What if we are quietly watching from a distance (in both space and time) as thousands of civilizations are helplessly irradiated to death by gamma rays?
With that in mind, I can imagine that millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Are you one of those people who continues to insist falsely that there was more than 1 Matrix movie, or more than 3 Star Wars movies?
I noticed that too <grin>
Is this too far away to try to detect the gravitational waves, if it made some? I forget, do gravitational waves travel at C?
Seems well within range; and yes they travel at C - there have been some LIGO observations that were successfully correlated with more traditional (e.g. optical or radio) observations.
It is a nice thought though. That was a real rough day for Earth, but we turned out alright in the end.
We are probably lucky, to have life at all.
Note I'm not claiming humanoids are all over the place, but with 400B stars in our galaxy, 1T stars in Andromeda next door, and other galaxies with similarly huge numbers of stars, multiplied by all the number of galaxies in the observable universe, multiplied by the number of exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone", it's quite possible intelligent, humanoid life has evolved somewhere out there.
It becomes harder to reason that humanoid life and even intelligent humanoid life must exist somewhere else without any actual data points.
Sure, but we're probably thinking of "intelligent life that can build a civilization", right? In that case, highly-intelligent alien orcas aren't going to meet the requirement. They just don't have a body type that allows them to change their environment and build technology. If there really are alien civilizations out there, like in Star Trek, that show might not actually be that far off with its assumption that 95% of them are humanoid. And in this case, there could very well be lots of other intelligent life, but which never managed to build a civilization.
Star Trek used humanoids because of practical special effects at the time and because it would be easier for the audience to identify with the aliens and make the show more accessible, not because there’s some underlying scientific reasoning going on.
To make any predictions about the shape that intelligent aliens would take would require some probabilistic falsifiable model that would tell us where to look and what we’d find. Anything other than that would rely on very shaky first order reasoning which is what we’re doing to guess that there is likely intelligent life somewhere.
Just finding alien plant life somewhere would be a momentous discovery, but that's still nothing like finding an alien civilization that we can communicate with, trade with, etc. One doesn't diminish the other.
Alien orcas (probably) can't leave their planet, or really establish much of a technological civilization. So they'd be interesting to observe, just like alien plants or alien mice, but that just isn't the same kind of thing as interacting with an alien civilization.
>No reason to believe that an alien Orca with thumbs couldn’t eventually accomplish the things we did without ever leaving the water.
How so? How exactly are the alien orcas going to get out of the water to outcompete intelligent creatures on the land? Building any kind of technology in an aquatic environment would be incredibly difficult, if it's possible at all; if there's intelligent creatures on dry land, they'll have an automatic advantage. Sure, the alien orcas with hands and thumbs would have a much better chance than Earthly orcas that don't, but still, how do you, for instance, build a gun when you're an aquatic species? On dry land, it's really not that hard. Even smelting metals seems rather impossible underwater.
> not because there’s some underlying scientific reasoning going on.
Scientific reasoning wasn't the intention, but the idea that aquatic aliens have as much ability to build rockets and spaceships as land-based aliens is pure fantasy. The laws of physics don't change on other planets.
It must have been an incredible discovery at the time.
The answer is probably the same. We would not know and continue our daily chores.
How close to a black hole? This isn't a common-or-garden black hole, it's supermassive. If it's (300M years ago) suddenly started producing intense radiation that we can measure here, then I assume that anyone in the galaxy that can see the central region is receiving a lot of radiation, as well as a storm of high-energy particles.