"Ian Parker" <ianpark... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:b1e6cbfc-4ec4-4fc0-ab98-b824905fe44c at (no spam) 34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
On 5 May, 22:28, "Rob Dekker" <r... at (no spam) verific.com> wrote:
"Ian Parker" <ianpark... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:da7aa5d9-d59c-4ccd-a7fb-441932d285bc at (no spam) w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
....
How can you wait for a "good strong" signal without SETI ?
There may be many strong signals out there, because we barely touched the (EM spectrum) surface with SETI.

Also, how 'strong' a signal is strong enough for you ?
Do they need to break into the dayly news to get your attention ?
Or, in case you don't watch the news, do they need to break into the next episode of Seinfelt ?

A strong signal is a signal of terrestrial broadcast strength. You are
watching Seinfelt and then you get a message from ET. A strong signal
can be picked up without special equipment, without mathematical
processing.

Is an interstellar broadcast of this strength possible? Emphatically
yes. If we assume a radio telescope 4AU across transmitting at 3cm.
This is 600 million km, or 20 * 10^12 lambda. This will give a 60km
(1.22lambda/d) spot at 100 light years. 600km at 1000ly. The galaxy
would only be about 60,000km. You might have to do some clever Fourier
Transform techniques to get rid of dark matter and other lensing
effects, but basically it could be done.

Nice. A radio telescope (array) 4 AU across, that works up till 10 GHz (3cm). Wow. I would give a leg to get my hands on that on.

It still seems far-fetched and a lot of trouble and energy use for an ETI to send broacast strength signals to 100s of billions of
other stars/planets in the Galaxy.
It would be a total waste of energy for the billions of years that we were in the single-cell/multi-cell level with our life status.

With that many targets, and that much risk of beaming to a deaf planet, the "Contact" scenario seems plausible : They would listen
to emerging communicating civilisations by eavesdropping on their transmissions before switching the beacon on. In our case (60
years of broadcast), this means they would have to be less than 30 light-years away for us to receive their signal now. There are
only a few dozen stars in a 30 light-years radius.
For ETIs further away, we probably won't hear their strong beacon for thousands of years.
So you would be waiting for thousands of years.

On the other hands, if they have that 4 AU antenna, it would be fairly easy (relatively low energy use) to send out a weak beacon to
every star system in the Galaxy.
Finding such beacons is what SETI is about for now.



I think you can guaranatee a broadcast quality signal at least. This
coupled with the fact that you will have a significant fraction of the
energy enitted by a star to play with. In fact if they really wanted
to they could even fry us. No sir, there is no problem with a
broadcast strength signal.

Sure, with some emagination, but why fry a planet halfway through the Galaxy ?



On the same lines they will also have learnt all the languages that
are currently used for broadcasting. No need to put pulsar distances
on a la Voyager. Plain English or plain Spanish will do the trick.

Re-broadcasting the received signal seems plausible. I'm sure you watched "Contact" ?

In terms of the 4AU radio telescope, all I am doind is assuming that

On 5 May, 22:28, "Rob Dekker" <r... at (no spam) verific.com> wrote:
"Ian Parker" <ianpark... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:da7aa5d9-d59c-4ccd-a7fb-441932d285bc at (no spam) w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
.....
How can you wait for a "good strong" signal without SETI ?
There may be many strong signals out there, because we barely touched the (EM spectrum) surface with SETI.

Also, how 'strong' a signal is strong enough for you ?
Do they need to break into the dayly news to get your attention ?
Or, in case you don't watch the news, do they need to break into the next episode of Seinfelt ?

A strong signal is a signal of terrestrial broadcast strength. You are
watching Seinfelt and then you get a message from ET. A strong signal
can be picked up without special equipment, without mathematical
processing.

Is an interstellar broadcast of this strength possible? Emphatically
yes. If we assume a radio telescope 4AU across transmitting at 3cm.
This is 600 million km, or 20 * 10^12 lambda. This will give a 60km
(1.22lambda/d) spot at 100 light years. 600km at 1000ly. The galaxy
would only be about 60,000km. You might have to do some clever Fourier
Transform techniques to get rid of dark matter and other lensing
effects, but basically it could be done.

