Now the topic title might imply to you that i think we are the only ones out there. I strongly belive that life exists on other planets in other solar systems/galaxies. My question is what if we, humans, are the MOST advanced race in the universe. This may sound self centered, but life had to start somewhere and what if we were the fastest evolving of them all, or the only ones who succesfully survived.

Getting to the real question, IF we are the most advanced race in the universe, or even the galaxy, what role would that give us? If we are the most advanced race, i dont mean to sound negative but, that would mean most of our efforts would be useless assuming that the other races arent very close behind.

I moved this topic to life in space from space exploration where it was originally posted.
The SETI effort would return a negative result, which would still be important to know. Everything else we are doing is still valuable.

Personally, I imagine that there are about two to ten active civilizations in this galaxy, which would mean that it will be a very long time till we meet up with one of them.

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Forming opinions as we speak

If we are the First Ones (which I doubt), then upon First Contact, we cannot count upon receiving The Wisdom of the Ages-- we'll have to give it instead... or not! Do we already have a string about the Prime Directive? S

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Ignoramus et ignorabamus.-- Reymond

Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.--Hilbert

Pick one.

The first race to develop interstellar travel will dominate this galaxy. It has been modeled that even traveling at sublight speeds such a race would fill the galaxy in a very short time. Therefore, either there are no races that have even developed sublight interstellar or faster travel, or we're the only one even close.

I also agree that the Earth cannot be the only world in the universe that has developed life, but I cannot say whether any of it is intelligent. The factors that led our species to develop the inteligence to manipulate our enviroment to suit ourselves is unique on the Earth of all of the intelligent species. It is possible that there are other intelligent species in the galaxy that don't imagine leaving their world, or that they are only a few hundred years ahead of us technologically and have just started their galactic colonization, or that they're all around us now, but leaving us quietly to ourselves until they decide what to do with us. I don't see it being very far off before we can either see directly the other worlds in the neighborhood (10-50 years) or send out our first sublight probes (50-200 years) to find the answer to this quesiton.

If it is just us, then in a million years will will fill the galaxy and maybe have started to reach out to others. If it is not just us, then we will be penned into our local neighborhood and doomed to a long and stagnant existence.

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...and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere; and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys...

I don't think it would give us any particular "role". Are you asking would life on our planet change if life elswhere was discovered?

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Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?"
Erwin Chargaff

John L, you wrote, “It has been modeled that even traveling at sublight speeds such a race would fill the galaxy in a very short time”

But models are just models. A model dealing with this subject has to be built on hundreds of assumptions—explicit, implicit, some not even recognized. The values of some of these variables have to be little more than wild guesses. Four examples:

1. What will be the cost of interstellar travel for an advanced civilization? Will the cost be something the average individual can easily afford, or something that requires a significant fraction of the advanced civilization’s resources?

2. If super-luminal travel is not possible, what about super-luminal communication, and at what cost? Such communication would have a profound impact on the type of civilizations that would evolve in the expanding inhabited zone. If super-luminal communication isn’t practical, what’s the cost of light speed interstellar communication?

3. What is the maximum practical speed for interstellar travel? 1%, 10%, 90% of the velocity of light? There’s a big difference between getting there in ten as opposed to nine hundred years.

4. What kind of political system will ET have? One which permits substantial individual or group autonomy, or one which requires nearly unanimous consensus for almost any significant activity? If group, but not individual autonomy exists, how many groups are accorded relative autonomy in decision making? Two, ten, a thousand, a million?

The number of discrete decision making entities as regards interstellar travel could vary between one and trillions. Could it be that really complex civilizations evolve towards a system in which all significant decisions are undertaken by the whole community and require a near unanimous consensus before proceeding? It easy to imagine that this type of system might become necessary when the consequences of mistakes or mis-uses of technology become more and more horrendous.

In such a situation, I think those who favor waiting until everything is sorted out, until we’ve taken care of the problems on our world, will carry the day just about every time. One hears such an argument frequently in social policy debate—even on this forum. It seems to me the clear consequence will be that nothing will be done in terms of interstellar travel.

I don’t think it’s a certainty that a space faring civilization would fill the galaxy in any given time period. Models are just models. Garbage in, garbage out.

