16 February 2009
Thousands of inhabited worlds!
An estimate says that there at least 361 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy and possibly as many as 38,000. I wonder how many of these inhabited worleds are cut up into arbitrary borders with nations bombing each other to get at fossil fuels. At any rate, I keep hoping we'll discover such a civilization in my lifetime. I think it would have a profound affect on our thinking. The odds are that anyone we discovered would be vastly smarter than us and hopefully much wiser.
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Perhaps this is my bias, but I think when we do discover another intelligent civilization, I am afraid that they will not be friendly. My fear is that they will be more warlike than us.
Maybe not.
That could be, but I think at some point, war doesn't make much sense from a very practical point of view. Sometimes evil gives way to other forms of evil. Slavery died out in many places not because the entire population attained enlightenment and became compassionate bodhisattvas, but simply because there were more efficient and practical ways to oppress people and confiscate the fruits of their labors. I'd expect an extraterrestial civilization to have developed more sophisticated forms of selfishness that didn't require dropping bombs.
...and of course if they're more advanced than us - and have more advanced weapons - it's likely that they would've killed themselves off by now.
Maybe those left are generally more peaceful?
Then again - maybe the war hypothesis explains why we haven't discovered any signals yet?
Unless the skies are filled with sadistic civilizations yearning to torture farflung sentient beings, it seems like they'd skip all the trouble of voyaging off to Earth and simply terraform the planets next to them. I don't think the Universe is running out of prime real estate just yet. If there are civilizations aiming to destroy us, they're definitely taking their time getting here. They've had billions of years to find their way here. (Or was the Centauri invasion force eaten by dinosaurs?)
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