--- In [email protected], "John" <jr_...@...> wrote: > > Awesome to think about. But where are they?
They are probably busy not existing. Consider the fact that there is only complex life on Earth because DNA isn't perfect at it's job, if it didn't make a few teeny mistakes every time it made a copy of itself the complications that compounded to make all life we see today wouldn't have happened, it would still be bacteria at most floating about in the primordial sea. That's one fluke but consider also the many different types of complex life that *could* have developed a self aware consciousness but didn't. How many millions of generations went by before the particular events that forced us into the state we are happened? If consciousness like ours is a given whenever you have life why did it wait so long and to be the only one on Earth so far? If we disappeared is there any other animal that looks like it might follow in our footsteps and develop an advanced culture? They all seem happy scratching their arses and eating each other. To evolve complex behaviour requires a pressure from the environment, what happened to us that could happen to something else and have the same effect? Another big problem with the 'where is everybody?' idea is that without a long carboniferous period we wouldn't have had the energy to create our civilisation and probably wouldn't have had the time to do all the required science. How many other potential life harbouring planets have a huge supply of free energy lying around like the Earth does? Just a few of the variables you have to toy with when considering life on other planets but if Earth is anything to go by you need a *lot* of coincedences for life like us to get going and even more for us to be self aware so how can anyone claim it's likely to have happened twice just because there are rather a lot of planets on which it could have happened. I doubt we are alone as far as life - as in microbes and moss - are concerned but something we could talk to is going to be a hell of a lot rarer. It happened once here, once in 4 billion years. And it rather goes without saying that it needn't have, it took a very particular set of circumstances to a very particular type of animal. The odds *against* life like us must be absolutely astronomical. And it has to be said it is *very* quiet out there. > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h76JFOuCpXI&NR=1 >
