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rfmcdonaldAn io9 post puts the question simply.
I've made multiple posts referring to Keith Wiley's paper on technological societies, highlighting his prediction that--with even conservative estimates on the prevalence of life--that could well be hundreds of vehicles created by different extraterrestrial civilizations in the solar system, vehicles that--at present--we are completely unable to detect owing to the primitive state of our astronomy. There could well be a high-tech civilization operating in the outer solar system and, unless it tried to contact us or we somehow knew exactly where the civilization was operating, we would have no way of finding out.
The situation is grimmer when it comes to the detection of possibly life-bearing planets. Only now in 2012 are we actually starting to detect planets in large numbers, and even though their detection is one of the signal achievements of our technology our samples are partial and the information we have gathered so far are bare. We know the environmental conditions--atmosphere, temperature, and the like--of only a few exoplanets, these exoplanets we know in only the broadest detail, and our exoplanet sample is patchy: we've a possible exoplanet detection in the Andromeda Galaxy but know about the Alpha Centauri system next door what can't be found (we'd have detected gas giants by now, but know nothing about putative Earth-sized worlds).
Is the galaxy filled with life, even tool-using life, even--maybe--a galactic civilization? At present, I don't know if we have the technology that would be needed to detect such a civilization if it wasn't actively trying to signal to us with technologies that we're familiar with.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
james_nicoll?
If there's one thing the Kepler mission has taught us, it's that planets are everywhere. Lately, it seems like if we're not discovering new exoplanets, we're finding evidence that there are hundreds of billions of them out there (many of them probably even Earthlike), and we just haven't found them yet.
On one hand, being up to our necks in planets is incredibly exciting business. It's entirely possible, for example, that we've already discovered Earth 2.0 and just don't know it yet. At the same time, this overabundance of exoplanets has raised some unsettling questions, and at the root of many of those questions is one big, glaring conundum: where the hell is the alien life?
I've made multiple posts referring to Keith Wiley's paper on technological societies, highlighting his prediction that--with even conservative estimates on the prevalence of life--that could well be hundreds of vehicles created by different extraterrestrial civilizations in the solar system, vehicles that--at present--we are completely unable to detect owing to the primitive state of our astronomy. There could well be a high-tech civilization operating in the outer solar system and, unless it tried to contact us or we somehow knew exactly where the civilization was operating, we would have no way of finding out.
The situation is grimmer when it comes to the detection of possibly life-bearing planets. Only now in 2012 are we actually starting to detect planets in large numbers, and even though their detection is one of the signal achievements of our technology our samples are partial and the information we have gathered so far are bare. We know the environmental conditions--atmosphere, temperature, and the like--of only a few exoplanets, these exoplanets we know in only the broadest detail, and our exoplanet sample is patchy: we've a possible exoplanet detection in the Andromeda Galaxy but know about the Alpha Centauri system next door what can't be found (we'd have detected gas giants by now, but know nothing about putative Earth-sized worlds).
Is the galaxy filled with life, even tool-using life, even--maybe--a galactic civilization? At present, I don't know if we have the technology that would be needed to detect such a civilization if it wasn't actively trying to signal to us with technologies that we're familiar with.
james_nicoll?
