Out of Pod Experience

Why? All because of you, I dare say.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox




What is keeping intelligent life from contacting or reaching us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter


Is it not developing biologically?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
It's basically the science of figuring out how to cleverly state we have no friggin clue how life originated. We can show how different physical parts come together like membranes, and that the replicating parts will replicate until they run out of material if you force them together, but an entire life form has no business being assembled accidentally. This is why we must send probes to other planets to find if there is life. We have no clue how rare or common it is to get this far.

Is it not evolving to care beyond it's own planet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence
We have tons of life on our own that would never care to go to the stars. What caused human brain development to shoot past the point where everything else stopped? We speculate about problem solving and adaptation, but these things still had to evolve FIRST, and be reinforced by needs second, and of course so many other species have gone extinct rather than adapt anything at all.

Is fast space travel impossibly hard to master?

Is there some great disaster that occurs in space and wipes life out too frequently to allow time to overcome all the obstacles? Stars dying or just changing phases could be putting a time limit on their systems for example.

I eat Meat.

Take that as you will.

I agree with both.

Since you bring up God, I had a fun thought one day.

The classic line about the Bible... 'The word of God'. Half joking I Thought to myself "Then why are there people's names on the pages?" and answered myself with the concept of a prophet. The idea that God spoke to a person, or gifted them some knowledge.

Can you imagine if God tried to explain causing the big bang and the creation of life to someone in that time period?

It's neat to go back and read creation stories from various religions leaning on prophets, and speculate how that would go. How they would try to put it into words. How they could begin to tell it to others.

Nah.

Moe likely that all other intelligent life hasn't left the primordial soup yet, or, they blew each other up in an intergalactic war that took place 65 million years ago.

The final hull shot missed, and took out the dinosaurs.

Life in the universe is not 1 / ∞, and one should never forget that space + time = ∞

One should also never, ever forget the cheesecake principal.

Given enough time, even a partial vacuum will create a cheesecake as the elements will (at some point) come together, create life and intelligence, resulting in someone or thing baking a cheesecake.

It may take several iterations of life and intelligence within said vacuum, but there shall be cheesecake.

Be glad for the existence of cheesecake, it's yummy, and everything else is a distraction.

AK

If you look at the location of our solar system in relation to the core of our galaxy, you will see that we live so far from the center that nobody has any interest to come out here.

A good analogy is this. The core is like a big city, lots of solar systems very close to each other, like apartments in apartment building. Then you move further out, the solar systems are further apart, like suburbs, everyone is close enough and have a little breathing room. Once you move further out, you get into the country, the solar systems are like farms picking out here and there, and there is a lot of empty space in between, that is Earth. Some intrepid explorer from the city might stumble on us, but the chances are that they never leave the city since there is lots of other people much closer.

Earth is a Rim world. The Rim is a dangerous place. Unexplored, uncharted and unimaginably huge.

Perhaps we are just a dream within a dream.

I read almost identical story by Isaac Asimov...my bet is he was first, being a genius and all.
Those aliens reproduced asexually and communicated with light and went hysterical when they found out about how we reproduce. Hilarious story actually.

EDIT : found it again

"What is This Thing Called Love?", written in 1961

included in "Nightfall and Other Stories", released in 1969

So I am not impressed by Terry Bisson (whispers "ripoff")

Your vision of how it works is tainted by years of science fiction.

I've heard it suggested by some scientist or another that the "core" is actually too densely populated with stars to sustain life. Gamma ray bursts, tidal forces, rogue planets, et cetera would all wreak havoc on developing life. Their assertion was that the outer arms of the galaxy are spread out enough that life would have the hundreds of millions of years necessary to evolve into a spacefaring race. If that's the case, expansion of colonies would be slow and limited to the "rim" of the galaxy, and we'd be trying to talk to each other across the entire span.

Also, there's concepts such as the idea of robotic probes being dispatched by various civilizations. There was a story I read years ago about a group of probes which had been damaged and basically set up a colony in our asteroid belt in order to survive. The premise was that there are three kinds of probes: explorers, seed ships, and hunters which will seek to destroy any other civilization they find. These probes watched as humanity developed space flight and explored the solar system, hoping that we'd find out before it was too late that we were endangered by our radio broadcasts. Ultimately we discovered an alien asteroid colony that was created by a seed ship and then destroyed by a hunter. When we realized what had happened and how, our radio broadcasts went silent and we effectively disappeared from the universe.

If that's the case, then no one has made contact because they're either dead, or hiding.