A picture of your house appears on a screen “Vee have found ze landink zite, crashink ze Vindicaar…now!!”
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We’ll be fine for a very, very long time as nobody knows we’re really out here yet. I’d be more concerned with what’s happening down here on Earth as after all these years we’ve been around we still can’t get along.
It’s actually been a while since I’ve done this, so…
R* – 7 per year, according to recent-ish estimates.
fp – This is probably as near to 1 as makes no difference.
ne – This … is probably somewhere around 0.1. Who knows, really.
fe – We’ve found life everywhere we’ve found an energy source, liquid water, and nutrients. This is probably as near to 1 as makes no difference.
fi – Now, here’s the bottleneck. I have no data to support this, but I find the argument put forward in Brown and Wardlee’s book Rare Earths to be convincing. While life may be ubiquitous, complex life could be quite rare. The leap from single-cell to multi-cell life is key. Get past that, and you’ve got a real shot. I’m going to guess … 0.01.
fc – Get past the previous hurdle, and you’re probably going to develop radio at some point. Unless you’re aquatic, in which case radio doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. So … guessing 0.5. (Pure WAG.)
L – Having developed it, how long do you use it? I’m guessing you go through your MOAR POWER phase of AM/FM radio usage, and then you go on to whatever the local equivalent of broadband internet is. So … 150 years.
That means:
N = 7 * 1 * 0.1 * 1 * 0.01 * 0.5 * 150 = 1.05
The smallest fractions – 0.1, 0.01, 0.5 – are the ones I’m least certain about. Still, it’s unlikely that the number is much higher than 10.
So while we’re not alone, our nearest neighbors are far enough away that we may as well be.
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When I took college physics and astronomy back in 2000, we studied this equation. Used spectrometers. Good stuff
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Psh any race advanced enough to send a message from space is too smart to deal with humans, they would just wipe out the race and be done with the BS before it even started, then harvest whatever resources that are actually useful, and move on.
It’s more like, whatever they can get here they can get almost anywhere, so why bother with the hairless monkeys at the bottom of a gravity well?
Why not wipe out a species before it can become a threat later? Humans are a huge threat to humans if we had advanced space travel, you know damn well we would just start taking over planets.
I always thought about Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs, and Steel and how something like The Walking Dead series would make sense as alien virus. Prometheus
Why land with ships or wage ground war? Customize a perfect weaponized virus. It needs a host and the ability to spread before it fully kills the host
Should implies can. Interstellar travel is a LOT harder than you may have been led to believe.
As I said above, we’re not alone, but our nearest neighbors are far enough away that we may as well be.
Meh i would not even land with a ship, if it were me, i would just suck the air out of the planet or destroy the O-zone and let them people die that way. Or use a mist that wipes out life. If you are an advanced race, odds are you can wipe out a planet’s life without landing.
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That’s an answer that’s more complicated than it needs to be. A relativistic impactor – an iron slug moving at 0.999c – will absolutely get the job done.
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It is only “hard” because people have not figured it out yet.
I give you Fermi’s Paradox – if it’s so easy, then where the Hell IS everybody?
Simple, avoiding a low-class world. Why would ANYONE want to make contact with a world that cannot even make peace with itself.
“Do not respond! Do not respond!”
give the Alien a ham and pineapple pizza
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Personally I think receiving any messages from space would be creepy.
It’s like thinking you’re home alone and then you hear someone talk
I don’t know what’s more far-fetched, a giant EMP charge shot from space, or every machine on Earth being on at the same time.
like, whos “getting” this message? who would you believe if they told you? unless you seen it for yourself with your own two eyes or heard it with your own ears, dont believe a thing.
unless its a telepathic thing. even then, who’s going to believe you? would you even believe yourself?
SUS! …you are one of them aren’t you >_>
…hehehe…
…o.o heh
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