That’ll do it every time.
In “If E.T. exists, he’s avoiding us, cosmic number-crunchers say” (MSNBC.com, (1/30, 2012), Irene Klotz reports, “Math suggests there’s no way advanced civilizations wouldn’t know about us by now”:
“We’re either alone, or they’re out there and leave us alone,” mathematician Thomas Hair, with Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, told Discovery News.
Hair, who presented his research at the Mathematical Association of America in Boston earlier this month, based his approximation of what he considered to be extremely conservative estimates for how long it would take a society to muster up the resources and technological know-how to leave its home world and travel to another star.
He suggests that they may not be biological and we may not have anything they need. Another theorist, University of Minnesota physicist Woods Halley, author of a book about the prospects of extraterrestrial life, says
… we don’t know enough about how life got started on Earth to be able to recognize alien life, even if it were staring us in the face.
“I think there are three options,” Halley told Discovery News. “Life is rare, which I think has a reasonable probability of being correct. Life is weird — every time you run into it, it’s extremely different from the last time you saw it. Life is dull, meaning you will find something that looks a lot like life on Earth and our problems (in detecting life) are technical.
He thinks the first option – that we are rare – is most likely.
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