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ProtoAvatar · October 16 2009, 03:48 PM

PurpleBuddha wrote:

ProtoAvatar wrote:

PurpleBuddha wrote:

I like to think of it like finding a dozen cats in a forest as large as the surface area of the earth. Scatter those cats in there randomly and then take a few steps into the forest. Will you be shocked if you don't find them after a few steps in? Take five or six more? No cats? Hmmmm...must be a paradox. We know they are in there, so why aren't we finding them? Scale this up by a magnitude of a few billion.

PurpleBuddha, you forgot to give these cats an evolutionary advantage that ensures their survival and prosperity (equivalent of intelligence/technology) and to wait a few thousand years. Fulfill those two requirements and, when you walk into the forest, you'll find the cats everywhere.
For a more detailed explanation, read my previous post from this thread.

Actually there is a flaw in my analogy. We do have an idea of how big space is, but we have no idea how widespread alien life is should that life exist. Further, even if a small percent of life has spread out from their home planet to other places, we do not know how prolific they are. Do they really spread quickly from galaxy to galaxy, or just populate a very small number (say a few thousand) planets in the scheme of things. How many of these civilizations may populate even a handful of planets, much less a thousand. How many go on to populate multiple galaxies?

Even if life is fairly widespread, given the largeness of the universe, I do not think comparing 12 cats living on a land mass the size of the earth is any kind of obvious understatement to the population density of the universe. It seems more likely that it is an overstatement.

PurpleBuddha, if a space-faring alien species colonized planets from solar systems other than their own, it won't stop at 10, 100 or 1000. The many different civilizations this species fathered won't have a program saying - we colonized 1234 planets, we stop here. As time passes, the colonization will continue.

I treated in a previous post of mine from this thread this exact problem:

About Milky way colonization and the cycles of alien civilizations:

Let's say you have an alien species that just learned to travel close to light speed (and let's assume lightspeed is an absolute speed limit).
This species now has ships that can reach the nearest stars in a few decades. Also, this species will be composed from various factions with various motivations (if it's anything like humanity). This means that some of the factions will have motivations that include sending colonizing ships to the nearest inhabitable systems.
These inhabitable systems will be inhabited in ~100 years, and the colonies will thrive in, let's say, ~500 years. These colonies will send their own ships (in addition to the ones being sent by the home system) around this time.
In another 600 years, the colonies created by this new colonizing wave will begin to send heir own ships - which will be added to the ships being sent by the home system and the first established colonies.
And so forth - the rate of exploration/colonization will increase exponentially as new colonies are established/the alien species expands.

In a few million years, this alien species will have colonies EVERYWHERE in the galaxy - Milky way is 100.000 in diameter!

And these colonies will be only very tenuously linked with the home system; in a few million years they will be completely different civilizations! Their values and perhaps their biology will be different - think star trek humanoids, at the very least.
Let's say the original alien civilization collapses - this will have NO EFFECT on the civilizations fathered by it! There can be no such thing as a "galactic middle age" when the galaxy is filled with thousands of different civilizations! Some will collapse, but some will be at their peak!

And I'm assuming that, at the beginning, there existed only one alien species - anywhere in the galaxy!
What if there are hundreds/thousands of alien species! Even if one assumes that a species is completely unlike humanity/has no desire to colonize the galaxy, a few of hundreds/thousands will do it.