Re: First Contact
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I think it's highly likely that man will go extinct before making "first contact." The failure of the SETI program is a strong indicator that civilizations probably don't last too long or at least stop advancing beyond a certain point.
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could you expand on this when you have a minute?
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If civilizations were around for a billion or even a million years, it's likely that we would pick up the radio waves of near us (within a million light years). Since we haven't it tells us that civilizations are a) rare and/or b) don't last very long. The fact that someone hasn't found us yet, means the odds of someone finding us now, or of us finding someone else, are miniscule.
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I'm not sure that's true we've only been around in any sort of detectable way for at most what? 50 years? 70?
I think there is a question of what "contact" will be. I mean if we received a signal from some sort of ultra advanced civilization tomorrow wouldn't it be very likely that the civilization that sent the message has long since disappeared? I think the chances of us receiving a signal from a civilization that still exists is very close to 0 due to the huge distances any signal would have to travel.
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