From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Fri Jan 05 2007 - 11:39:44 MST
"Philip Goetz" <philgoetz@gmail.com>
> I did some math, and it turns out to be highly UNLIKELY that
> ET would find it worthwhile to travel to the stars!
So at the end of your economic mumbo jumbo you conclude that intelligence is
incapable of erecting large scale engineering projects. BALONEY! I said it
before I'll say it again, the cost of building a Von Neumann probe would be
TRIVIAL for an advanced civilization. It would be like one of us purchasing
a candy bar. The cost of launching such a probe to the nearest star at
25,000 miles an hour, something we can do today, would cost even less. If
they did that then in just 50 million years, a tiny fraction of the life of
the universe, the Galaxy would look vastly different from what it does now
and ET could harvest astronomical (and I mean that word literally) amounts
of energy. Your economic explanation of why we don't see that engineered
Galaxy is that out of the billions of individuals in millions of
civilizations no one, absolutely no one, bothered to buy that candy bar.
Be honest now, does this excuses put forward to explain away the lack of
large scale engineering really strike you as credible? If you knew ET
existed but had never seen the night sky is this really what you would
predict the sky would look like? I don't see an elephant in my living room
so I can reasonably conclude there is not an elephant in my living room.
Sometimes a absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
John K Clark
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