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Wayne.B

On Fri, 26 Dec 2014 22:21:58 -0500, wrote:

The flaw in the article is it assumes the only way life could possibly
evolve is if the universe worked out exactly like it did.
It is a joyous accident that things worked out like it did ... for us
but if it didn't it could have happened somewhere else and Sagan was
saying it is very likely that it did. They just won't look like us..

===

That's all true and another big factor is time. As far as we know
now, intelligent life on earth has existed for less that 100,000
years. That's just a heartbeat on a galactic scale. And of that
100,000 years it has only been the last 100 or so that we have been
capable of creating any sort of phenomena detectable at a distance,
i.e., electromagnetic waves and large scale explosions. It's very
likely that sometime in the next 100 years we will stop relying on
high powered electromagnetic waves for communications, to be replaced
by optical fiber for everything other than very low power local
communication. That paradigm shift is already in progress. Hopefully
we will also stop producing high powered (nuclear) explosions. That
has also been in progress for a while.

So following along that logic path, our civilization has a less than a
200 year window for producing detectable signs of life. Presumably
other intelligent life forms elsewhere would follow a similar timeline
if they exist at all. The odds that their 200 year window would
coincide with our existence are almost infinitesimally small but who
knows. It would be a miracle. :-)

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