Quote:
Originally Posted by Boeing Guy
While I have no doubts there is life out there in the vastness of space, I feel I have to point out following.....
Pale Blue Dot: Distant Spacecraft Photograph Earth - NASA Science
This was a famous photograph taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 Space Probe, at the time it was only 3.7 billion miles from Earth (approx). Earth is the lPale Blue Dot, low down on the righthand side. |
I'm a big fan of that Pale Blue Dot thing that Sagan wrote and it still brings a tear to my eye from time to time when I feel particularly maudlin. Anyone with half a brain has to agree with him about extra terrestrial life though in my opinion.
Playing the odds, there has to be life out there, only a fool would think otherwise. We sit in a solar system, tucked away in the corner of a galaxy of 300 billion solar systems, on the outskirts of a universe with 200 billion galaxies that we can currently see (god alone knows how many are yet to be discovered). Attempting to put that into some kind of perspective, if the Earth was the size of a shirt button, each one of of us is a single bacteria on the back of on an ant in the middle of the Brazilian Rain forest.
But....
Lets just suppose that a vastly superior intelligence has the technology to see across interstellar space, and they can see so clearly that they know that Earth is inhabited. Lets then suppose that they also have ships that can cheaply travel across the vast expanse of space at vast multiples of light speed so that they could still be alive when they got here.
Lets ignore the film version warfaring aliens that want our water/gold/resources, because all that stuff can be mined much more easily from your average asteroid or comet, without having to deal with Will Smith and Bill Pulman flying F16's or worrying about getting the flu and crashing into Horsell Common.
I agree with you. Why would they come all this way to make crop circles, cut up cows and stick objects into the rectums of American farmers? Why would these super intelligent beings travel all this way just to leave their landing lights on as they fly north over the coppice?
They are definitely out there, but why would they even bother coming to this little backwater planet of ours?