Someone else recommended that book to me after I wrote a similar post to this one last year. Or maybe it was early this year.

At any rate, even if it isn’t “vanishingly rare” it is probably rare enough that it may arise every couple of hundred million years. And then all the things that could destroy it come into play so that a fully mature species capable of space travel might have occurred only 2 or 3 times in the entire history of the universe.

Then again, an alien may be sitting right next to you right now and you’d never know it because he chooses not to have you see him. But he and his buddies in the Galactic Federation are scoping us out, seeing if we’re worthy of membership.

I would not be surprised at either scenario.

ed.

Just a small correction. Warp speed is not x times the speed of light but x3 (or x^3) times the speed of light. Therefore, Warp 7 is actually 343 times the speed of light. I don’t remember where I read the original attribution but it was used in the Original Series, TNG and DS9 for certain. I don’t know about others or movies.

Its a pretty good reason to get off this planet I think. Even if you don’t believe in alien attacks there are things like comet impacts, etc. The more spread out the human race is the safer it is.

Good points from both of you. One possible explanation for the apparent dearth of intelligent civilizations may be that many of them get wiped out by rogue comets, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, black holes, or even just massive solar flares from their own sun before they develop the ability to get off their rock.

Or, they destroy themselves. This is why Drake’s equation is pretty much full of crap. You can’t quantify stupidity.

ed.

Don’t forget - until Edwin Hubble in the ’30s, the universe was thought to be what we now know is only our galaxy. It was Hubble who discovered that there were other galaxies - thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands of them, he thought.

By the time Fermi propounded his theorem, the number of observable and estimated galaxies - each with hundreds of millions of suns - was still thought to be a countable number, perhaps in the millions.

By 1970, the estimated number of galaxies was in the billions.

Then (appropriately named) came the Hubble Space Telescope. Their most recent estimate is that there are 125 billion galaxies, give or take - as many galaxies as there are stars in our galaxy.

Fermi had no idea of the size of the universe, so the usefulness of his theorem is moot.

Now, since the universe is expanding, it is for all practical considerations of this sort infinite - and the infinite number of monkeys theorem steps up. That theorem as usually stated is widely misunderstood.

To refresh memories, it used to state that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing blindly on an infinite number of typewriters in an infinite amount of time, sooner or later some monkey would quite randomly type perfectly the complete works of Shakespeare (or the Bible or any other book you can imagine). Well and good - it’s a cute illustration of what infinity means.

However…the rules of randomness and logic also apply. What infinity and the theorem suggests is this - if an infinite number of monkeys etc result in the random creation of a phenomenon once - that random phenomenon will continue to recur randomly - an infinite number of times. THAT’s what infinity means.

If the evolution of intelligent life on earth is a random accident of a large (or infinite) number of occurrences, then in infinity it is a logical necessity that such an event recurs infinitely.

This is of course part and parcel of the alternate universe theories (as opposed to parallel universe theories that derive from Heisenberg and suggest that there is an infinite number of other universes in the same space we occupy) - that in a universe so vast as to be limitless, an exact and nearly exact example of myself exists “elsewhere” (no meaning to the word) - except that in some of them I’m handsome and left-handed.

So where are the aliens? Out there in a universe so teeming with life that the numbers would stagger out pitiful human conceptions of mathematics - but out there in a universe so vast and silent that even if after developing the Star Trekkian ability to warp out at ten times the speed of light we will never find each other except by the randomest of chances.

Don’t forget that Star Trek Voyager was humming along at warp 7 much of the time - 7xthe speed of light - and it was going to take them fifty years to get back from the Delta quadrant to our own Alpha quadrant - in the same pitifully insignificant galaxy.

So they’re out there all right, maybe even with their “To Serve Man” cookbooks - but the fact that they haven’t come calling yet is simply a matter of its mathematical unlikelihood and is yet another blow to our anthropocentric perception of All That Is.

Very cool post. Made me want to be reading science fiction.

You have really good non-fiction writing skills. Maybe fiction, too, you don’t show that hand. Despite the fact that you and I get on each other’s nerves, if you ever want some conversation on the practicalities of getting into book writing, drop me an email.

It’s the Jack London fallacy: that it’s about wolves chasing bunnies. The fact is wolves are a charity case kept alive by h. sapiens, whereas we have a hell of a lot of rabbits.

The rabbits did a better job of surviving than did the wolves. And if I were betting the mortgage money I’d say the viruses and bacteria and insects will out-survive us. After all, as Rick points out, intelligence is not the only path or the best.