I think you can guaranatee a broadcast quality signal at least. This
coupled with the fact that you will have a significant fraction of the
energy enitted by a star to play with. In fact if they really wanted
to they could even fry us. No sir, there is no problem with a
broadcast strength signal.

On the same lines they will also have learnt all the languages that
are currently used for broadcasting. No need to put pulsar distances
on a la Voyager. Plain English or plain Spanish will do the trick.

- Ian Parker

Re-broadcasting the received signal seems plausible. I'm sure you watched "Contact" ?

In terms of the 4AU radio telescope, all I am doind is assuming that
ET will be able to manoever spacecraft to within a wavelength of each
other. The telescope is not a solid mass, it is a set of small phase
locked telescopes. We are starting to achieve similar things. I recall
that in an earlier posting I talked about the preponderance of fiber
optic technology. The driving force is a telescope the size of the
Earth + Particle Physics.

There is thus nothing inherently impossible about what I am proposing.
It is a logical culmination of ET (Emergent Technology). Of course ET
(Extra Terrestrial) will have had a few thousand years (at least)
start.

As far as halfway across the galaxy is concerned, this is purely a
statistical assumption. If we take a random point on Earth, odds are
it will be 10,000km away (a quadrant). Half of the Earth's surface is
in the nearest quadrant.


- Ian Parker

Ian Parker wrote:
On 3 May, 07:27, Matt Giwer <jul... at (no spam) tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:
...
Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.
As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.
� � � � The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
� � � � There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
� � � � Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur.. It
would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
on average.
Thermodynamics applies universally. Sub atomic as well as molecular.

I do not see how it can be applied to neutron decay. The process is not lossy.
Quantum phenomena regularly violent every aspect of thermo. Even for entropy I
do not see what constitutes "order" at the partical level. If the matter of
interactions expressed by Feynman diagrams it is no clear from when a change in
entropy is to be observed and in which direction.

The only reason why we do not associate it with sub atomic particles
is that there are not many particles involved in a single acelerator
based interacton. Thermodynamics is statistical. If you have a large
number of particles at accelerattor energies, if you have a Big Bang
in effect thermodynamics certainly applies. During the first 3 minutes
there was a defined temperature, a high temperature, but a
temperature.

So all that is required is to find processes which do not require accelerators.

Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
need a multiple of kT.

As a house can appear on this side of an event horizon I sort of think the
demon has met his match.

Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
of the presence of AI itself.
Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
fact need to break causality itself.

Or run causality in reverse locally. Perhaps with that supermassive rotating
object which drags information into the past.

If there are conservation laws it would seem they should apply over all time
not in every arbitrary interval of time. But does information exist as we might
describe it? Position and speed are not independent pieces of information. It is
only one quanta of information else by measuring position the speed information
is not conserved.

--
The leading cause of suicide in the US is military service.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 3991
http://www.giwersworld.org/environment/aehb.phtmla2

On 3 May, 07:27, Matt Giwer <jul... at (no spam) tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:
...
Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.
As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.
� � � � The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
� � � � There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
� � � � Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur.. It
would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
on average.

Thermodynamics applies universally. Sub atomic as well as molecular.

The only reason why we do not associate it with sub atomic particles
is that there are not many particles involved in a single acelerator
based interacton. Thermodynamics is statistical. If you have a large
number of particles at accelerattor energies, if you have a Big Bang
in effect thermodynamics certainly applies. During the first 3 minutes
there was a defined temperature, a high temperature, but a
temperature.

Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
need a multiple of kT.

Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
of the presence of AI itself.

Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
fact need to break causality itself.

Ian Parker wrote:
On 3 May, 07:27, Matt Giwer <jul... at (no spam) tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:
...
Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.
As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.
� � � � The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
� � � � There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
� � � � Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur.. It
would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
on average.
Thermodynamics applies universally. Sub atomic as well as molecular.

        I do not see how it can be applied to neutron decay. The process is not lossy.
Quantum phenomena regularly violent every aspect of thermo. Even for entropy I
do not see what constitutes "order" at the partical level. If the matter of
interactions expressed by Feynman diagrams it is no clear from when a change in
entropy is to be observed and in which direction.

The only reason why we do not associate it with sub atomic particles
is that there are not many particles involved in a single acelerator
based interacton. Thermodynamics is statistical. If you have a large
number of particles at accelerattor energies, if you have a Big Bang
in effect thermodynamics certainly applies. During the first 3 minutes
there was a defined temperature, a high temperature, but a
temperature.

