Aliens and ufos: what to you think?

[Crazed Rabbit]

With regard to the Drake Equation, courtesy of XKCD;


The time required to travel to a different galaxy is so inconceivably great that pondering civilizations in other galaxies will always be purely academic.

The nearest non-dwarf galaxy is two million light years away. Light takes eight minutes to travel the 93 million miles from the sun to earth. Now imagine not eight minutes but two million years traveling at the absolute fastest anything in this universe can travel to reach just the closest spiral galaxy.

Intelligent life out there somewhere? Maybe. But I hope we never find any - or rather that none ever finds us.

As for UFOs? Bah - we could detect any foreign object in our solar system easily enough to find any spaceship coming at us.

Here, I doubt it.

In our Galaxy. Well the Drake Equation estimated maybe ten civilizations on parity with us.

So an optimistic astronomer would estimate ten at our level in our local galaxy right now.

Say there is only one in this galaxy right now. Then We are it's eyes and ears. Bit of a responsibility.

Be a pessimist and say the Drake equation is two or three orders of magnitude over confident... With some in the order of 100 billion galaxies out there... That means there is potentially 100 million to a billion civilizations out there.

The bigger question is where are they? Most of science doesn't assume that we are unique. IFF we are that is a very massive responsibility.

Oh btw on current tech we could easily get across our galaxy in the order of ten million years... Which is tiny considering dinosaurs walked the Earth 65 million years ago and ruled the earth for so long.