By The Way...

The Titan landings today have put me in a spacey sort of mood, which makes it a perfect time to link to this article, about alien civilizations. What's interesting about it is that it's about scientists taking the idea of alien civilizations seriously, not just from the typical eye-rolling scientist perspective:

Haisch, along with physicists James Deardorff, Bruce Maccabee and Harold Puthoff, make their case in the journal article: "Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation."

The scientists point to two key discoveries made by Australian astronomers and reported last year that there is a "galactic habitable zone" in our Milky Way Galaxy. And more importantly that Earth’s own star, the sun, is relatively young in comparison to the average star in this zone — by as much as a billion years.

Therefore, the researchers explain in their article that an average alien civilization would be far more advanced and have long since discovered Earth. Additionally, other research work on the supposition underlying the Big Bang — known as the theory of inflation — shores up the prospect, they advise, that our world is immersed in a much larger extraterrestrial civilization.

Cooool.

Now, bear in mind that I don't think it's wrong for scientists to be highly skeptical of the idea of aliens and alien civilizations, because as scientists they work on these things called "facts," and to date there's nothing out there (aside from our own imaginations) which suggests there are intelligent aliens wandering about the stars. Wanting something to be true isn't the same thing as having it be true. At the same time, reponsible and reasoned speculation is also within the scientist's purview, and this sure seems like some interesting speculation.

What's left unstated here is the idea that massively advanced aliens leave us alone mostly because, from their perspective, we're just a step above household pets on the intellidence scale. Not sure how I feel about that.

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• #4 Comment from rubyslipers4me 
  1/15/05 1:18 PM | Permalink

  Scientists, Physicists and on lookers to the future.  Are they all wrong? Or do we think we are the only living beings? Hummm...well somebody needs to expand their reading and thier minds a little farther than the .50 cent words used to discribe thier..... theory or maybe they are still stuck on Darwin.  No, I don't think their are "ET's" oh please phone home....But throughout of all the Universe and beyond billion's of stars newly discovered not to mention astroids and planets...take it as a wakeup call and study a little deeper. Much deeper. I could go on but I won't. The mnd is a terrible thing to waste on shallow thinking.  
• #3 Comment from plittle 
  1/14/05 9:30 PM | Permalink

  Part of the thing is that all the scientists are science fiction geeks, so they design their theories to try and allow for the existence of ETs. None of the things mentioned in the article fall into the category of hard science. Multi-dimensional super-string theory? It's all just theoretical musing, closer to art than science. Sure, it's a starting point for future research, but it's like saying a doodle on a lunch napkin will result in an accurate recreation of stonehenge. I guess it's possible, but it doesn't happen very often in practice.
  -Paul
• #2 Comment from greyhoundloner03 
  1/14/05 9:24 PM | Permalink

  I like that idea...of not being alone in the universe.
• #1 Comment from mavarin 
  1/14/05 6:07 PM | Permalink

  Nah, it's not that. They just don't feel like spending a few centuries getting here.
  -K