        So all that is required is to find processes which do not require accelerators.
Well if you heat something up you don't require an accelerator. Mind

Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
need a multiple of kT.

        As a house can appear on this side of an event horizon I sort of think the
demon has met his match.

Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
of the presence of AI itself.
Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
fact need to break causality itself.

        Or run causality in reverse locally. Perhaps with that supermassive rotating
object which drags information into the past.

        If there are conservation laws it would seem they should apply over all time
not in every arbitrary interval of time. But does information exist as we might
describe it? Position and speed are not independent pieces of information. It is
only one quanta of information else by measuring position the speed information
is not conserved.

"Ian Parker" <ianpark... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote in messagenews:ba82e399-e2d2-4ecb-b85b-3980393c2854 at (no spam) 34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...

....

Re-broadcasting the received signal seems plausible. I'm sure you watched "Contact" ?

In terms of the 4AU radio telescope, all I am doind is assuming that
ET will be able to manoever spacecraft to within a wavelength of each
other. The telescope is not a solid mass, it is a set of small phase
locked telescopes. We are starting to achieve similar things. I recall
that in an earlier posting I talked about the preponderance of fiber
optic technology. The driving force is a telescope the size of the
Earth + Particle Physics.

There is thus nothing inherently impossible about what I am proposing.
It is a logical culmination of ET (Emergent Technology). Of course ET
(Extra Terrestrial) will have had a few thousand years (at least)
start.

You are right, and I do not contest that at all.
But you mentioned that SETI is a waste of time and that we should wait for a strong signal.

The thing is, what do we do if that very strong signal does NOT appear.
What conclusion can we draw then ?
Seems that the only conclusion we can draw is that no ETI has set up intergallactic radio/TV broadcasts.
(Thank heaven ! I was already concerned about 5,689 channels of ETI advertisements and infomercials).

But maybe they set up a modest beacon. Maybe that transmits some info about what is important to know about ETI life in the Galaxy.
If we do not look for that beacon and it is there, then we miss out on the most significant piece of information in the history of
mankind.
Is that a waste of time ??





As far as halfway across the galaxy is concerned, this is purely a
statistical assumption. If we take a random point on Earth, odds are
it will be 10,000km away (a quadrant). Half of the Earth's surface is
in the nearest quadrant.

If we do NOT get a strong signal the conclusion is simple. We either

On 7 May, 04:13, Matt Giwer <jul... at (no spam) tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote:



Ian Parker wrote:
On 3 May, 07:27, Matt Giwer <jul... at (no spam) tampabay.REMover.rr.com> wrote:
Ian Parker wrote:
...
Yes but we don't even see that. Don't suppose there have been no
searches for IR radiation round stars. Beta Pictoris has some rubble
round it, but it is condensing asteroid like masterial, NOT Dyson
habitats.
As I think I have said before Dyson civilizations will have radio
teledcopes at least 4AU across and fragmented optical telescopes,
possibly thousands of kilometers across. Hence, if they are there at
all, they know everything about us. This is why SETI is such a
complete waste of time.
� � � � The problem with what we think we would expect from a Dyson civilization is
that it is based upon out technology today whereas by definition a Dyson
civilization would be unimaginably ahead of us.
� � � � There is no way we could possibly know what to look for.
� � � � Thermodynamics does not apply in the sub-atomic interaction of matter to
energy. There is no reason to assume an energy to matter conversion would
generate any waste heat at all. So if they are converting unneeded solar energy
back to matter by a fundamental process even the IR radiation we not occur.. It
would be a sphere whose temperature would be 0 degrees. Or perhaps 4.7 degrees
on average.
Thermodynamics applies universally. Sub atomic as well as molecular.

        I do not see how it can be applied to neutron decay. The process is not lossy.
Quantum phenomena regularly violent every aspect of thermo. Even for entropy I
do not see what constitutes "order" at the partical level. If the matter of
interactions expressed by Feynman diagrams it is no clear from when a change in
entropy is to be observed and in which direction.

