My personal take is that there’s some kind of anthropomorphic fallacy in thinking life should tend towards “civilization”.
Life will tend towards reproductive success and it seems entirely plausible to me that reproductive success doesn’t at all imply the use of radio waves.
The dinosaurs were a very intelligent life form that never tended towards civilization and some of their bird ancestors can be smarter than most mammals etc. Expecting the trait of civilization to emerge seems unfounded and against available evidence.
Space travel seems impossible. I realize you can back of the envelope it in a way that makes it seem within grasp but there’s no economic benefit in colonizing another star and only some marginal mining benefit in even visiting the nearby planets so I don’t think it will ever happen.
No, rare intelligence and to a lesser extent rare earth remain as convincing as ever. Potentially habitable does not mean life sustaining, and given the lack of strong biosignatures on any of the examined near earth exoplanets, I’d say that there is indeed increasing evidence that life of any kind really is that rare, much less intelligence.
It is just absurdly hard to get conditions right for microbes to form on a reasonable timeframe is a solution after all.
What do you mean after all? Wasn’t it the consensus since forever that there was basically 0 chance of anything actually colliding because galaxies are mostly empty space? I’m pretty sure I read about that when I was a child.
What I like about this image is that this is probably the biggest object that I can compare to something I know, that I can “comprehend”. With 6 km wide, it is about the same size as Grenoble, a city I have seen from above while hiking. I can understand how far the picture looks from it, how small a human would be on it
I biked out to a park yesterday with my big binoculars but I’m still waiting for my tripod to show up so I just checked out the moon some. Thanks for posting.
The Pleiades and Hyades should still be fairly high in the sky, and make great targets for binoculars. I’m also VERY partial to the little beehive cluster in Canis Major (go to the first barely visible star down from sirius, along the dog’s spine, and move directly right from there). If they’re strong enough, the Orion Nebula also makes a great target. The regular beehive cluster is alright; it can be tricky in the city, but you should juuuust be able to see what kinda looks like a faint, blurry star just left of the angle of you make a right angle between Pollux and Procyon. There’s also a few binary stars that make good targets right now. You should be able to split the first bright star out from the cup in the handle of the big dipper into three stars.
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