night sky, we've only been transmitting signals into space for less then a hundred years. They haven't even made it out the front door yet so to speak, we're on average 27000 light years from the center of our galaxy.
It is more likely that light speed is a real limitation though. Life has a tendency to expand exponentionally given the chance. An alien species capable of FTL could spread over the universe multiplying like a virus. Although it could go a lot slower then you would expect with generations getting longer and longer as a species advances while the procreation rate declines. At least that's what's already happening in our modern societies. Still after billions of years you would expect them to be everywhere.
Ofcourse even if FTL is possible that doesn't mean you can instanteaniously go anywhere. Heck maybe it's like Star gate and you need to ferry over a receiver first on a sub light speed ship before you can create a wormhole or transporter for FTL travel. Star trek's warp drive also wasn't very fast compared to the size of the universe.
Another possibility is that an advanced species will shed their material form, transcendence to an energy based life form so to speak. In that case we're as interesting as a colony of bacteria on a coconut floating in the middle of the pacific ocean. Energy based lifeforms will definitely choose to go where the highest concentration of energy is, which is not our boring sun.
