Rachel Mocks UFO Citizen Hearing

[Moonwalk]

319. The grad class from Gilesse 581 actually makes sense--we're the final frat boy ritual...

And 22 lightyears is certainly doable.

As for Drake's equation, no one's arguing that there isn't other intelligent life in the universe. For fuck's sake, we're surrounded by other intelligent species on this planet and we might just find something interesting living under the frozen ice of Europa. Any scientist or sci-fi writer will happily agree that there is other life in the universe; and we'll all agree that some of it is undoubtedly intelligent (by our standards). Probably a lot of it. It's a big universe after all. Hubble deep field picture--a small area of space--found 5,500 galaxies--that's GALAXIES. Our one galaxy has up to 400 billion stars! So. Odds are good.

But Drake's equation doesn't say that said intelligent life is going to appear concurrent with us and/or near enough to reach us. The friggin' dinosaurs lasted 160 million years. If you were an alien species on Gilesse 581 looking at Earth, then for 160 million years all you'd see on our planet were giant, mostly featherless birds. You might well give up looking at Earth after a few million years. And just how long is your civilization going to last anyway? Long enough to catch a glimpse of humans evolving?

And we modern humans--ones that cultivate and build and such, have only been on Earth for 200,000 years. Hmmm. We haven't even managed to make it to 1 million years--we might not make it even that far. My point is, is NOT about whether there is or is not other intelligent life in the universe. Let's not even argue that--there is. There's tons of it! The question is, how many of these beings are at the exact height of FTL space travel RIGHT NOW. Not millions of years ago, not a million years in the future? How many of these planets are waiting for the dinosaurs to die off before something like us can appear? How many had something like us and all we're seeing is the dying star of that once illuminated their civilization, but now is almost gone, and so are they? Many highly intelligent species may not be like us at all. Living under oceans, or in methane atmospheres. Why would they even look for life on planets with land or oxygen?

And how do they find us? 400 BILLION stars. We're hiding at the end of one of the tail ends of the spiral and we've only been sending out radio waves for something like 93 years. I don't for a moment doubt extraterrestrial life is out there. The odds of that are high. But the odds that an advanced race that can--MAYBE--visit us (and we're going to have to accept the breaking of a lot of laws of physics here for that), one that is living now and living near enough to "Hear us," etc, etc, etc....the odds are waaaaaaaaaaaay down on all that. I think we need more than Drake's equation if we're going to argue that aliens have been dropping in on us at all--most especially if we're going to say they did so before radio waves announced our presence to the universe.