From a stastical kind of view, I really don't buy alien spaceships.
Think about it.
The universe is about fourteen billion years old. Humans have been looking at the sky (depending on how you define that phrase) for less than 130,000 years (that's how long we've been "humans".) We've been "civilized" for, what, 10,000 years? And we've only had telescopes for a couple of centuries. A couple centures BC at the very earliest.
But let's stick with 130,000 years. That means we've existed for %0.0009 (nine ten thousandths of a percent) of the life of the universe.
We've been sending intelligble signals (radio) out into the ether for, what, let's call it a century? That means the farthest ones have travelled about 100 light years, or six hundred trillion miles. That'd cover about %0.0000002 of the galaxy (and that doesn't even count all the factors that someone who actually understands astrophysics could include).
So in the nine ten thousandths of the age of the universe we've been around, and in the two ten millionths of space we've alerted to our presence, there will be another spacefaring intelligence close enough or fast enough to get here within a hundred years? Or, alternatively, they just happened to stumble upon us?
Cigarette
Cleveland, OH
April 2004
APR 01, 2007 01:22 PM