[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Tomaz Kristan]

The most common line of thinking goes something like this:

"You know, the Universe is soooo big, even the Galaxy is sooo big, that
there MUST be intelligent life out there!"

Well, as has been said here before, it's not THAT big. The assumption that
the "Universe is big enough" - is a bad one. Still this assumption is
widespread. It's a common idea.

In the infinite space, with the infinite number of stars and with the
infinite light speed, this "axiom of the masses" - would hold.


But with the finite light speed or any other finite number - this reasoning
can be easily wrong.

Say, that there was a quadrillion of civilizations just like ours in the
Universe. That still doesn't guarantee another  civilization with a book
named Rare Earth with the approximately the same  plot.

The probability p of an advanced civilization per star can easily be
smaller than 1/N - where N is the number of stars in the Universe.

The majority just forget this obvious fact. They just assume that p is
bigger than 1/N or rather p is MUCH bigger than 1/N.

Looks like it isn't!

www.protokol2020.wordpress.com




On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 10:05 PM, TwentFirstCentury Matters <
matters21stcentury at yahoo.com> wrote:

> "### Absolutely. Plus, we have to remember that our information about
> the far reaches of the universe is very outdated. It takes time for
> light cones to intersect... not seeing signs of expansions in galaxies
> farther than 0.7 billion
>
> years is to be expected. This means we don't have to be the firstborn
> in the whole universe, only the firstborn in a much smaller sphere, to
> explain the still-empty skies."
>
>
> Rafal,
> would you surmise the farther away beings might be, the more unlike
> humans they would be?
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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