BBC Focus Magazine

[nath2099]

So there is a lot of talk about UFO's and aliens at the minute, though it's not rare for this topic to be raised it seems to be peaking with some of the 2012 doomsday theories. This got me thinking about alien life. I feel it is out there, I can't conceive were alone. What I can conceive though is we are in fact the most advanced.

I know it is a bit of a bold statement but some one has to be, maybe the reason E.T has not been in touch is that they can't and may not have the technology. Maybe the Voyager satellite will crash on some planet and create a Roswell style event in a galaxy far away and raise the are we alone question in some up and coming civilization.

Just a thought.

Nath

[M Paul Lloyd]

Well, given the perceived age and size of the universe it seems altogether perfectly possible that some other planet, or indeed several, could have enjoyed the conditions that would support the development and rise of one or more sentient races with similar technological and intellectual aspirations to ours and which may have managed to survive long enough to exceed what we have achieved thus far.

However I find it unlikely that if they exist right now their being in what we might regard as our local area of our own galaxy (within say 80 light years) seems a bit too good to be true and even if by some stretch of credibility they had then we would probably be separated from them by such a vast ocean of time that in their present form they would find us no more interesting than is the moss growing on my shed roof. ?

I am rather intrigued by the notion that one day in the far distant future our decedents may very well encounter archeological remains of ancient extraterrestrial beings.... and I don't just mean a few pyramids on some dusty planet but advanced artifacts drifting through space, a bit like the Voyager probes perhaps.

I think Star Trek covered it a couple of times at least.

[Shadowwolf]

This got me thinking about alien life. I feel it is out there, I can't conceive were alone.

Well even leaving aside the incomprehensible size of the verse itself, the Milky Way is quite a big galaxy with many stars and many more planets orbiting those stars. We also know that life exists on at least one of those planets and there does not appear to be anything profoundly special about that occurrence. Nor does the emergence of intelligence on our scale, pretty rare but not particularly requiring of incredibly special circumstances. Therefore the chances of us being alone either as the sole instance of life or intelligent life in the galaxy seem rather small to the point of being incredibly unlikely. The circumstances do seem to be specific enough to result in us not tripping up over alien civilisations every few star systems as Trek or Wars would have it. However, as we currently lack any actual concrete evidence for life, intelligent or otherwise, elsewhere in the galaxy then we cannot conclude that it is definitely out there.

What I can conceive though is we are in fact the most advanced.

I know it is a bit of a bold statement but some one has to be, maybe the reason E.T has not been in touch is that they can't and may not have the technology.

It is technically possible but I'd reckon it is unlikely, the galaxy has been around for quite a considerable time before humans ever appeared and our technical capability has barely arrived. It's really been less than one piffling century that we can scan the EM spectrum and broadcast over it. ET may well have aimed its equipment our way when there was neither anything to receive or transmit on this world and we don't have to travel far back to get to that situation. It is also possible that ET is largely doing what we currently do, listening without any deliberate broadcasting and like us so far have not encountered much; we did have that Wow signal event but that's still inexplicable and a sole event. Even our non-deliberate broadcast bubble is incredibly small in astronomical terms and the further out you get the weaker the signals become so that even well before the leading edge it would be indistinguishable from all the other noise.

That we've heard nothing is insufficient reason to suppose that silence should indicate we are the most advanced.

Maybe the Voyager satellite will crash on some planet and create a Roswell style event in a galaxy far away and raise the are we alone question in some up and coming civilization.

Possibly but really, really unlikely. As it is, the Voyagers and Pioneers are not aimed anywhere in particular and are really just adrift in the vast void between systems. Voyager One for example, in about 40k years it will only pass AC+79 3888 in the Ophiuchus constellation somewhere between one and two light years distance (as per Wiki). A teeny, completely dead probe will skip by in the vast void where it is unlikely to encounter anything or be noticed even were there anything there to notice. Even if any of the probes somehow managed to be captured by a system gravitationally and somehow then make it unmolested to a deteriorating orbit about an inhabited planet, the frail remnants will incinerate on the way down with little or nothing making it to the ground where the odds of it being found are astronomically slim at best. They will also only last so long before sustained micrometeorite impacts render them so much debris and that's their more probable future than being found by another intelligence.

I'm sure other places have had Roswell style events though, whenever the local government needed to hide sensitive activities by invoking a currently popular urban legend

[MikeG]

?..maybe the reason E.T has not been in touch is that they can't and may not have the technology

Why do we always assume that if E.T. makes it this far, they will want to announce their presence. The most likely is that either they would want to observe us without interfering, just as we would if we discovered a new tribe in the Amazon. They would have nothing to gain from announcing themselves, given our current "primitive" state. I don't think any advanced civilization is going to take us by the hand and show us the way to the stars. Why would they? They would just be creating competition for themselves. Given our bickering nature, putting such technology in our hands may be something they will live to regret.

[Shadowwolf]

wrote:?..maybe the reason E.T has not been in touch is that they can't and may not have the technology

Why do we always assume that if E.T. makes it this far, they will want to announce their presence.

Well I think the original premise could also include communication from non-interstellar space-faring aliens who would lack any reason to remain hidden or silent to assist observation. Of course there are still other reasons to remain silent and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that we may be the most advanced in our region currently and that's why we hear nothing.

Even if they were capable of interstellar travel of some description, well we'd have arguments for them remaining hidden, but it could also be argued the other way. Personally I think the most likely explanation for encountering no visitors is because there hasn't been any, at the very least none while we've been here. We don't hear anything because not much is out there and that results in likely large spacing between habitable worlds, the chances of overlap of communicating civilisations are small, and the technology we're scanning with and for is extremely limited and possibly not long utilised for long range comms.