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To: Don Martini who wrote (107373)	3/5/1999 9:20:00 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

OT Could it be we're the first of our type? Someone has to be first. Of course 50 years isn't that long considering the distances and power levels involved. TP

To: Don Martini who wrote (107373)	3/5/1999 11:26:00 AM
From: Fangorn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

OT Don, Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. The Scientific Method has given us the tools to look for ET life but it was only developed in the last four or five hundred years. There could be many civilizations within 100 light years but if they haven't developed electronic technology they couldn't hear us and they wouldn't be broadcasting either. A civilization just a century behind us in technological development will be invisible to us and incapable of detecting our copius transmissions. I have to ask why would an intelligent Creator create billions of galaxies each full of millions or billions of stars many of which are orbited by planets and then put intelligent life on only one small planet orbiting a small star in the outskirts of a nondescript galaxy. I am an agnostic when it comes to a Creator but cannot accept that if there is/was one that He/She/It would be so profligate with space, time and matter unless He had another purpose in mind and our presence is either an afterthought or accident. By the way, I belive we have already discovered at least three other intelligent (sapient) lifeforms... Chimpanzees, at least the Bonobo species, use tools, communicate and have a culture which is passed from generation to generation. They can learn sign language and then teach it to others as can Mountain Gorillas. Orcas and some species of dolphins and porpoises are very intelligent and some have been taught to use an array of symbols to construct simple sentences describing not only objects but their feelings about things. The difference between human intelligence and these animals is measured in quantity, not quality. My favorite theory for why we haven't found evidence of ET is that our neighbors have us under quarantine so that we can develop naturally without outside interference until we reach a certain level of technological and/or ethical prowess. Another that has a certain appeal... We will soon (50-100 years at most) no longer be spewing radio waves into space because all that stuff will be either carried by fiber or narrow beam point to point lasers. Under that scenario there would be a small window of time (a couple hundred years) that a technological civilization would be broadcasting the kind of signals we are looking for, maybe everybody within range is either beyond the broadcast stage (in which case see first theory) or haven't developed enough tech yet to send or receive a signal. In an apparently infinite universe the possibilities are apparently... well... infinite.