"The Great Silence":

[Liffrea]

Why Haven't Signs of Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life Been Discovered?

"The idea that we are the only intelligent creatures in a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies is so preposterous that there are very few astronomers today who would take it seriously. It is safest to assume therefore, that they are out there and to consider the manner in which this may impinge upon human society."

Arthur C. Clarke, physicist and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

The world-renowned physicist Lee Smolin author of Life of the Cosmos says that what we should look for to confirm the existence of intelligent life in the Milky Way is a message left for us some time in the last several hundred million years.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog...iscovered.html

[Cato]

Because there's nothing to discover.

[Ulf]

Because there's nothing to discover.

Not even amino acids or bacteria?

[Cato]

That's not what I meant.

[Skandi]

Probably because the time windows don't match. For us to pick up radio signals in the 60 odd years we have been looking they would have to be broadcast 100's if not thousands of years ago. equally by the time any life picks up our signals, we will probably be gone, esspecialy if you factor in the return journey time as well.
The window of opportunity for sending such signals is so small in the history of our civilization, and if theirs is similar it would be ridiculously easy to miss them. For all we know a planet could have been sending out powerful signals for the last 1000 years, but if the last one reached us before we invented radio, how would we ever know.

[Barreldriver]

Dimensional barriers are to blame. Each path down time/4th dimension/space, branches into an infinite number of possibilities, realities, events, time lines, etc... Each of these realities/forks/branches in the time line are separated by sheets/membranes. In order to contact life in another galaxy you need to be able to travel through time/the fourth dimension. In order to do so you need to be able to warp or breech the sheets/membranes separating the forks in the fourth dimension, you need to warp space itself.

Once we are able to generate enough gravity to manually warp these membranes, we will be able to travel freely in a loop between the companion universes of our own time lines, and those of all others (meaning those in other galaxies within these universes).

The answer is membranes, dimensional membranes and lots of gravity.

[Liffrea]

Stating the obvious, space is vast, my opinion is that basic life is pretty likely to be common, intelligent/sentient life, extremely rare. I wouldn’t say none existent, it would be unusual if humans were the only sentient species, but I believe it’s rare enough that from a human perspective it might a well not exist.

I believe we are very much alone in our part of the cosmos, perhaps that isn’t a bad thing…

[Psychonaut]

Dimensional barriers are to blame. Each path down time/4th dimension/space, branches into an infinite number of possibilities, realities, events, time lines, etc

Seriously? Hardly anyone takes the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics seriously anymore (if anyone really did at all). Of all the possible solutions for resolving the problems within QM, this one is, IMO, the least believable.

[Germanicus]

The probability still comes down to the numbers, and odds,.... how many Earth like planets are in an eliptical orbit with a moon like ours, with a star like ours roughly the same distance away as ours= not many

[Barreldriver]

Seriously? Hardly anyone takes the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics seriously anymore (if anyone really did at all). Of all the possible solutions for resolving the problems within QM, this one is, IMO, the least believable.

I take it seriously.

I nearly approach the Many Minds Interpretation, basically the divisions proposed happen at the level of the individual observer.