Bob

Your point is well made. It's true that a rigid society as you've postulated may never expand, continually finding further self improvement necessary before expansion is undertaken. The models I was talking about were based on a society that would encourage colonization of the neighboring systems, that the costs of travel are reasonable for the planet/solar system as a whole, and that the speed of travel was high enough that the ship could reach the nearest star systems in a short enough time for the passengers to be able to successfully colonize at arrival. The short-time of the expansion of the hypothetical race was compared to the life of the galaxy. It was assumed that as each new colony developed they would them send on further colony ships to new worlds, after a few hundred to few thousand years. I believe the simulation I saw covered between 100,000 and 1,000,000 to fill the galaxy based on variables to the rates of travel, birth, and motive to expand further, but they all agreed it would take little time. I also believe that if we are the first race in the galaxy to travel interstellar space that we will fill the galaxy with humans.

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...and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere; and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys...

I'm curious to know howcome you think there are about 2 to 10 in our galaxy - do work by the drake equation?

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Challenging Limits

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I think it’s unlikely there are any species more advanced than us in our galaxy. I base this estimate on six observations:

1. Advanced ET would likely be really advanced since evolution from gas cloud to interstellar cruiser would have to be only a millionth faster than us (one extra year of progress for ET every million years) for ET to be 10,000 years ahead of us. For ET to be near our stage of development seems pretty improbable.

2. A technological civilization didn’t emerge for more than four billion years after formation of the Earth even though life appeared very quickly. This suggests to me that technological civilization must not be easy to produce, and probably depends on a lot of very improbable things.

3. To me the likelihood of multiple occurrences of this emergence is low since one of the requirements are stable orbit, stable star, and no sterilizing events like impacts or nearby gamma ray bursters for about four billion years.

4. ET hasn’t communicated with us and hasn’t left any evidence of his existence (like a probe, a beacon, or some distant weird product of his advanced technology) even though an ET 10,000 years ahead of us would know we are here. Even if super-luminal observation is not possible; ETs extremely sophisticated planetary, ecological, and sociological systems modeling will give us away; especially with the signals contained in our atmospheric gasses guiding his models.

5. Advanced ET would find it easy to unequivocally and unambiguously communicate with us and he would be very aware of the benefits to him of such communication.

6. Humans’ use of energy has been increasing at an increasing rate for at least 100 centuries. ET’s use of energy should be really prodigious, which presents opportunities for us to observe the effects of intelligent use of this much energy. No luck so far.

To sum up: A really low probability for the emergence of technological civilizations; ETs failure to communicate or leave evidence; our failure to detect ET. To me, the simplest explanation is that ET isn’t there.

We're the only ones.

Bob

Do you believe that the CHON, etc., elements have self organization properties? If so, what prevents them from self organizing on other planets in the Goldilocks zone. Once self organization leads to self replicating molecules, thence microbes, thence multicellulars what prevents technically competent critters from emerging? What prevents the physics, chemistry, and biology that produced us from operating in like manner throughout the universe? I choose to believe the universe is awash in living organisms some of which are as intelligent and technically competent as are we, because the processes that produced us are as likely as hydrogen fusion in stars.

We are pretty far out in the suburbs of the MW which makes it less likely that we will bump into extra-solar neighbors. But then the dynamism closer in to the center of the MW may create a more stark desert.

Veiwed in hindsight each particular path followed by the evolution of a single technically competent species will appear to be very unlikely. It would be similar to the road patterns on the Earth if humans are replaced by some other species (or some other species had evolved to sentience in lieu of humans) as the Earth sentients. The likelihood of them building roads structured as the ones we have built in the places where we have built them is vanishingly small. The probability of their building roads to suit their methods of transportation approaches one. So the probability computation for the rise of technically competents must include all the paths not prohibited by physics, chemistry, and biology and the many ways in which life producing processes can couple to each set of principles. Once technical proficiency reaches the level of comfortable interstellar travel, they will infest the MW then the universe.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

Gourhead, you wrote, “what prevents them from self organizing…self replicating molcules …microbes …multicellulars …what prevents technically competent critters”

I think what makes this very improbable for a particular celestial body is that the process can be interrupted at any time:

1. Anytime in four billion years this body can move out of the habitable zone because the star got brighter (which they all do, and from the consequences of which the Earth escaped for reasons unknown), or it’s orbit changed in multiple ways for multiple reasons.

