Adding to the Why the Silence in the search for intelligent ETL, heres a background on cosmic nucleo synthesis - indicating that it took time for the heavier elements from which we are made to by synthesized first in large stars then supernovaed into the cosmos. This means local materials from all the galaxies. How many generations of this process possible so far? His guess: 3 times, admitting great uncertainty. But what it might suggest is that the Galaxies have had a fair amount of time to generate advanced civilizations, perhaps 2 or more times over so speak, beginning with a succession of waves over the past say 8 billion years or so. this of course would be an continuous process more or less, so a potential trickle of new interstellar civilizations entering the galaxy for the past several billion years at least. If the speed of light is indeed an ultimate limit which even these civilizaitons cant get around, the only alternative for star travel is the slow way... but, given the enormous time involved, the opportunity to be exploring the galaxy, perhaps beyond, seems plausible. Some other considerations: the distribution of stars seeded with heavier elements seems to be in the mid to outer main reaches of the galaxy, roughly a broad band that includes earth. Stars without heavier elements can be safely ignored, and that is quite a few! Pretty much rules out globular clusters for example. Another interesting thing is the very special place of carbon in the periodic table as a one only in terms of its incredible chemical virtuosity, and it might well be argued that intelligent life had to arise from carbon. Ditto, the unique features of the double helix of R/DNA in providing a plausible means for replication. So, could mean the Star Trek humanoidish zoo might not be all the far from what we could expect. We can still plausibly wonder why the galaxy is not flooded with residual electromagnetic radiation. If civilizations had limited lifespans, would they perhaps not have posted automated signals capable to generating directed signals in search patterns for millions of years? One could make up a lot of stuff here, arguing for some kind of trans-stellar presence across the galaxy by now. But, for whatever reasons, so far we have not been visited, allowing for conspiracy theory addicts, and so far weve received no messages we can detect. As Chris rightly pointed out, this is just so much wool-gathering, but I do find it intriquing ... the quiet, that is.... again the issue of thin information, issues of scale and real difficulties facing even advanced civilizations, is just unknown... so this posting is definitely informal layperson armchair. Nothing more. And yes, we could be only birds, or early birds....
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 04:33:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015