This was fun to read, and well thought out...

[NM_Shooter]

I don't know what your opinion of space faring aliens might be... my own thoughts are that there is other intelligent life out there, but highly^100 improbable that it is going to come here.

This is a fun read....

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

[glenn kangiser]

Started reading this , Frank.

A few thoughts come to mind.

If scientific... perhaps they are communicating - we are not communicating the same way or are an entirely different type of life form.

If Biblical... perhaps we are the first experiment with creating life and we are a failure not to be repeated.

Perhaps there are more experiments out there but cross-contamination is being prevented by distance and the creators desire to prevent one experiment from being influenced by the other.

Perhaps ET's are other Biblical entities that are not allowed to present themselves directly.

Perhaps we are not nearly as smart as we think we are.... maybe all of our communication is like baby gibberish and they don't want to ruin our eventual development of real communication skills by talking nonsensical baby talk to us....

Just random thoughts after getting up to make big gun noises and scare my  and the neighbor dog from barking at my steer. Just brought him home yesterday.....

13.7 billion years ...age of the universe... I consider this to be scientists picking numbers out of their hat to sound smart.  They are such a small fly speck on the ground pepper shaker of time that there is no real way they can say that with any authority.  There is no factual data to support their claim, so they do not really impress me with their big numbers.

Biblically life on earth is roughly around 6000 years as I recall.  How long in the making? Who knows... seems it is not that totally specific... Other places?  Planets..?  Experiments with life ... If Biblical it would seem that it was the first experiment with creating life.  Rethinking was done according to my thoughts... Noah ... the flood.. the rainbow covenant indicating afterthoughts about destroying most earth life.

OK ...someone else for crazy thoughts.....

[NM_Shooter]

Well, we are looking for any sort of energy that is electromagnetic related.  This covers a whole lot of activity, some which is generated on purpose, some not.  I work with the folks at NRAO in Socorro, and got to tour the array a couple of years ago, and was able to walk around in one of the dishes along with a tour of the correlator room.  We're doing a very good job of looking for anybody using electricity, nuclear power, or rubbing dissimilar materials together.  It is possible that there is an energy source that we are missing, but for them to be able to use this source without doing something else that generates emag distrubances is very, very unlikely.  We're not just looking on channel 23 on the CB radio.... we are looking very, very broadband. 

I sent the below email to a buddy of mine (who sent me that link).  Here are my thoughts on aliens 

<snip>
That is an excellent write up, and I agree with most of it, especially the arguments that it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.  I believe that space wandering aliens are highly^100  unlikely, but I believe that planet locked intelligent life elsewhere is highly probable.

I have a theory about families.  I have a very large family on my mom's side.  Over 110 first and second cousins just in the Chicago area alone.  When I was a little kid, we used to socialize with them a lot.  We'd have picnics and reunions, Christmas and birthday parties.  But something weird has happened.  As the family has grown bigger we tend to not socialize together much at all.  Even the family members there no longer get together.  Seems like it is the parents that are the focal point of a social group, and as the parents age, they tend to not hang out so much with siblings as much as with their own kids and grandkids.  I think the integral family social circle is difficult to maintain with a group greater than about 20 people.   There have also developed some feuds within our once close family structure.  And I think some of it is driven by competitiveness / greed.  A lot of it is apathy, but competitiveness and grudges exist.  So groups of my peeps have splintered off and go do their own thing.  Nothing surprising there.

For any intelligent life, I think that development of technology is dependent upon interaction within social groups.  Two people almost always can get more than twice as much done as one person.  I also think that for a species to continue to adapt and to thrive, it must be competitively greedy.  The very nature of wanting to do well for yourself and your offspring in an environment of limited resources is to get just a little bit more of the resource than others wanting those resources.  It is competitiveness, coupled with technology, that makes us effective at destroying ourselves.  I suspect that this is the case for all intelligent life, and maybe even not-so-intelligent life.   

Because of this, I think we tend to reset ourselves (when I say "ourselves" I mean all intelligent life everywhere) with self destruction once in awhile, and find ourselves back to standing in caves waving bronze spears, sporting tails and fully functional appendix and wondering what the hell happened.  We may be in the first cycle on Earth.  Who knows?

Or a meteor whacks us once every 250M years and we start all over again due to God, mother nature, karma, or whatever your particular religion might support (I gotta believe Allah plays a big role in setting everything ablaze). 

Let's say it takes 250M years to get to a nuclear capability, and 200 years after that we scrub the planet (I think I am being generous).  Considering that you would really only have radio communications for a tiny bit more of that time, that means that you only are capable of radio transmissions for .00008% of the existence of life on that planet.  Heck, that is nothing more than a blip, even if you have 70 septillion stars out there.  Our radius of awareness is nowhere near the range of observing all the solar systems.... So there could be millions of planets with intelligent life out there that we would have no possible means to communicate with.  Space is not empty; crap and attenuation happen. 

So I think there are other critters out there.  Some just picking their head up out of the primordial ooze, some with high definition TVs.  Probably some with tri-corders and plasma engines too.  I seriously doubt that any of them will ever make it to my birthday party.

But I acknowledge the infinitesimally small probability is there, so I will always buy extra snacks just in case.

[glenn kangiser]

Cool, Frank.

I think if we did contact them that they would have to kill us or suffer the consequences of the meeting if we made it there..

We would for sure try to exploit their wealth, start wars between them to get them to kill each other and our elite would try to profit off of the war industry for killing them and off of the travel industry, taxes on us to go there and kill them etc.  

We are not about to change.  We just want different places to exploit.

We = the collective we and our leadership puppets led by the puppetmasters.  Had to bring this in as our big industry does not look for other horizons without an eye to profit.  Yes - I realize that is natural and just business.

Face it.  We are not nice.  We are savages and the worst among us are those in suits trying to pretend they are not savages.  Trying to project a clean outer image does not change the beast within....