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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

I think intelligent alien life is extremely rare. Even with everything right ...: - Non binary star system - stable sun - non gravitational locked planet (thanks moon impact) - hospitable planet (goldilox zone) - inner solar system not populated with super giants - continents and oceans (not a water world) - magnetic field protecting us from radiation - planet the right size and the right amount of atmosphere. (i could keep going on)

... we were still owe are existence to an asteroid (among many other things) that wiped out the dinosaurs.

On top of everything, star time scales in the billions of years, evolution hundreds of millions of years, and semi intelligent life within the tens of thousands of years.

if there is other intelligent life out there near by, it either happened billions of years ago or will happen billions of years in the future.

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If there are 3 billion out of the 300 billion star systems in the galaxy that have habitable planets, then there should be at least 10,000-100,000 star systems that harbor currently brodcasting species, no?

the situation of our planet, all the things i said above (in particular non-gravitational locked, magnetic field, water & continents) is a 1/N event.

I feel like N is very large. When you factor out all the stars of the 100 billion in the milky way, I think you get something unlikely, let alone on a planet in the habitable zone.

also, something on the other side of the milky way (100,000 light years), is also far away, so its not like we have the entire milky way to choose from.

Using average values in the drake equation, there have been have been 18 million broadcastable civilizations in the milky way.

If we take an average lifespan of 1,000 years and say those cilizations have formed over the last 5 billion years (where planets mostly cooled down throghout the universe) then there are currently only 4-5 broadcastable civilizations in the milky way. Is that correct?

Why would anyone be stupid enough to broadcast location? Ever see independence day? Might be better off not knowing... though .. I think i'd be almost willing to give up life on earth to know... just because I'm curious as hell.

We already do it, so... :D

So aliens are going to build city sized ships to travel light years so they can steal the resources of one planet in a star system?

One would guess that aliens with Independence Day technology could figure out how to terraform or build space colonies in their own star system. Even if they ran out of raw material there, surely the next closest one would do.

Given the population growth rates, and struggle for resources, eventually all alien species will realized its them vs others.

More than mining resources from planets, its generally 'We need to finish them off, before they finish us off'.

in the movie, they were after the earths molten core, in the movie thats something rare

IMO intelligence is merely a by product of time, evolution and survival so I don't think it would be that unlikely.

But dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years longer than us.. and there’s no indication they were intelligent or ever built anything

Do you have proof they did not build anything? What can resist millions of years?

No, that's what he's saying. There's no indication that they did.

some more, the dinosaurs weren't just stupid (small brained), I believe they were so by design.

I began thinking about it by finding out alligators/crocodiles lived during that time, and they have larger brains. I then wondered why, until I considered the fact that they came from laid eggs, and their 'thing' was the ability to get big when evolution supported it. brains require lots of oxygen and egg shells have limits to how much they can allow through them.

my theory is that they were dumb by design, so that genes could activate and allow them to get really big if it suited them.

If that were true, why aren't sharks the most intelligent beings on the planet? They've been around in more-or-less their current form since the dinosaurs were around.

Intelligence (as far as we know) requires a brain, which requires a lot of calories to work correctly. Increasing calorie intake requirements is not something that survival-selecting evolution would select for.

Evolution selects for survival, not intelligence. Sharks and other animals have survived very well for millions of years without ever developing a higher level of intelligence. If anything, intelligence seems like it might be a happy mistake of evolution, and potentially very rare since evolution doesn't select for it explicitly.

It's probably the right combination of a body, intelligence, social structure and environmental pressures that lead to sophisticated tool making societies that pass their knowledge on down so it accumulates.

So far, we're the only species on Earth to have enough of the right combination to get this far. So maybe it only happens 1 in 1000 worlds with multicellular life.

How many planets does that leave in the Milky Way? That's the sort of calculation SETI does.

you answered your own question in the sentence that followed it. sharks face little pressure to evolve, so they aren’t changing very much

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