Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Many incentives

To clarify
Socrates II — (archived)

If life in the Universe is rare, then I would expect the few intelligent
species to eventually seek each other out, hopefully for peaceful and
informative purposes.

However, if there are lots of intelligent species in the galaxy and beyond,
then while of course there may be no one else just like us, we would
need to be more than we are to attract a species that can conduct
interstellar travel.

One thing we can deduce for certain, there are LOTS of planets in the
Milky Way, with there being estimates of billions of Earth-type worlds.
Even if there aren't many with intelligent organisms upon them, it would
take a long time to find and study them all.

Our electromagnetic transmissions have only reached out into the
galaxy in a bubble just 200 light years across, which is rather small in a
galaxy 100,000 light years across with 400 billion star systems. And
most of those broadcasts are relatively faint and won't get very far
unless someone has very senstive receivers and happens to be looking
our way.

Of course an advanced ETI who doesn't like to leave their solar system
(that too may be a paradigm in regards to life coming from a system of
planets, but I digress) might build powerful telescopes in local space
which could see Earth in detail and determine there is something living
on our planet. We already have feasible plans for space telescopes that
could pick out continents on Earth-type worlds, so why not someone
even more sophisticated doing better than that?

This may be another answer to the Fermi Paradox: They can study us
and everyone else in the galaxy from the comfort and presumed safety
of their own solar system.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=star-shade-could-reveal-e

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