Dirty Greek - UFOs and ETs visiting Earth?

Then let me hear no more of our kind's natural necessity to form hierarchical groups. An observer viewing human life shortly after cultural takeoff would easily have concluded that our species was destined to be irredeemably egalitarian except for distinctions of sex and age.

- Marvin Harris

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Dirty Greek - UFOs and ETs visiting Earth?

Science : UFOs and ETs visiting Earth?

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I've said this before, but I'll annoy you all with it again. The chances of not only a civilization with space travel but one who has then traveled to visit us is SO much smaller than the chances of just another intelligent species with a civilization, and even smaller than the chances of just another intelligent species who are, say, hunter-gatherers.

Consider a species even 1000 times more intelligent than we are who has been around much, much longer. Assuming that they are intelligent enough, they still need so many things to be able to invent space travel: complicated speech, organized and motivated citizens and leaders (well, at least citizens), the necessary materials and fuels, and, the one we don't think about as much, appropriate limbs and something similar to an opposable thumb, combining to create a grasping system. Or, of course, some form of psychokinesis or other method of making something as intricate as a space travel system.

I'd say the chances of other species, probably far more advanced than we are mentally, is pretty high. At least, that is, the chances that they ever existed. You then have to consider whether they exist now and whether they have the qualities I mentioned, not to mention tons of others I didn't mention or can't think of myself. There could be super-intelligent gasses and fish out there (see dolphins) that couldn't ever create even a city, much less a spacecraft.

And, you can consider the example from Hitchhiker's Guide, where there could be tons of species who live on parts of the universe where they see nothing in the sky and therefore they never even consider traveling into space.

Those, in my opinion, blow Drake's equation out of the water.

Posted By George on 08/01/2008 @ 11:51 AM | Link and Discuss (0) | More Science
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