2. The rate of impacts may be too high. Or, any one impact can set the evolutionary clock back to zero at any time. If this had happened on Earth at two billion years, we still wouldn’t have invented photosynthesis.

3. Other cosmic disasters, such as nearby supernova, gamma ray burster, black hole, or other things we don’t even know about can render the body uninhabitable any time in those billions of years.

4. The body must have enough water, but not too much. If the Earth had just a little more water, there would be no significant land masses, and no technological civilization. The amount of water on the surface, and probably lots of other substances has to be just right.

5. And there are lots of other things that could stop evolution towards a technological species. Massive, periodic volcanism, extreme glaciations (such as experienced by Earth only about six times, and from which it escaped for reasons unknown), evolutionary or even technological (like gray goo) cul-de-sacs, lots of things nobody knows about, and a whole lot more things that I don’t know about and thus can’t mention.

Gourhead, you also wrote, “Once technical proficiency reaches the level of comfortable interstellar travel, they will infest the MW then the universe.”

To me this assertion requires that the acquisition “of comfortable interstellar travel” must be exceedingly rare (and thus exceedingly improbable in a particular circumstance), otherwise, Where are they?

It kind of summarizes my points: Technologically advanced civilizations are hard to do and therefore must be rare; we don’t see any--either from their contacting us or our detecting them, both of which would probably happen; therefore, there probably aren't any.

We’re the only ones.

Bob

I see Bob and I are on different paths; I am as optimistic (in keeping with my subscribing to Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett) as he is pessimistic. For items 1 thru 3, I agree many systems will meet the fate Bob describes; however, many will not, because there are many sun-like stars with 10 or so billion years of stable life and planets likely to be in stable orbits. We can't even be sure that the Permian Extinction accelerated or delayed the march to our level of technical competence; or, more inclusively, the march of some species to technical competence.

For items 4 and 5, I say evolution is more creative and self organization, having reached the level of life, is more tenacious than Bob has imagined. Cephalopod-like and arthropod-like critters can achieve technical competence in water worlds maybe by creating conditions in which amphibian-like, reptilian-like, and mammalian-like critters can live and comfortably have their being.

As to Bob's concluding point, the absence of evidence suggesting the evidence of absence, my take is that we are fortunate that they are not sufficiently far ahead of us to be an imminent threat or to provide us with a technological quantum leap forward. It's very difficult to predict the average time required for the physics of self organization to produce our level of technical competence. Our access to data is extremely limited.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

First an apology - I thought this was a post about the 80s-90s UK new wave band, The Only Ones, formed by Peter Perrett, and best remembered for their hit, Another Girl, Another Planet but I now realise it is not. I was going to say I saw them in Peterborough one night and they were great.
However this is also an interesting discussion and although Bob does make a fine arguement against ET's likelihood, there are a lot of stars out there, and most likely a lot of planets orbitting them so the conditions for life similar to ours do probably exist somewhere, or have done or will.
That being said, the time between achieving space travel and finding a suitable planet to colonise and then getting there may be a significantly long phase of the necessary evolutionary path to really becoming safe from being wiped out in a stroke.
We have only taken the first small steps.

Gourhed, you wrote, "critters can achieve technical competence in water worlds"

It seems to me that creatures living in water have four huge disadvantages in developing comfortable interstellar travel:

First, they won't have fire. How do you even begin metal or glass working without fire? To me this seems a huge hurdle.

Second, the effects of manipulation by impact will be greatly reduced because of the viscosity of water. Flint knapping, or any other lithic technology would be tremendously handicapped if it had to be performed underwater. Even cutting fibers would be more difficult.

Third, the effects of projectiles would be almost completely attenuated. No rock throwing, no atlatl, no bow and arrow. Effective projectile throwing may have something to do with our development of mathematical abilities.

Technology without projectiles, metal, glass, fire, or even lithics seems severly under-powered--like, what's left? I understand life's ability to overcome difficulties, but not all barriers can be surmounted, and this sure seems like a series of really giant barriers.

Fourth, they won't even be able to see the stars.

