re: Do you believe there are other intelligent life forms out there?More intelligent

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Do you believe there are other intelligent life forms out there?

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The Drake equation is full of variables that we have no basis for estimating. I'd like to believe that the universe is teeming with intelligent life, but in the absence of any evidence I'm more or less an alien agnostic. There are a lot of possibilities though: maybe we're the first; maybe the evidence of other civilizations is being withheld from us by some other far more advanced civilization; maybe we're still in front of the Great Filter and we're doomed as a species, etc.

The big fly in the ointment to me is that, on a cosmological time-scale it doesn't take all that long to colonize large parts of a galaxy. You're looking at a few dozen million years even with the slow-arse technology that we can conceive of today. So if any civilization can survive for that long we ought to be seeing signs of it in the form of very large engineering projects like Dyson spheres or star realignment. Of course there are other explanations: maybe civilizations that last that long aren't interested in colonizing the universe; maybe they don't make visible engineering projects as suggested; maybe they only 'colonize' with drones that we wouldn't detect; etc. This is why I remain agnostic about the whole thing.

I'd be surprised if there isn't microbial life on other planets though, if through no other mechanism than panspermia. And I guess it's logical to say that intelligent life is almost a certainty if the universe is truly infinite, but I'm not sure it means anything if you're talking about something so rare that it's at a distance we have no hope of reaching. Unfortunately with our current understanding of physics, FTL travel violates causality, which is something that I really can't believe in.