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Research Suggests How Alien Life Could Spread Across the Galaxy
astroengine writes: As astronomical techniques become more advanced, a team of astrophysicists think they will be able to not only detect the signatures of alien life in exoplanetary atmospheres, but also track its relentless spread throughout the galaxy. The research, headed by Henry Lin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), assumes that this feat may be possible in a generation or so and that the hypothesis of panspermia may act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another.
Habital planets are so rare and far apart that alien life wouldn't be able to spread across the galaxy. Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there. Much less a population and equipment and supplies enough to start a society.
Actually, we don't know if habitable planets are rare. We are finding a bunch and have barely look at what the universe holds. Now the traveling thing could be a problem, but maybe there are civilization on other planets that don't waste their time and resources killing each other and actually focus on science and space.
Be seeing you...
Hell, even earth is so far away from the nearest possibly habitable planet that if we could travel 90% of the speed of light, it would take something like 10,000 years to get there.
Spores are patient.
Panspermia doesn't involve a bunch of Oregon Trail style settlers heading out and populating an empty world. You fire microbes, or possibly even just the precursors of life out and they start multiplying and evolving if they land somewhere they like.
Now the traveling thing could be a problem, but maybe there are civilization on other planets that don't waste their time and resources killing each other and actually focus on science and space.
This. There's 7 billion of us. I'd wager less than 100 million of us are engaged in productive activities besides life-sustention, probably less than 10 million using their immense brain computation ability to do it. But this is due to war and inequality, not that the rest of the world are idiots. Not that they were born idiots. Some may have been brainwashed so thoroughly that they might as well be idiots, but that's still not necessarily a permenant condition. If everyone was given equal opportunity, and people with brilliant ideas didn't have to struggle just to survive, the average citizen struggle just not to die from all the corporate poisoning etc, then something closer to 4-5 billion of us could be doing productive stuff. Amazingly productive stuff. Stuff that probably less than 10000 people alive today could even imagine under current society.