The only reason why we do not associate it with sub atomic particles
is that there are not many particles involved in a single acelerator
based interacton. Thermodynamics is statistical. If you have a large
number of particles at accelerattor energies, if you have a Big Bang
in effect thermodynamics certainly applies. During the first 3 minutes
there was a defined temperature, a high temperature, but a
temperature.

        So all that is required is to find processes which do not require accelerators.

Well if you heat something up you don't require an accelerator. Mind
you are talkink about Big Bang temperatures.

I know this is slightly off topic, but one of the things that is not
yet understood about the BB is why there is matter. In a hot box you
have equal amounts of matter and antimatter. There must be some
symmetry breaking interaction of baryonic quarks, possibly with a
guage particle which is of too high an energy to have been seen yet.



Thermodynamics in fact applies to information. James Cleark Maxwell
proposed a daemon that would let fast moving atoms pass and stop slow
moving ones. The refutation of this is that to make a decision you
need a multiple of kT.

        As a house can appear on this side of an event horizon I sort of think the
demon has met his match.

Ah, you have are thinking about Hawking and the entropy of Black
Holes. BTW the radiation given off by a BH is random and of high
entropy.



Maxwell's daemon tells us (indirectly) that information obeys the laws
of thermodynamics. Indeed Marcus Hutter has shown that compression is
not only associated with thermodynamic entropy, but is an indication
of the presence of AI itself.
Of course you can postulatre all kinds of magical powers for advanced
extraterrestrial civilizations. However to break the 2nd law you do in
fact need to break causality itself.

        Or run causality in reverse locally. Perhaps with that supermassive rotating
object which drags information into the past.

Many people have speculated that the expansion of the Universe is what
gives rise to the arrow of time. If you have a sealed hot box it will
maintain its entropy. It has a temperature and is in equilibrium. As
soon as you allow it to expand there will be more quantum states in
the future. Thus to put it in a nutshell, if quark soup expands it
will produce galaxies, stars and the Universe we in fact observe. Can
the Universe condense into quark soup. Yes it can but it is so
unlikely as to be discounted. All intersactions are reversable - Yes -
in a strict dynamical sense. Are intersactions reversable in the
statistical sense? No, because we are going from a small number of
possible quantum states to a very much larger number. All states are
equally probable.

If I say all states are equally probable, if I have a Hermetian
Hamiltonian where each path is as likely as the one in the opposite
direction, entropy has to increase. If it did not increase we would
not have a causitive relationship.

  - Ian Parker





        If there are conservation laws it would seem they should apply over all time
not in every arbitrary interval of time. But does information exist as we might
describe it? Position and speed are not independent pieces of information. It is
only one quanta of information else by measuring position the speed information
is not conserved.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

But in the absence of any such evidence, I conclude that the silence
of the night sky is golden, and that in the search for
extraterrestrial life, no news is good news.

I think you fear its discovery.

The Great Filter we have now is religion. Religious leaders (who merely
make money out of death) pounce on any evidence for the existance of
aliens and destroy it.

Several of my friends have suffered the consequences of being contactees
and have dissapeared. The ones I know ended up in the local nuthouse (ran
by the Church) and if they did not step down they were lobotomised and in
some cases their faces disfigured or their arms or legs broken or in other
cases cut off.

The evidence for extraterrestial visits is destroyed, their messangers cut
to pieces.

These atrocities are instigated and carried out by normal religious
leaders mostly christians. This is because any proof of the existance of
aliens would invalidate their faith. That is their faith in a life beyond
the grave. This is fear, fear of our own inevitable death.

There is historical evidence for extraterrestial vists by intelligent life
from another planet orbiting another star. My ancestor Gulliver Goddard
owed a farm near Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK (Goddards Farm) and in about
1660 a black disc landed on his farm and he was befreinded by alien
hominids. These creatures lived in the farm with Gulluiver and in a Roman
Palace nearby (The Vine - now demoloshed I understand). The local gentry
said it was not true and one of the witneses was hanged as a heretic at
Basing House. Goddard got an army together led by Oliver Cromwell and the
civil war was fought over this. The royalists went to the farm and
interrupted dinner where the aliens were all shot dead by the hand
cannon's the royalists had. The disc had been hidden in a circular barn
built round it. One alien got away and made it back to his craft but he
needed to refuel it with water. One royalist followed him into the disc
and shot him at the controls.

