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A quasar, too heavy to be true
On Monday, January 1, 2018 at 9:19:09 AM UTC-7, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
In article , Gary Harnagel writes: It is quite unreasonable to assume that in all the universe we are the first. In fact, it is unreasonable to assume that a civilization like ours didn't develop billions of years ago. How does this in any way contradict any worldview? The existence of a benevolent civilization billions of years older than ours wouldn't change YOUR worldview? Come ON! Not in the least. Why should it? I wouldn't be surprised. The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, the universe about three times as old. Civilization developed here, so I wouldn't be surprised if it did elsewhere, but I don't know how likely it is; perhaps there is some difficult bottlenect. It would be an interesting event, yes, but it wouldn't change my basic worldview. It WOULD change that of 99% of the world's population just if an advanced civilization wore confirmed to exist on a planet around Tabby's star. The odds of spontaneous life could be arbitrarily close to zero. That we are here (necessary for this discussion to take place) has zero commentary on the odds of spontaneous life anywhere else. That's likely to be quite irrelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia Panspermia is a hypothesis, by no means proven. I think it's pretty solid given evidence for extra-solar comets and asteroid impact. It seems to me that we should be arguing intelligent life developed long ago in the universe until refuted by evidence to the contrary. Why should we assume anything? Because we're human. It's what we DO. Also, there is no way to disprove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But there IS a way to confirm it, which was the mission of Kepler and will be the mission of the Webb telescope. Yes, the universe is older than the Earth, but since civilization developed only recently on Earth, it in no way follows that it must have developed earlier elsewhere. "Must" implies 100% probability. I prefer a strong "may" :-) At only 0.1% the speed of light, generation ships could cross the entire galaxy in a mere 0.1 billion years. There is no evidence that this has happened. Perhaps WE are the evidence :-) |
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