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Pastimes : Movie Reviews. U Rate It! Silver Screen Gem or Stinker!

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To: ManyMoose who wrote (376)	3/22/2005 6:55:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 725

The video "The Privileged Planet" held that only a star sequestered safely in a less densely populated portion of a spiral arm of a galaxy could produce an earthlike planet, because stars in the center of the galaxy would have too much radiation, and stars in denser parts of the spiral would have too much light. That might reduce the result by a factor of 10 or 20. I tried redoing the calculation at that link with what I think are very optimistic values for each part of the equation and I got 1,440,000,000 communicating civilizations in our galaxy. I doubt its really that high. The equation is interesting but the problem is that many of the values to plug in are unknown and the potential answers can be widely different. Still, as you say, with the number of stars in the universe there must be thousands or millions of inhabited planets. I hope we find out without actually meeting those aliens. I don't see how it could turn out well for us. We could find civilization at our stage of development or less, although the odds are against our first encounter being with such a civilization unless most of them tend to destroy themselves once they get nuclear weapons (which if true would be really horrible). Or they could be benign or standoffish. Meeting aliens could be very risky but I can imagine a number of scenarios where it would work out pretty well. Certainly such scenarios are more likely than "To Serve Man", or aliens making us all slaves. OTOH I've seen arguments that aliens would have an incentive to destroy us because any civilization that can move large spaceships across interstellar space would have the ability to wipe out life on a planet and they might want to take us out before we take them out, in fact before we even know of their existence. I suppose if their paranoid enough... Did you see the movie Contact with Jodie Foster? Yes. Not a bad movie. I didn't read the book. Tim

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