Originally Posted by KrisZ
Love the various "examples".
"The universe is so vast, there must be other intelligent life" - sure how would they find us in this vastness?
Oh, the technology that would be like "magic" to us, just like the Spanish. But Spanish manifested themselves right away to the original inhabitants and their technology, although seemed magical, was in full display. A superior civilization, with superior technology has no reason hide itself and its technology.
So where are the examples of this alien technology you guys keep mentioning? I'm sure the answer would be that it's probably part of that magical technology, so we can't even perceive them lol.
Again, how can logic and reason stand against wild imagination?
Originally Posted by KrisZ
Originally Posted by Wolf359
There are probably other civilizations out there, but with light as the limiting factor, they're probably beyond reach. If we can somehow do 10-20% light speed, Andromeda at 2.5 million light years away would take 12.5-25 million light years to reach. Our species hasn't even been around that long.
It's not just the travel I'm talking about. We have been emitting man-made electromagnetic waves for about only 100 years. Even assuming the best case scenario that the signals are uniformally distributed around our planet, essentially making it as an expandable bubble in all directions, and that all the signals are above the cosmic noise and have the power to travel millions of years, that only gives us a 100 light year bubble where we are visible. So we are pretty much invisible to the whole universe, as far as signs of intelligent life goes.
Sure, another civilization may have our solar system classified as one that could support life, if they happened to stumble upon it, but chances are that ours would me one of many. Without signs of intelligent life, it would be the luck of the draw they they would decide to make the journey to our system.
Another factor is time. I don't think "believers" realize that the observable universe is a view to the past. When we're talking millions of light years away, what you see today is not what it actually is in reality. So going by your example of Andromeda being 2.5 million light years away, if we had the technology to travel there today at light speed, it would take us 2.5 million years to get there, but the time we got there, it would've been 5 million year difference between what we saw today and by the time we arrived. In 5 million years a lot can happen to living organisms and the planets themselves.
But heck, I'm sure the magical technology would take care of that too.
You're still looking at it through the lens of current human technology. Who, today, knows what technology could be developed in thousands or millions of years?
There's really no technological problem that can't be overcome by an engineer, given enough time and knowledge. I believe, even the laws of physics that we're bound by, today, are able to be, and will be, overcome eventually. And, probably have been solved, by other civilizations who have been around exponentially longer than we have.