Comment by _aky4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _aky4 | Hacker News Reader

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Further we look into the void, further we see how vast it is in length of time and breadth of space. And in that void we're a tiny speck of dust on an already tiny speck of dust. For me, looking at zoomable deep space telescope imagery, it's a 50/50 proposition, either we have the only miracle of life in existence, or it's prolific.

Deepest visible light image of 10,000 galaxies - https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0406a/zoomable/

NGC 1866 star cluster - https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1847a/zoomable/

Runaway galaxy UGC 10214 with thousands of galaxies in backdrop - https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0206a/zoomable/

Abell 2218, a rich glaxy cluster composed of thousands of galaxies - https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0814a/zoomable/

Gordo ("The Fat One") - enormous galaxy cluster with mass of three million billion Suns - https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1802a/zoomable/

Gallery of more of these at https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/archive/zoomable/ - follow a delightful thumbnail, then desperately seek the tiny buried zoomable links on subsequent pages.

The incomprehensible vastness in terms both time and space, combined with our own flittering existence, mean that even a universe utterly teeming with life would never see two advanced civilizations actually cross paths.

Could you elaborate? To me that seems tobe too anthropocentric thinking.

All thinking about aliens is anthropocentric. We have a sample size of one.

Von Neumann self replicating probes would make contact between two very distant civilisations eventually happen. Though that may occur after both civilisations are gone and all that remains are the programmed probes creating relay stations to send out more of themselves.

>it's a 50/50 proposition, either we have the only miracle of life in existence, or it's prolific.

This seems like a false dichotomy. There could be 200 billion planets with life in the universe...but only about one per galaxy. Someone did a probabilistic analysis of the Drake equation, and found out that indeed, given the known facts (that we don't see any life yet, how life appears to have developed on earth) that a substantial likelihood exists that the density of life is right in the range where there are many instances but we will never see one. It's sad to never get closure, but it's irrational to deny it's a possibility.

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