Bob

The very fact that we have servived this long and have begun to look into the sky and wonder what if... is good enuff reason to conferm the egsistance of other life forms having done the same thing. However the size of the galaxy, and the complexity of the conditions required for our evolutionary path do, as Bob sagests almost compleatly prohibats us ever meating them. The masive improbabilaty factor could be a clue as to our history. As we all know this planet has had some near extingtion events. Any changes would or could have ment we never made it to this point in our jerney into space colinisation. Or did they simply slow the prosess. Bob makes repeted referance to the cost to a society of space exploration. Thats the only reason we do not have a maned space station on the moon, and have not yet been to mars. The cost. It seems to me that as long as we persue this monatary based economies we will never afford the leap into space.
Now dont ask me to sagest a better way becouse I dont have the slightest idea how to fix this money grabing mess we have gotten our selves into. Good old Gene Rhodenbery had some idea about this but I cant remember what that was either. We need to be pulling in the same direction and with the same goals or we are wasting our time. The other more redickleious idea is that we have been visated and are in fact the descendants of them. No I dont realy think that. or do I.... Yes I am one of those people that wants to slow our rush into space, but not for the resons sagested. Waiting untill its safe or cost effective would be silly.
I am more concerned about being asimulated or eaten. Or just blown up to make way for a buy pass. I do think we need to be more technicly advanced than we are... why wont my spell check work in here.

I think that there is probably other life out there. This is a good discussion to have, but I would throw one more thing in to the mix. If there is other life out there, I think it will be totally different to anything here. It will have developed to suit its environment which, if even slightly different to ours on earth will mean the life will be unrecognisable to what we have here.

The chances of us being able to communicate with radio waves or anything else could be very slim as the nearest planetary inhabitants which have developed this talent could be a very long, way away!

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Of all the things I've ever lost, I miss my mind the most!

You need to be much closer initially. I am fascinated by your many spelling errors; not because they are errors but because they draw distinctions between us and AI. Even though your accuracy may not be good enough for the spell checker to steer you into the correct spelling, it is good enough for us to understand what you mean. Trying to develop AI with the human capacity to get meaning through spelling fogs much more dense than yours will be a challenge. Especially humorous to me was your use of meat when you obviously meant meet (I hope). Meat is seldom used as a verb and, when it is, the meaning that immediately occurs to me is "to convert to meat i.e., food also see butcher v.t.".

Except for ice covered oceans such as is true of Europa, we think, they could see the stars. They very probably would have eyes (even on Europa-like worlds) as did our ancestors before they moved to land. Bioluminescence in worlds like Europa would confer a great survival advantage.

Bob, you need to loosen up and neutralize the negativism of your tightly constrained perception of the many tricks evolution can play. As for fire, critters could be evolved with hypergolic functions. If the sentients are cephalopods or crustaceans they can build structures from the ocean floor thereby creating water-free areas for our kind of technology. Even mammals could evolve without having first started as reptilians on land as could the reptiles without passing through the amphibian stages.

The path to technical competence may be longer but no less sure; it grants too large a survival advantage to be skipped. Nature contructs all sorts of biota, most of which won't endure, but those that don't offend the environments where they occur will survive and progress. It's the manifold structures that have to be sifted through selection that makes it all work and will create more fanciful creatures than we can imagine.

Self organization eventually leads to truth as we "know" it and produces critters that learn to love the truth above all else as Moses almost guessed in his rendition of the first Commandment.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

On Earth, intelligence is very pronounced in the molluscs (octopus), mammals, and birds ... some would also argue insects with regard to bees and ants. Perhaps its mankind's luck to have the advantage of appendages so as to construct things and actually record knowledge on retrievable mediums other than relying on mimickry or language. Intelligent (alien) life may fluorish throughout the universe, but not be identifiable to us unless they have almost the same capabilities as us .... or more!

I'm with you on that Spacepunk, but I'd go even further.

Life on another planet may have evolved completely differently. We have distinct groups here of plants and animals, along with bacteria, virus' etc, etc.

Who's to say that on another planet a completely different type of celled organism has evolved to be the dominant life there? Who's to say that dominant lifeforms on other planets haven't formed from bacteria?

The possibilities are limitless, which is why I think that anything similar to our life, will be a lot further away than we think!

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