'The Youngness Paradox' --"Explains Why SETI has Not Found Any Signals from Extraterrestrial Civi

originally posted by: ArtemisE
I just don't buy it. I think either there is a dept of defence number to call and he's lying or the powers that be already know SETI is looking in the wrong place for signals.

These are all naked assumptions. What are they based on? Are you familiar with how astronomers and astrophysicists work, and what they do when something interesting or unusual has been found?

a reply to: RUFFREADY

maybe they don't use the same kind of communication system as we do .

originally posted by: ArtemisE
What I'm saying is , since loads tax dollars were spent you can bet nasa/government had a hand in writing out the initial protocall. You have to imagaine that they wrote protocall a for if contact was made, when the project was originally designed.

There may nave been some tax dollars at one time, but SETI is currently NOT funded by the government. It relies on private funding.

I just don't buy it. I think either there is a dept of defence number to call and he's lying or the powers that be already know SETI is looking in the wrong place for signals.

The problem could be related to that fact that SETI has barely looked anywhere yet for a signal. They have only scratched the surface when it comes to looking for a signal in our galaxy.

I suspect there are a trillion'ish planets in our galaxy that host life. Most of them will be nothing more than carpets of cyanobacteria. Occasionally, you'll get African savanas full of life, or south American rainforest level's of life. Once in a blue moon you'll get semi-intelligent life. These I suspect, will be few and far between. Once in a while, you'll get truly intelligent life. I suspect the frequency at any given time is very small. I think we are not alone - just so far distributed that it's almost irrelevant!

Supposing intelligent life was originally distributed very sparsely, what's to prevent it from slowly expanding its territory, until it filled the galaxy? The general tendency of life to colonize new spaces is well known. The history of the human race, so far, is one of expansion from a small corner of Africa to an entire planet.
The expansion premise is the basis of the Fermi paradox. Even at speeds well below that of light, the galaxy could be filled in a few million years. Since conditions had apparently been favorable for life, several billion years before the origin of our planet, it seems that there has been far, far more than enough time for our galaxy to have been fully colonized.