The Shrine

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/

Pretty good arguments. After reading Kurzweil, I always wondered, "if what he predicts is true, why haven't super-intelligent aliens contacted us by now?"

Live it up guys, we might just destroy ourselves before reaching the singularity.

Whoa, hello again!

They are comin out of the woodwork aren't they?

Zhuge Liang4 wrote: Live it up guys, we might just destroy ourselves before reaching the singularity.

That's been theorized many a times and so much so I'm pretty much convinced that IS the destiny of the human race: self annihilation. Whether it be an experiment gone wrong or nuclear war, it seems our species is the kind that will just tear itself apart until we've gone extinct.

And Hey Zhuge, hehe

I don't find the argument on this to be very convincing. The argument about life being 'unlikely' doesn't really mean much when 'unlikely' cannot be defined as a probability. If the chance of life is 1 out of 1 googol planets then yeah it's be unlikely to find life elsewhere. If it's like 1 in a trillion planets unlikely then you'd expect quite a bit of life in the universe (billions of galaxy X billions of planets). It's basically a rehash of the equation of the likelihood of life that is equal to a bunch of numbers multiplied together, except no one has a clue whether any of these numbers are remotely correct. Depending on how you tweak the numbers you can either get we must be alone or the universe is filled with intelligent life.

It is pretty safe to say though that given the size of the universe, even if intelligent life existed, it'd be pretty hard to reach other unless we come up with technology, or that the alien possesss the technology, that fundamentally changes how the laws of physics as we know it. I think Hawkins said that it's probably the case where basic life is very common, but complex life is very unlikely, but how likely and how unlikely, no one really knows.

Zhuge Liang4 wrote:http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/

Pretty good arguments. After reading Kurzweil, I always wondered, "if what he predicts is true, why haven't super-intelligent aliens contacted us by now?"

Live it up guys, we might just destroy ourselves before reaching the singularity.

It must be that time of year again, Zhuge is posting =P

Don, that's not really what the essay is about. It's not about how likely or unlikely complex life is. It's about given that liklihood, what does it imply for the future of our species?

Zhuge! Long time old friend.

The average time a space faring civilization will last could be 1000 years or 1 million years. It's again a number that's totally arbitrary and depending on what you think it is, you can get completely different conclusions on the nature of life in the universe.