Drake equation: How many alien civilizations exist?

Originally posted by Blue Shift
There's nobody else around but us. Now, maybe they exist on some hypothetical plane of existence we can't comprehend

Or did they wire everyone up for cable TV and tear down all the TV broadcast towers and that's why we can't detect their TV broadcast signals anymore?

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
If on the other hand you go with Sagan's more optimistic number, the Fermi Paradox would truly be a paradox, as it would be with most figures in-between.

Quite true. The more aliens, the more likely there would be many that would be much more advanced than us, and they more likely we would see some evidence of them. So if they exist, there can't be a whole lot of them or we would have seen evidence of them by now, even with our limited explorations.

The thing is, it's hard to keep reminding ourselves just how huge and foreboding and hostile space actually is. We get fooled by shows like Star Trek into thinking that space is something that can be zipped around in without it taking much time at all. But it's mind-numbingly huge and deadly and even the light and radio waves moving through it take practically forever to get anywhere.

So to those folks who believe that there are alien civilizations out there like ours, it still needs to be recognized that we'll likely never know about them, and never interact with them, and in that regard they are no more useful to us in any practical way than if they were imaginary. Imaginary Vulcans have contributed more to our lives than any real alien, if they exist, and I feel that will pretty much always be the case.

Originally posted by Blue Shift

Originally posted by HEYJOSE
If you still think that we are alone, then, well...your and idiot.

"Your and idiot," huh?
Sorry, I just have to laugh.

Thanks man. You made me realize, why am I posting on this stupid Sh$t anyway. Who cares. It doesn't matter. PEACE.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by Blue Shift
There's nobody else around but us. Now, maybe they exist on some hypothetical plane of existence we can't comprehend

Or did they wire everyone up for cable TV and tear down all the TV broadcast towers and that's why we can't detect their TV broadcast signals anymore?

I think the idea is that even if they did that, their signals would still be floating around in space, bouncing off things, bending around black holes and such that we could still detect it. Not only that, there would supposedly be more than one civilization doing this, so even if we missed our window of opportunity to catch one of them broadcasting into space there would still be a million or so more still (1,000 ~ 10,000,000,000 years ago) doing it.

As it is, though, we haven't heard jack diddly. Sure, we haven't been listening long, but in the above scenario, with millions of civilizations potentially broadcasting for billions of years, how long should it take?

Life in The Universe (Apart from life on Earth) doesn't exist untill we find it or it finds us.

As yet we haven't.

reply to post by CaptainBeno


Drakes equation

N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L

Equation solved

N= GUESS* guess guess guess guess guess guess

So N = GUESS!!!!

Originally posted by pikestaff

Originally posted by rigel4

Originally posted by kronos11

Originally posted by Druscilla

Ah the Drake Equation. On the other side of that, We have Fermi's Paradox: If there are indeed ETs out 'there', why haven't we seen them? (NOT including UFO reports, but more of a proper "seeing")

Because humans are by and large feeble minded and would not be able to handle such a revelation. Instead of evolving in the past 500 years we've astonishingly went the opposite way. Seeing them is, for the time being, only for the select few who have been chosen.

I totally have never understood this concept of "Humans being feeble minded", how so?

Most people are far more capable than you think... People could handle the truth easily.

I am reminded of the program 'war of the worlds' that aired in 1939 (?) in America, the panic was widespread, was it not?

That was a long time ago.........People were still naive back then.

Originally posted by Blue Shift

Originally posted by DaveNorris
how can we expect to have found alien life when we have searched less than 0.00001% of the places it might be.

Well, statistically speaking, there's something called a "sample" which could be useful here. We don't need to search everywhere, we just need to search in enough places so that it represents a typical slice of the universe. So far, we haven't searched a whole lot of the universe, but we've searched a bit of it in different ways including listening to radio noise, and the answer so far is the same. There's nobody else around but us. Now, maybe they exist on some hypothetical plane of existence we can't comprehend, but we don't really care about those things. We're looking for intelligent creatures that live in the same kind of reality as us that we can understand.

So far, none. Oh, sure, there are millions of hypothetical aliens out there, and maybe a few statistically probable aliens out there. But they kind of have the same thing in common -- they aren't real. the only way for us to know for sure that there is an alien out there is to find one. Yes or no. Anything else is just wishful thinking.

edit on 24-8-2012 by Blue Shift because: (no reason given)

so far we have searched earth, we have barely scratched the surface of mars and we have a few images from the surface of venus and titan.

searching for radio waves is a bit pointless as humans have used radio waves for a little over a century and our first transmissions are about 110 light years out at this point which although passes many solar systems only covers one thousandth of the milkyway. there may be many 'radio wave bubbles' out there they just havent reached us yet.

Drakes "Equation"??
Isnt that more of a THEORY?

I mean a equation have a definite anwer right?
Like x+1=2 / x=1...No?

If so..It should be Drakes THEORY...Not equation....

Originally posted by DaTroof
Now, if we're talking about an infinite universe, we must also assume there to be galaxies with stars as large as our entire Milky Way.

There are no mathematical grounds for making a statement like that.

You may not realize it, but "infinity" excludes an infinite number of possibilites.

For example, how many numbers are in the set of all even numbers?

How many of those are odd numbers?

How many numbers are in the set of all odd numbers?

Harte

reply to post by lobotomizemecapin


Sure, on OUR known scale. I'm talking about infinite space and perhaps extra dimensional universes that overlap this one. I'm not sure how much farther I need to explain.

Sick of seeing “because we haven't seen them they can't exist“ ...

People with that frame of mind need to realise that the universe that we have observed is TINY, like the size of a proton in comparison to the entire Milky Way...it is incomprehensible to even be so small minded to think that month other life exists out there, then, you could also argue that life doesn't exist, since “living beings“ are made of the exact same things that non-living objects are made of.


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