I just keep three children. Answer the door with them hanging off you, looking frazzled and snap...

'Yes?'
When they tell you what they want to talk to you about, 'Sure, if one of you can babysit my children, you can come in'

Have a look at this Drake Equation Calculator

Now THERE'S a bold statement if ever I've read one!!

Wouldn't we be the Aliens to them as well though? Not that I'd care as long as Sigourney Weaver came along as well

I use sign language they leave pretty quickly and give me a wide birth the next time they come

I love SETI ... I have their screen saver to find signals ...

Nice.

What an article! I was ok right up to "God will's his son into the womb of a virgin" To essentially explain why he doesn't need a spaceship or to actually travel anywhere.

I think that's the point I lost my faith too, Arkon.

Hmm. That's quite interesting. Using the figures it supplies, it gives a figure of 1000 civilisations able to communicate. Hmm. Not much of a Galactic Empire that.

Clarke suggested that the fact that we havn't encountered any Von Neumann machines yet may mean that we are the furthest advanced civilisation around.

Von Neumann machines are capable of replicating themselves from natural and surrounding resources, with no further input from anybody else. The idea is that you send one off to a far flung planet, then when it lands, it clones itself many times, and then deploys probes off to other planets. The number of machines should theoretically grow exponentially, however there are many failure mechanisms to account for. Clarke suggested that this sort of automation would demark a high technology civilisation from a low one, and would represent a certain point in achievement.

There's a better description here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator

and here:

http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/V..._machines.html

The suggestion is that, given the distances involved, VN machines would be the most effective method or exploring space, and the fact that we havn't encountered any yet suggests that there are no galactic civilisations capable of developing them. He touched on this in 2001 and 2010, as that's effectively what The Monolith was, among other things.

Of course it doesn't mean to say that there arn't primitive civilisations that havn't developed any kind of communications capability yet.

And of course on the other hand, Clarke, though he may have conceived the geostationary communications satellite, also suggested that by 2000 we would have learnt how to train monkeys to do menial housework for us... How I wish I had a monkey now...

S

I love the line "Albert Einstein was certainly a smart man, but in a fistfight with the Almighty, he loses."

Albert Einstein -

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

Or maybe we are the Von Neumann machines

Cool Calculator. I've had a play with it and even using really pessimistic numbers I got 330 communicating civilizations, which I initially thought was a lot, but when you consider that's 330 out of 100 billion suns, we don't really have much of a chance of finding one by chance.

I personally think it's the absolute height of mans arrogance that we can even believe we are the only intellignet life out there. The most arrogant section of mankind is usually those of a religious persuasion. Isn't the real reason most if not all religious types deny the possibility of extra terrestrial life is the fundamental undermining of their faith if we should ever find some.

I am much more likely to believe in ET rather than a god, as religion has had a few thousand years to come up with some concrete proof and failed. Whereas SETI and Nasa has only been at it a very short time and already found hundreds of extra solar planets. Why is it religious people think they are so special, more special than us non-believer, and so special life can only exist here?

Albert Einstein -

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."