Comments by "Steve Davenport" (@stevedavenport1202) on "Cool Worlds" channel.

  1. Well, seems like the aliens home star system would need to be within 100 light years or so for us to peak their curiosity and make sending a probe feasible.
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  2. You Tube has super charged learning and made it far more engaging than a mono tone grad student at your local university.
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  3. My cure for future oriented FOMO is to think about my current life and compare it to that of an ordinary citizen living at the dawn of the industrial revolution. I can communicate with almost every corner of the globe instantaneously, enjoy all kinds of cuisines, physically travel to the other side of the planet in hours, enjoy the benefits of modern conveniences like electricity, appliances to cook my food and wash my clothes, miracle medicines, etc. People living 200 years ago were condemned to lives of subsistence poverty, short lives, rampant warfare, many communicable diseases, illiteracy, super slow long distance communication, etc.
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  4. I don't think life on a simple bacterial scale is rare in the universe. But, if you look at how incredibly rare it is to have a habitable Rocky planet in the goldilocks zone of a stable star which can foster life. Add to this the incredible and un interrupted chain of events needed to lead to simian level sentience, let alone human level intelligence. We also need to assume that no cataclysmic super volcano wiped out life or an asteroid impact, super nova explosion, etc. So, just getting to homo sapien level intelligence on an alien planet is a very remote possibility. We cannot assume that the planet has the right combination of arable land in the right quantities with animals that can be domesticated and readily available mineral resources to exploit to create agrarian civilizations, which eventually ignite technological progress. This second step, on top of the first, makes the odds even more remote. So, if we assume that light speed is the absolute speed limit and recognize how huge the known universe is, even if a single space faring civilization existed on the other side of the universe, it would take them billions of years to reach us. So, in my mind we are either alone in the universe or one of two or three advanced civilizations separated by billions of light years travel. This answers the paradox.
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  5. Yeah, if you don't have any solid data to plug into the variables, it's just a bunch of scientists with big egos speculating. I suspect that there are several instances of bacterial and viral life forms in the universe, but even these are comparatively rare. Even if human level intelligence has emerged on other worlds, there simply is no guarantee that that intelligent life would go on to develop civilizations. We hominids started out as a handful of bands clustered around a small part of East Africa. What if a super volcano had erupted there and wiped out the handful of hominids in the area? What if there were not enough land and biodiversity of species and plants and accessible mineral resources to use as a resource base to create rudimentary agrarian societies? We might still be a handful of hunter gatherers eking out a living. So, the probability of this chain of events happening throughout our galaxy is so very, very, very, very small.
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  6. Correct, assuming a natural randomness that is not guided by some sort of super intelligence, life on earth will change in ways that are impossible to imagine. A super natural, globe spanning intelligence with no competition could, hypothetically, induce an evolutionary stasis on the planet OR it could go wild and constantly spin off new life forms....
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  7. My uninformed opinion is that the level of intelligence that homo sapiens possess is exceedingly rare to unique to our planet. An incredible chain of events had to occur in order for homo sapien intelligence to arise on our planet. If we are living in a multi verse with thousands of other "universes" existing on a parallel time scale with ours, then there may possibly be a handful of civilizations amongst them. What I think is most likely is that we will stumble upon life on other planets in the form of microbes and, in a few rare cases, plants and small animals with rudimentary sentience. We should tread lightly when we find them.
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  8. Aliens want to discent and conduct medical experiments on us....be scared.
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  9. It seems like a legitimate use of the JWST, if you ask me.
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