From Space.com: "No near neighbors: Closest technologically advanced aliens may be 33,000 light-years from Earth." Basically the research on which the article reports indicates that the conditions that would give rise to biospheres stable and long lived enough to for intelligence to evolve are so rare that it is unlikely that any more than two intelligent, tool using species would exist in the galaxy at the same time. "Worlds without number have I created" says the Lord. I don't think He was talking only about uninhabitable hunks of rock or gas giants, so I'm a little doubtful that there are only one or two intelligent species at a time in each galaxy.
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Real Life Supervillains
Spy thrillers and superhero movies alike rely on an endless stream of supervillains with grandiose schemes to kill off half the world (or ha...
Anyone capable of grasping the size of the Universe...and such people are few and far between...knows that 33,000 light years is a relatively short distance. Even at that ratio, there could be a staggering number of civilizations scattered...emphasis on "scattered"...across the Universe. Sadly, given the vast distances involved, it's unlikely there will be much interaction among them.
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ReplyDeleteThe reason they're excited every time they find a new rocky planet (or confirm that one has a nitrogen rich atmosphere) is that they're so hard to see. The reason they're so confused every time a star or galactic core does, well, anything is that they don't understand stellar evolution or the propagation of light waves through an electrically charged medium over vast distances, and refuse to accept that most of their theories are wrong. We'll likely find that we've been looking at other civilizations without seeing them (and listening to the garbled static that was once their radio signals without realizing it) and then wonder how we missed all the overwhelming evidence. It'll be like when we first saw the Andromeda Nebula as it truly was and wondered, "How'd we miss all those stars?" and, "Why did we really think the universe was so small?"
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