His first point: the oxygen content is too high. Oxygen is a highly corrosive element and is unlikely to be conducive to life. Think of a planet with a high chlorine content atmosphere, would you expect life to evolve there?

Another of his points: The planet is highly geologically active. This mitigates the ability of life to start or hold on.

It was a wonderful article and pointed out nicely that there might be life on other planets but we just wouldn’t recognize it.

Now they act like deranged proctologists.

Spike

Even if you tweak the variables in the equation to be conservatively low, the calculation establishes that not only is there advanced life out there, but there is most likely millions of other civilized species in our universe.

Most advanced countries had SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) institutes during the 60’s and 70’s largely based on the strength of the Drake equation. Now, I think the US SETI is the only one left. The problem, as you mentioned, is that even if intelligent does exist in our universe, it would most likely be so far away that even at light speed travel, the great distances are well beyond our reach (it might take billions of years to get there). The aliens would be confronted with the same problem in getting here.

But don’t rule out the possibility of us being visited by petite aliens with big eyes too quick. Many scientists think quarks and black holes may be windows that could allow space travelers to quickly pop out many billions of light years away from where they entered. There is also the possibility of time travel.

The problem here is that when you plug in the variable for the amount of time required for life forms to evolve to such an intelligent degree, the number of possible intelligent life forms is greatly reduced or eliminated.

One has to suspect that if there are super advanced aliens visiting us, their mission would not include hanging outside Stan Romanke’s window in Denver.

Doc:

Hate to tell you but the Drake Equation has been pretty much discarded if only because “X” is irrelevant without some starting point or baseline. Not only that, we’ve discovered 50 or so more planets and what is becoming rapidly clear is that our own solar system is probably extremely rare - much more than one in a million. Most planetary systems contain one or more of these “hot Jupiters” where most of the accretion disk formed close to that sun - too close for liquid water to exist.

ed.

It is likely only a matter of time before this reality becomes objectified. Too many people taking too many grainey picture of saucers and triangles. Not likely that all of them are ours. Quite likely that some of those that aren’t ours are not hoaxes.

Sooner or later someone is going to have evidence that cannot be denied.

Scientists are increasingly agreeing that faster than light travel is possible.

We’ll see, be patient.