From: Jim Fehlinger (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 05:09:03 MST
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> >Charles Lineweaver of the University of NSW school of
> > physics has calculated that the average rocky planet must
> > have formed 1.8 billion years before our world appeared, give
> > or take 900 million years.
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/01/12/FFX1JOZATHC.html
Well, that's certainly a more entertaining hypothesis than the opposite
one -- that our world may be the only, or among the first, to develop
intelligence.
A two-billion-year head start would be enough time for a signal from a
really bright (**really** bright) extraterrestrial radio station to have
gotten
here even from other galaxies -- say, from one of the sixteen galaxies
of
the Virgo Cluster (about 60,000,000 light years away).
So maybe SETI@home will tune in a repeating broadcast of "Singularity
for
Dummies" after all. In fact, I think the Virgo Cluster is in their
search area -- they have used it for position checking. See:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/newsletters/news.cgi
Jim F.
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