On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 09:53:14PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
On 08/10/2016 05:03 AM, Bastiani Fortress wrote:
11:00 PM, August 9, 2016, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org>:
Personally I don't hold much hope for humanity..I figure the solution to Fermis paradox is self-evident.
We don't see interstellar "civilizations" very often, because those who did not get over making everything bigger and more powerful for sake of bigness and power didn't make it. For reals. Some of those gamma bursts may be industrial accidents, or Bad Outcomes to MAD based defense strategies (an especially stupid kind of industrial accident).
Is there a name for the planet that was the asteroid belt before it was an asteroid belt? Mars' Marina Canyon/ trench, may have been from rain of some composition, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Marineris but perhaps was an interplanetary energy warfare result where ultimately Mars succeeded and that other planet became the asteroid belt. To my eye, that trench looks more like target practice (for a somewhat intense version of 'practice') rather than river delta...
If the absence of torrents of long range EM message traffic is surprising, that's only because we presume aliens talk with strings and tin cans "just like us." If the absence of star drive signatures is surprising, it's more likely that our assumptions about what those signatures would be are faulty, than that there are no interstellar voyagers riding the starwinds. If the absence of physical visitors is surprising, that just means a lot of people have not taken a hard critical look at UFO investigations: Failure to invade and loot or otherwise dominate a technologically weaker species' cradle planet may be evidence of the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence, rather than its absence.
:)