Carlos wrote:Ironhide wrote:Moggy wrote:Preezy wrote:There has to be life clinging to a rock going round one of those stars, just has to be.
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
If there's other life out there, which I'm assuming there is given the incomprehensible number of stars in one galaxy alone, the odds of any two civilizations advanced enough to develop interstellar travel meeting each other are almost non existent.
I imagine most miss each other by millions of years.
The other option is the galaxy is teeming with life, uses a much more efficient way of communicating than radio and has Earth segregated off in some sort of planetary preserve like the the tribes in the Amazon because we are deemed both primitive and stupid.
Crop circles are just some sort of extraterrestrial NTV where we wonder what they are and the aliens are all peeing themselves with laughter at the sight.
We've been broadcasting radio for just over 120 years. I doubt those early signals would be anywhere near powerful enough to ever be detected but let's assume an advanced race could pick them up. That would mean an intelligent race would need to be within 120 light years of us.
As a map it looks like this:
That tiny blue dot shows a diameter of 200 light years around Earth. And that's just our galaxy!
There could be thousands of intelligent species of life out there, all blasting out trippy space music. But, even if they started broadcasting in the days of Julius Caesar, if they are on the other side of the galaxy, we'll never hear the alien version of Mozart.