http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck7TUZNz748

Here’s an incomplete little taste courtesy of our friends at YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOcfCkUBsdc

- Fuller

Maybe civilizations have tried and long ago and either achieved or failed their intended goal, but realized the price was not worth the information and so never sent additional probes. Maybe other civilizations simply weighted the benefits to the cost and saw there was little to be learned.

Or, maybe, the time is JUST SO for us to find them in the midst of their explorations only they’re colonizing one of the billions of other galaxies.

With the strength and abilities of our technology, we can only just now see planets the size of Jupiter in other star systems. Much less a probe the size of Voyager! To imagine a galaxy filled with probes is to assume our neighboring civilization has found a method of communication faster than light and far more reliable than what we currently know.

WARNING! UNFOUNDED SIZE ESTIMATES!
We’re a piece of plankton in the middle of the ocean and can’t understand why, after exploring a shot glass worth of water, we haven’t found any other plankton.

This does not, however, mean I disagree entirely. I think it’s highly unlikely we will find other intelligent life. But I don’t think your argument disproves their existence.

–dennis

“Aliens? Yes. UFOs? No.“
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/11/25/aliens-yes-ufos-no/

(About halfway through that story you linked to. It’s very interesting)

http://davidbrin.com/lungfish1.htm

One of the most chilling stories I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it.

Personally, I strongly disagree with the notion that an advanced civilization is certain, or even likely, to be driven to constant expansion. Interplanetary colonization is extremely costly; interstellar colonization even more so. And to make a go of it — to actually gain from it — requires the kind of patient, long-term approach that’s incompatible with the mindset that leads to rapacious expansion. So I see the rapacious cultures either wising up, or self-destructing, before they ever get to the next star.

— This is usually called the ‘Zoo’ theory I believe, the idea that other civilisations are deliberately keeping themselves hidden from us, for many possible reasons — we may be a danger to them, or them to us, or they’re studying us, etc. It’s a legitimate idea but it’s only speculation, and it’s not a falsifiable theory. Even if it were true, it doesn’t provide us with a model for any investigation and is therefore not useful scientifically. Okhams razor makes short work of it. But it is a nice thought.

- ‘Yet’ is meaningless in this context. The point I tried to make in the article was that there is nothing privileged or special about the point of time we find ourselves in today. On a galactic scale, any event that’s likely to happen in the future is at least as likely to have happened in the past. And as I said, it would only need to happen once to change what we find in the galaxy permanently. The chances of aliens getting their probes out for the first time at the same time as humans first start kicking about is exceedingly small. Does that make sense?

- This is basically the argument I was making, that intelligent life is so rare that the chances of encountering it are on par with no chance at all. This is an opinion that differs from the folks at SETI.

- I think you know how unlikely this explanation is!