Just wait 800,000 years and you can join the Eloi.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Hello Jetlack.

On what do you base your rare-earth hunch?

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

I take it you're referring to the fictional species in The Time Machine?

Or are you talking about "god?"

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

In the previous post before the one you are referring to, I was musing about the the happiness of a domestic creature. It is on the previous page. Considering the context, I would say it is Wells' creatures to whom they are referring.

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I was referring to The Time Machine, of course. Maybe few enough people read it these days that it's no longer such an obvious refrence.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

I read it. The best part was not in my view the famous Eloi/Morlock symbiosis, but the crab creature at the end of the world.

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I like to laugh over the implausibility of the Time Traveller (he's never named) finding recognizable working matches in a recognizable museum 800,000 years in the future, but it's still a good story.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

This is a good point. Until we find some evidence of other earth like or similar biological life sustaining planets then we could assume that the earth is in fact a very rare planet indeed. We could assume that life in the universe comes in all different types of forms not just carbon based biological ones that we are accustomed to if this was the case then the range of life sustaining planets would increase dramatically.
Based on our current estimates for the age of the universe relative to the age of our planet there seems to me to be no reason why the universe is not in its infancy stage relative to its life span and that intelligent life on earth is one of if not the first in the galaxy or universe. If the age of the universe is in fact around 13 billion yrs then the earth is only approx 1/3rd the age of it. If the universe by design was to last say... 10 times that age then we could then say that the earth was one of the first offspring, and that life evolving from the earth was one of the early ancestors of life in the universe.

We could be the ones making the rules!

I've always thought the problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it assumes that a civilization's technological advances will take it in a path that leads to the use of radio and/or space travel. This is quite possibly not the case - if you just look at the history of earth, most of our civilization's existence has been without either, meaning that we were more or less nothing but "silence" to any other listeners out there.

It's quite possible that it is the same for most other civilizations within a reasonable distance (meaning within our galaxy). Perhaps there are thousands of civilizations in the galaxy, but their societies followed different paths of technology, some leading to dead-ends (like the agrarian societies that more or less characterized humanity for nearly 5000 years before the Industrial Revolution). That might seem to violate the principle of mediocrity, but it really doesn't; I can think of plenty of technological pathways that humanity could have taken which would have led us around the use of radio waves, or spacecraft.

Also we have no idea what will come after radio communication. We've only had it around 90 years, after all - who knows what comes next and whether we can detect it now.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Regarding all of our radio and radar transmissions into space, we know that a TV broadcast signal gets very weak just 30 miles from the transmitting antenna. A 50,000 watt radio station transmission signal gets weak about 1500 miles from the antenna. Short wave will travel half way around the world, but that’s only about 12,500 miles, and the signals are often quite weak. So wouldn’t all of our transmitted signals spread out in deep space and dissipate so much that they could not even be received at the distance of the nearest star? Plus, a distant observer would have to contend with the EM signals being bombarded into space by our sun, which compared to our earth in size, we are a mere dot transmitting fairly weak signals into space.

So why should we expect that people on some other planet dozens or hundreds of light years away should be “beaming” a very powerful radio signal directly at us, and how many watts of power would such a transmitter require to reach us with any observable strength, even assuming they knew we were here?

And if they just happened to pick up our signals, and they are 90 light years away, it would take another 90 years for us to receive their "Hello" response to our early signals and our early signals were very weak and probably won't reach out 90 light years in distance. And how long have we been transmitting very high powered signals? 30-50 years?

Sure, but one could also be musing on the happiness of a domestic creature with biblical undertones...

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

Any references to Eloi with biblical undertones would be a bilingual pun.

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I don't know--but comms in the "water hole" frequencies should be detectable. Note that the earth's curvature is a major reason for TV signals to get weak--they go right through the ionosphere and out into space. Hence relay stations and satellites to extend the range of TV signals.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I don't know how powerful such a signal would need to be, but I can think of one reason for a species to send out such signals.

If an alien civilization is even a few decades more technologically advanced than our own, then they would have the ability to spot planets the size of earth in their neighborhood, as well as the ability to analyze the spectrum of their atmospheres. If they see signs of life on those worlds, then they might send out directed signals to those worlds, just to see if anyone is listening there.

I wouldn't expect anyone to just send out powerful messages out randomly, though. And, even if they did just send them out randomly, the chances of us intercepting such a message would be pretty slim.

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Yes, they laughed at Einstein, but only because of his silly hairstyle; no one was actually laughing at his science.