Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.