Close Encounters!

There is a widget down the left side of this page from "The Daily Galaxy" that has all sorts of interesting and cutting edge science articles.

I read one today that made me pause and wonder!

In this article they state that since the Universe is about 13 and a half BILLION years old it is very possible that there are civilizations around that are a billion years more advanced than we are!

At first glance this doesn't seem too outrageous or astonishing, but if you stop to think about it.......... it's enough to make the hair on the back of your head stand up!

If you go back about a billion years in our development, back past the primates, back past the dinosaurs, back past the first things that crawled out of the ocean, and even further back..... then about a billion years ago all there was on this planet were little one celled amoeba that were swimming around like little microscopic Pac-Mans!

Makes you wonder what these billion year old aliens are like, doesn't it?

I think we can safely say that the technological stage of a civilization's development can't be overly long since we have so little evidence of it from the information we have been able to gather from S.E.T.I. and other programs.

If a civilization relies on technology for even a million years before they go on to something like a spititual or etherael existence then that is only 1/10th of one percent of the span of a billion year old race.

No wonder we can't find 'em!

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Gary (The Eclectic) Timothy said;

The Daily Galaxy appears to be a wonderful collection of science stories - right up my alley. Thanks for the link!

It's a fascinating article and it presents a lot of food for thought.

One comment though: Intelligent life on Earth, that is, humans, appears to have been even more of a chance thing than many people realize, because if it hadn't been for the KT event (the killer asteroid responsible for wiping out most of the dinosaurs), mammals wouldn't have had the the chance to evolve into humans.

So, if that killer asteroid had never struck, the age of dinosaurs would still be ruling today. And those dinosaurs ruled the Earth for a whole lot longer than humans have been here, and they didn't get much smarter in all those millions of years so there probably wouldn't even be any intelligent dinosaurs or reptiles today if mankind hadn't evolved.

My point is that even if life is common throughout the universe, intelligent life may be much, much rarer that it would seem. All because it might take some pretty rare circumstances, like a killer asteroid at just the right moment in time to wipe out the dumb ruling class of critters to allows some other critters that may or may not have evolved the potential to become intelligent.

Intelligent life also has to get lucky to not have a killer asteroid wipe them out before they learn to communicate and/or travel in space!

There are all sorts of other cosmic dangers out there that could be a real party pooper for humans. Things like a nearby gamma ray burst pointed at earth, or a nearby supernova, or a very massive CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) from our very own sun that happens to be pointed right at Earth, or a .....

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know!) and is available as an E-Book H E R E! and H E R E! And as a paperback H E R E ! and H E R E !