From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 22:17:34 MDT
Nathan Currier writes
> If by "aliens" you mean the Little Grey Men of standard UFO
> lore, then 5% [of their being real] doesn't seem totally unreasonable...
> I would guess somewhere around 1%. The key is to drop the assumtion
> that they are aliens, and consider the slight possibility that they
> might be genetically engineered future humans coming back in time
> to study us Neanderthals.
I put the odds of anything rather fantastic, such as either of these
possibilities, at around a million to one, personally. It just seems
to me that our conventional explanations of almost everything we know
fit rather well together.
> The existence of alien civilizations is also very problematic.
> Feynman put it best: "Where are they"?
This was Fermi's Question. Sometime after the war, was it 1950?
> If there are any civilizations at all between here and the Coma
> Cluster, then space should be teeming with aliens spreading at
> relativistic speeds on sand-grain-sized colony ships.
Yes, I think so too. The least bizarre explanation is that we
are all alone for a billion or so lightyears, at least.
> I think the only major bottleneck is the evolution of complex
> multicellular life, which took 3 billion years on Earth. This
> may be the only small probability in the Drake Equation.
Could be. I guess if I had to bet on a weak link in the Drake
equation, I'd put my money there too.
> Sentinence evolved here in two separate lineages- dolphins
> and primates.
There is no evidence that dolphins are as smart as chimpanzees.
They fail the mirror recognition test, and on other tests that
researchers have conducted in the past decade, their performance
is *not* impressive.
Lee Corbin
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