Thanks for that. So, do you believe in aliens and that they could visit us? I remember reading Stephen Hawking believing it could happen and that it could very well play out like when Columbus met first nation Americans - not very well.
The probability of primitive life developing on a suitable planet may be extremely low, or it may be high, but aliens intelligent enough to beam signals into space may also be smart enough to build civilization-destroying weapons like nuclear bombs, he said. More likely, he added, is that primitive life is likely to develop, but intelligent life as we know it is exceedingly rare.
?We don?t appear to have been visited by aliens,? Hawking said, adding that he discounts reports of UFOs. ?Why would they only appear to cranks and weirdoes??
http://m.space.com/5266-primitive-alien-life-exist-stephen-hawking.html
http://newsthump.com/2010/04/26/all...-sent-from-basingstoke-warns-stephen-hawking/
Hawkings comments about columbus were somewhat tongue in cheek.
My views are that if you take a mathematical approach it's almost a certain that there is other life, but the same mathematical approach would suggest that advanced intelligent life is rare. Our planet is closer to its end than begining, for example our magnetic field has dropped 10% in the last 200 years, so the question become how advanced can you develop in that finite period of time? And we've had some lucky breaks, many of the events that have caused mass extinction in the passed have exceeded average recurrence intervals in the period of modern humans by as much as 10 fold allowing us to develop uninterrupted.
Then the other issue is that the stars and planets are all different ages, so it raises the question does this intelligent life exist in the same narrow window as ours? Now if we had the technology to travel at close to the speed of light (one day we will have), we could travel to the edge of the solar system in a week and another week to return, but while the astronauts would have only experienced 2 weeks of travel, when they return 160 years would have passed on earth. This is one reason why I dont think we have been visited, the vast distances of space make any travel essentially a permanent move, if they did come it would be to colonise.
So basically I do think aliens exist, I don't think they are visiting, and I'm not sure they have the capability.
I have a cousin thats a professor of physics and we have spoken extensively about this, I find the topic fasinating and really think we should explore space. Unfortunately there are zealots the espouse religious dogma on both sides of the issue that make fact based rational discussion increasingly difficult (not you by the way).




