vivster said: Nah, I shouldn't say 99%. I should say 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999...%. Which mathematically is just 100%. The question is not if they'd contact us, it's whether they would even find us because that's only possible by stumbling upon us at random chance. And that chance is literally astronomically small. |
Again I want to make clear I'm not defending crazy theories and all that stuff but going 100% implies that you know it all that you are some kind of God that knows the entire universe, everything that lives in it, their intentions, their history and so on...
It's as if we had lived 1000 years ago and you would have told me that you are 100% certain that man will NEVER fly in the sky cause by what is known 1000 years ago a human flying is absolutely impossible and unthinkable.
As for finding us as we are such an insignificantly small planet lost in an insignificant solar system on the outskirts of the Milky Way, I get what you mean, the universe is so unfathomably huge, beyond what most people can conceive that finding us would appear to be pretty much close to impossible and that may be true but my point is we don't know...
We don't know what technologies such creatures have. Look at us, 3 billion years ago we were just single cells, 100 million years ago we were mice and other such primitive mammals, about 2 million years ago we slowly began a transition towards intellectual domination though we still were animals, 50 thousand years ago we began mastering tools and at that point it was clear no other animals could catch up with us, 10 thousand years ago we began recording history, 400 years ago we began industrializing our societies, 50 years ago we split the atom and began creating the very first artificial brains known as computers, 20 years ago we began implementing a world wide network in some ways recreating neuronal patterns, some kind of brain at the scale of the planet that we called Internet...
What we will be able to achieve in only 100 years could be unthinkable today and what we will be able to achieve in 1 million years which is NOTHING at the scale of the universe and its 13.8 billions years history, we probably don't even have the brain capacity to even remotely understand.
By your comments here an there you seem like a smart person which is why I think I can level with you on this notion. The universe is far too mysterious and exotic and we are only beginning to understand what it is made of and how it works. If Aliens were to visit us, they'd have to master technologies that would allow them to transcend the limits of the speed of light as you said earlier in this thread but what if they do? What if all the theories on folding space and creating wormholes were something those aliens master perfectly after maybe millions of years of technological evolution?
Again I agree that it's not logical that they come from far, hover in our skies for 5 minutes and leave. But until we have some kind of ultimate proof that we are alone or unnoticed by aliens we can at best consider highly unlikely that we have been visited but we cannot completely rule it out, hence 99% probable that we have not been visited.
One last thing, since the 1930's we have been broadcasting signals into space which means that any intelligent species that exists within a radius of roughly 90 light years from earth must have noticed our existence. 90 light years may not be much at the scale of the galaxy but that bubble is growing and I don't know how many stars must be by now inside that bubble, about 100? More? Which means that this 99% I'm arguing about is going to decrease as time goes by, just saying
Sorry for the long post.