the smartest aliens travel across the light years of space to stick stuff up your butt.
 

Hey Mr. Spaceman
 

SteveStrummerUK

mike_mccue
I heard a presentation recently that pointed out that, when you consider the age of the universe and our planet, the amount of time it took for life to appear and learn to send signals and space craft out into the universe was an incredibly short span of time.

Off the top of my head...

• The Universe is estimated to be around 13.8 billions years old
• The Earth is estimated to be around 4.6 billion years old
• Life on Earth is believed to have started around 3.6 billion years ago
• Life on Earth has existed for approximately 26% of the age of the Universe

I think the presentation was designed to show why "we're special".
 
Perhaps we're special because for supposedly intelligent life forms, we don't much care about, you know, facts and stuff - at least if it doesn't suit our purposes. 
 
Or perhaps the ability to create one's own facts is a special sign of a higher intelligence? 

 
I'm special.
 
 

SteveStrummerUK

mike_mccue
I heard a presentation recently that pointed out that, when you consider the age of the universe and our planet, the amount of time it took for life to appear and learn to send signals and space craft out into the universe was an incredibly short span of time.

Off the top of my head...

• The Universe is estimated to be around 13.8 billions years old
• The Earth is estimated to be around 4.6 billion years old
• Life on Earth is believed to have started around 3.6 billion years ago
• Life on Earth has existed for approximately 26% of the age of the Universe

 
 

Yes. Actually we should decide whether we are now talking about life or intelligent life, something we can communicate with. It's not that big of a comfort if (as likely) there's some algae somewhere that can live in a temperature of 200 C. :o/
 
If we talk about, say, the early primates, that 3.6 billion years of life is cut to about 20 million years, which is only about 0,15 % of the age of our universe.

And the ability to communicate wirelessly is even more recent.
 
(Although it could be argued that the ability to communicate intelligently has been lost.)

drewfx1

SteveStrummerUK

mike_mccue
I heard a presentation recently that pointed out that, when you consider the age of the universe and our planet, the amount of time it took for life to appear and learn to send signals and space craft out into the universe was an incredibly short span of time.

Off the top of my head...

• The Universe is estimated to be around 13.8 billions years old
• The Earth is estimated to be around 4.6 billion years old
• Life on Earth is believed to have started around 3.6 billion years ago
• Life on Earth has existed for approximately 26% of the age of the Universe

I think the presentation was designed to show why "we're special".
 
Perhaps we're special because for supposedly intelligent life forms, we don't much care about, you know, facts and stuff - at least if it doesn't suit our purposes. 
 
Or perhaps the ability to create one's own facts is a special sign of a higher intelligence? 

You should probably see the presentation for yourself instead of deriving the meaning of it from hearsay promoted on the part of someone who has relayed what impressions they took from it. I think the idea was more about an acceleration of evolution rather than total span of time and I did a bad job of explaining that. 
 
 
 
While I was checking the 3.7 billion figure I noticed that many of the same scientists that have determined that life on earth is 3.5-3.7 billions years old also feel that it is possible that life in the universe might be 10 billion years old... a possible 6.5 billion year head start isn't trivial. Imagine what kind of iPhones we'll be using 3 billion years from now.
 
Additionally, Many of the folks that have determined that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old haven't figured out what the universe was 13.9 billion years ago... while other folks figure that it was probably some kind of universe.
 
best regards,
mike

trivia:
 
Vertebrates appear approximately 525 million years ago.
 
Mammals appear approximately 225 million years ago.
 

 
I know the odds stack up pretty favourably that life, and even intelligent life, exist elsewhere.
 
But my personal feeling is that it might be not quite as common as the statistics suggest.
 
As far as we can tell, and given what must have been pretty conducive environmental conditions, life has only actually begun once on Earth. Every organism on this planet (including the 98% of all species that have become extinct) can be traced (or at least, logically deduced) back to a single origin. The proof is there in the basic genetic makeup common to all organisms.
 
If the conditions for life were/are abundant throughout the Universe - in other words the very conditions in which life got going here - then it might reasonably be argued that life might have started discretely in more than one form on Earth.
 
Unless, of course, the uniqueness on Earth of the life we find here (i.e. with a biochemistry based on RNA/DNA) might actually be the only way life can exist. Again, if this is the case, that might also bring down the probability of it starting elsewhere.
 
 
 
Edit - Spelling
 
 
 
 
 

Here's the presentation:
 
It should be really easy to see how much hearsay and inaccuracies I added when relaying the impressions I was left with after I was done entertaining myself with this and several other presentations: