The Glade 4.0

It's a shame we'll probably never find out if there's other life out there.

If they're smart, they'll steer well clear of here.

"Bleezlethorp! Put out the lights! Humans are coming and I don't want them to see that we're home!"

QFT!!!

We do not need to find life beyond earth. If there is anyone out there, I hope we never find them and that they never find us.

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Raell Kromwell

If we don't, who will help us against the Reapers?

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Tee hee humans ruin their society and environment humans are so **** up and destructive tee hee.

What makes any of you think that we're worse than any other species that may or may not inhabit the universe?

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It's about as likely that we're the best species out there as it is that we're the worst. /shrug

We won't. Our descendants might. Our species has a tradition of figuring out how to do things that we think are impossible.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's generally true, but has limits. We might not know what those limits are, but they're there. At the very least, there's a tremendous physical difference between say manufacturing large thin panels that can create resistance with the air beneath them, to fly in our atmosphere, and getting a craft to match or surpass the speed of light, where it would most likely still take at least a lifetime to reach a viable planet. And all of that's just the price of rolling the dice at the casino table. The odds still are that nothing within our range would reveal life. Oh and of course none of this takes into account the chances of either the human race taking a technological step backward due to their own folly, or a natural cataclysm forcing the issue.

Prove it.

Are you seriously going to claim that everything is possible? because that's what you're doing. Yes, maybe one day each of us will become infinite gods that can merely think and reform the entire universe at our whim. Fine, that's the bottomless and unprovable abyss of philosophical babble that you're engaging in. You're right, anything's possible, we can't disprove anything, but that gets us nowhere in reasonable argument because none of us truly accept that in every day life. When 7 billion people roll out of bed, so to speak, no one thinks 'I might float in the air or slam against the ceiling', because we've all accepted the truth of gravity, however it might specifically be defined. To try to argue that maybe somewhere else in the universe gravity doesn't exist or is appreciably different is a non starter, because we've never measured that after a trillion tries and hypothesizing about it doesn't get us anywhere.

It's just hard to look back at the last 200 years, recognize the advancement in technology (and the exponential speed of increase), and not imagine that tech 200 years from now will seem to be "magic" or "impossible". I'm not saying we're definitely going to evolve into demigods, but hey, that's not impossible

At least we can always dream.

If we could find them then they'd already have found us. So nothing is out there that's reachable in my opinion.

An unprovable assumption.

Not that I'm sold on life on other planets, how do you figure that?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

It assumes every instance of intelligent life in the universe is more advanced than we are. Chances are equal that we're the most advanced life-form or that we're the least-advanced.

I admit we've spent at least a fifth of recorded history regressing technologically before starting up again and taking off exponentially, but it could have played out worse.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Also as easily as we could go from current technology to technomagery in 200 years we could as easily go belly up and have another dark ages, especially given our capacity to destroy ourselves.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I don't think we ever regressed in technology and I doubt you could prove it.

How were the pyramids or the sphinx built? We lost that information for thousands of years, not to mention all the running water, paved roads, bath houses and the like that disappeared for 1000 years after the Roman empire went belly up. Maybe regressed was a strong word, but we certainly spent a thousand years doing very little advancing compared what happened in after.

While alien societies could have done better, they could have as easily done worse.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

If we built a spaceship today that could accelerate constantly at 1g, any one of us could conceivably land on the other side of the universe within our lifetimes (less than 50 years).

Obviously building such an engine would be no small feat, but I don't think alien beings (if they exist) should be considered "un-reachable."

Is that the word you meant to use? Because I didn't do the math, but I think even the observable universe is much, much bigger than that.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Whether or not carbon-based life is the only possible type of life, it certainly seems to be the lightest. On their own, the five lighter elements just don't bond in ways that allow for the vast diversity of molecular arrangements that you get with organic chemistry. Diversity is likely a necessary condition for evolution to work at all. Effectively this means that if life does exist elsewhere in the universe, it would have to be on a pretty similar schedule as we are.

One argument goes that because of this, any other life in the universe is probably about as technologically advanced as us. Thus even if they exist, it is exceedingly unlikely that know about, let alone have visited earth. In other words, if we can't do it, probably neither can they.

On the other hand, imagine a parallel earth in which the Roman Empire didn't collapse. It's not difficult to imagine that the population and technological boom starting around the Renaissance in our history could have happened centuries earlier. By the present time, they could be 1000 years ahead technologically. On a cosmological/geological time scale, it's insignificant. But if the prognosticators are right, we might be just at the "knee of the curve" right now. If so, even just a century or two could make a radical difference in capability.

I don't really have a point. Just sayin'.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yes, Universe. Just keep in mind that I'm speaking in terms of time for the astronauts on the spaceship. If you went back to Earth after the mission... well I don't think it would exist anymore. Relativity is interesting like that...