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| curl-6 said: A shot from the surface:
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Ooh look at that curvature, Mars is so much smaller than we thought. You should be able to walk around it in 10 minutes! It's like a Mario Galaxy planet! :)
| Ka-pi96 said: Yeah, that's why I said it would change the possibility of life on other planets to a certainty. I mean, you'd have one other planet that 100% did develop life. Finding advanced life doesn't seem likely. We'd really need it to find us if we were to have any hope of making contact with other life in the universe any time soon (and that "soon" probably realistically means the next few millennia). I don't think it would even be possible to be sure about a discovery of currently living life on other planets for us, let alone have any form of contact. As I understand it the universe we see from Earth isn't really the universe in the present, but the distant past due to the ridiculous distance of everything and the sheer amount of time it takes for light (or other signals) to travel to Earth. So even if by some miracle we were to discover signs of advance life elsewhere in the galaxy, we'd probably be picking up signs from such a long time ago that that life may have already been rendered extinct. |
To put yourself in the shoes of curious advanced alien life, how would you go about finding other life in the universe. The fastest way within the known laws of physics seems to be by artificial self replicating life, exponentially spreading out in the universe to report back findings. Send a robot to the next solar system where it will duplicate to send robots to all nearby solar systems and so forth.
We know the minimum amount it takes to get an answer back, it must be more than twice the distance in light years. And then by the time word reaches back to you, the candidate solar system is already that many thousands or millions of years further along. And yep, any signals we could pick up are from long ago. We see the center of our galaxy as it was 20,000 years ago. Andromeda, as it was 1.3 to 2 million years ago.
Now suppose any aliens have already send probes out across the galaxy, what are he chances any probes visited the solar system during the past few thousands years that signs of intelligence became visible from space. The pyramids are only 4,000 years old, a blip on a search project on the scale of an entire galaxy. To find us, they need to not only look at our grain of sand in between all the other grains of sand on the beach, but also at the right time, measured in millions if not billions of years.
How could you make yourself visible and reach out. The best way seems to be by manipulating a star to create a beacon, turn the light of a star into a morse code beacon that can't be explained in any natural way. Perhaps there's already a few of those out there, how to find them though. Individual stars are hard to pick out beyond a certain distance, other galaxies are just specks of light. And then when you find one, it's a relic of the past with likely no success sending a signal back (which won't get there for thousands of years)
The scale is both depressing and exciting. The chance of being the only intelligent life is very slim. The challenge is to stick around for millions of years to find it...
