Habitable Zones

[Yooxra]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0328090937.htm

Makes you wonder how long till we start seeing E.T.'s on a large scale. Get your blasters ready friends.

[Kz]

vent yooxine im bored all alones

[Fusa]

I honestly believe that we started to see UFO's after the Atomic bomb blew off ( then many many subsequent "test" fires ).

As soon as you start to make your presence known, you will be found easy, if we are already watching such planets whos to say they didn't detect these atomic blasts coming from the "safe zone" and travel here in 25 years.

[rursusferre]

I personally don't really think aliens have come here. Time is as important as distance. The universe is enormous and its likely the time it would take to traverse those distances make travel improbable. But I do think there have to be, or will be, or has been other life. Anything else is just retarded. I remember reading a guy doing an equation that took all of these crazy factors into account, and it left like one tenth of one millionth of one percent as planets that would have life, some crazy low fraction. It still meant that there were literally millions of planets that would have life. I just think we will never see each other, which is sad.

[Gogan]

The Drake equation (well worth a read). It almost seems an obvious conclusion once you grasp just how enormous the universe is. Per the article, with the original values Drake used, he estimated there were 10 detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the entire Milkey Way galaxy. Now realize there are billions of other galaxies in the universe. So yeah, how could there not be other life in the universe?

But as Rufus said, time and distance is a bitch. There are some interesting theories related to the Drake equation (e.g. Fermi paradox) that try to explain why, if extraterrestrial life should be so common, we haven't detected any yet. Seems like the crux of it is, technological civilizations don't last very long. Even a 10,000 year old civilization is a drop in the bucket of the estimated 14 billion years the universe has been around. So yeah, between the relatively short lifespan of an advanced civilization and the huge distances between galaxies (hundreds of thousands of light years), the chances of bumping into each other does seem pretty small. =/

[rursusferre]

Yeah, scale is something people really can't grasp. It's the same thing for people who argue against evolution, I think they just don't really grasp the scale. Chances are there have been hundreds or even thousands of civilizations within the observable sphere around us. Hell, there could be a civilization right now. The problem is, when we look through our telescopes, we are seeing hundreds of thousands, if not sometimes millions of years old information. We'll probably never know.

[Stag]

Isn't Steven Hawking an alien?

[Stag]

Maybe a transformer

[rursusferre]

No, but he loves whore houses apparently.

[Onion]

God told me we were the only ones so obviously you're all wrong.