Justin Hale
Joined: 24 Nov 2007
Location: the Straight Talk Express
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 Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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| ED209 wrote: |
Could you then show me the math?
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Unfortunately not, as I am a mere lay observer. Nevertheless, in 1999, the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe (ranging from dwarfs with as few as ten million stars up to giants, like Andromeda, with one million million. Our Milky Way of course contains 400,000 million according to recent estimates).
"... the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth" says Dr Glen Mackie
With nutty numbers like that, waiting for tangible evidence before asserting that other civilizations exist is extremely unreasonable. We should assume uncritically, not even have a debate, that they exist.
| ED209 wrote: |
| Even if there were an infinite number of planets they could all be in theory dead. |
They could, and the vast majority I suspect are, but the likelihood of them all being dead (and remember to include satelites, likely to be more numerous than planets - Jupiter has 63) is very low indeed, given our planet got lucky and our neighbor Mars is a near-miss. I expect in the future for it to be discovered that Mars once had a civilization, but let's not go nuts.  |
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