Upcoming Dec.4th Episode

[DrLogic]

I may be one of those. ("May be" because I think it may depend on the day and time I'm asked, and the mood I happen to be nursing at that moment.) But I do accept that the universe is teeming with intelligent life.I don't pretend to fully understand the Drake equation but I accept that there's a hell of a lot of stuff out there and the probability of intelligent life is likely also very large. But the flip side, of course, is that the likelihood of finding us within this haystack of intelligent life must likewise be very small, with all these civilizations spewing "messages" of one form or another into the universe. And if there is so very much intelligent life why would any highly advanced civilization hang around here for, at the least, decades. Surely everything to be learned was learned within a few years, and any agenda other than simple exploration could certainly have been advanced by now.

Whenever I try and apply logic to these matters I come back to my starting point; something inexplicable is going on but it is so far beyond our current capacity to grasp it that we are best served by waiting for science and circumstances to drive the question, not self-dubbed "researchers". I think, as I've said, that many of these researchers only add flotsam to the garbage heap. What I find refreshing about The Paracast is that the hosts and many of the guests take a similar attitude. There's no pretense that there's an answer lurking inside the next guest's trenchcoat. It's a hands-up, "Did you see that?" exploration, rather than a glib effort at "I know what that means!"

Well you have to consider, would you never go to a country just because you read a book by someone who has already gone? If the numbers from drake equation look daunting, then factoring in the the number of individual 'people' in the universe would may very well suggest that they arent overly interested in us, if there are a number of species able to travel the universe in a short space of time, feasibly there could be enough flying around here to blot out the sky, but there isnt.

The other thing to consider is, if the universe is indeed over 13bn years old and a typical planet takes 5bn years or so to evolve intelligent life, with the number involved, there are probably a large number of species that have lived an intelligent life for anything up to 8bn years - i doubt they have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs if this is the case. We are finding more and more planets over the last couple of decades, how much of the universe coupld you map in a few billion years? For all we know we maybe little more than a node on a database.

The thing to remember is when the numbers are big enough, probabilities start turning into realities as every connotation is explored at some point or another, and that is my take on it at the moment. 'if' we are being visited, it would be due to the number of individuals able to visit planets far out weighing the number of life harbouring planets, with the number of sightings equating to the probablistic outcome of 'x' number of possible visitors vs 'x' number of visitable planets.