Why Life On Mars May Foretell Our Doom

Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Bostrom has an interesting interpretation on why the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half-century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a 'Great Filter,' which can be thought of as a probability barrier and consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems."

Re:Fermi Paradox

[amohat]

Or, duh, life-bearing planets are so few and far apart that our primitive tech hasn't noticed anything in the last, oh, moments of time humanity has existed.

Sometimes I'm glad we haven't found anything. How embarrassing it would be, like having guests show up during a ugly fight with your spouse. (hehe, that episode of Office was painful!)

I'm not sure we deserve to meet an advanced alien race. Humans pretty much suck, we'd prolly figure out a way to try to war with them anyway.

The Great Filter? WOW!

[StefanJ]

In an article in SEED magazine, Geoffrey Miller suggests that technological civilizations lose ambition toward real achievement once they start playing computer games. [seedmagazine.com]

Cripes, I known fellers like that.

Oblig. HHGTTG Ref

[Anonymous Coward]

THE UNIVERSE:
4. Population

        It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

alternative theory from countless sci-fi novels...

[stmfreak]

As we have seen through our own history and present, when civilizations interact, it is often hostile and violent. It would only take one aggressive, space-faring, xenophobic race to send the rest into hiding.

With two such crazies, even the aggressors would hide lest they meet their doom in a kinetic fireball. Planets and space habitats are just too easy a target.

This fits with UFO observations too. We see their ships, but not their home worlds. Ships are mobile and hyperspace travel may be untraceable. Additionally, why would they communicate with us when we're broadcasting everything into space? That's crazy talk. It's only a matter of time before the Zurgs find us, drop some comets in our oceans and turn Earth into an algae farm or just bust it up and leave us for dead.

Hell, it may have happened before. We have an asteroid belt that some propose was formerly a planet. Our Moon was supposedly formed through some sort of cataclysmic collision between Earth and some other large planetoid.

We need ships. Lots of them. We're sitting ducks out here.

Re:Life on Mars?

[Forge]

There was life on Mars and there will be again. It's just a little dormant right now.

As for the doom foretold by finding any or by the success of SETI? Come on. The aliens are already here.

The problem is that they have surrounded Earth with the cosmic equivalent of yellow tape. Hence the strange activities of those aliens which have been spotted.

Some of them are CSI detectives trying to figure out what's wrong with the lifeforms on this planet. The rest are teenagers sneaking across the line on a dare to make a little mischief and run like hell.

Want to guess which of them mutilates cattle and draws crop circles?