The rebellion culminated in the beheading of Charles I (then King of
England).

Gulliver was allowed to live and wrote about his contact in "Gullivers
Travels". The first edition of five copies was straight and told about his
travels into space, later editions were modified to make them acceptable
to the religious authorities at the time.

One story is almost intact and is told as a child's story about the planet
of goblins (hominids with compound eyes). I recall one episode where
Gulliver gave food and water to a old goblin couple who called at his
door.

The Farm is still there and is up for sale as a working farm.

I went to the abandoned farm when I was a child of ten with the family
where the story was told to us children. The disc was still there and I
looked inside. I saw the dead Royalist's blue silk coat with gold braiding
and hand cannon on the floor where he ha starved to death when the
automatic hatch closed. The remains of the alien were there too.

The circular barn was built round it. I could just reach up and touch the
metal on the underside of the discuss shaped object which had an automatic
hatch with a lift in the centre of the underside of the disc which stood
on four legs.

The aliens recently (2006) returned, collected their dead (some were
buried in caskets in the farm and some (a family) at The Vine).

This story is from the margins of my memory.


--
Chris
http://www.myphilosophy.eu
simple_language at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:da947645-72d9-4966-bcee-266aa7d34d40 at (no spam) a1g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=20569

Deleted

Bostrom views this much the same way I do. The only point I would add is that
if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital habitats, technological races could
colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can imagine
when staying inside the confines of the planetary assumption. Which means the
lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more problematic.

Are We Alone in the Galaxy?
http://writings.mike-combs.com/alone.htm


--


Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative
of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings...
It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer
dictatorship to democracy.

Ronald Reagan at Westminster Abbey, 1982

"Mike Combs" <mikeco... at (no spam) nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti> wrote in message

news:fvd652$bdk$1 at (no spam) home.itg.ti.com...

Bostrom views this much the same way I do.  The only point I would add is that
if Gerard O'Neill was right about orbital habitats, technological races could
colonize the galaxy far more outrageously and thoroughly than we can imagine
when staying inside the confines of the planetary assumption.  Which means the
lack of obvious visual indicators becomes even more problematic.

I don't see that at all. The assumption that advanced civilizations would
move out and colonize is flawed. So is the assumption that they would
travel or try to communicate. Just the opposite should be true.

Colonizing as a necessity is assumed why?
 Because now we can't see how we can sustain ourselves
on this planet. We assume colonizing is the only way
to survive long term. A truly advanced civilization wouldn't
NEED to colonize. As they would've figured out how to sustain
themselves and their population growth within their own
natural environment.

As for traveling, remote sensing is a far faster and easier way of gaining
information. Not to mention, a truly advanced society would already
have the 'answers' to the grand questions. Rendering exploring and
contacting others moot. We don't have those 'answers' yet ad
feel the need to make contact.

Simple observation of the trends of humanity show that as we become
more advanced, the need to colonize, travel or communicate with
others diminish.

And the assumption life predates earth by any significant time period
is also weak. The observations show life evolved just about as soon
as possible in our case.   The age of our sun is a very significant portion
of the age of the universe. It's likely we are an early example of life
in our galaxy. Life is most certainly evolving everywhere it can, just
at about the same time frames everywhere.

For those not keeping up with the latest cosmology, the discovery of
dark energy and matter are changing everything. Life on earth evolved
at a very unique time in the evolution of the universe, at the transition
point between a dark matter and dark energy dominated universe.
This transition point should define the ideal conditions for life as it
occurs when matter domination has matured.

The latest cosmology can be found here.http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/

Steinhardt and Turok, of Princeton and Cambridge
are rewriting the text books as we speak.

Excerpts below from....

A Quintessential Introduction to Dark Energy
Paul J. Steinhardt
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princetonhttp://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/steinhardt.pdf

"We live at a special time in the history of the universe.
The Copernican revolution taught us that there is nothing special about our
location in the universe. If space is uniform, then should not the same be
true for time? Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding taught us
that the universe is evolving, but the notion had been that the evolution
has been steady over the last 15 billion years with no remarkable
changes. We now know that time is anti-Copernican. We live at a special
moment in cosmic history, the transition between a decelerating,
matter-dominated universe and an accelerating, dark energy dominated universe.
The progressive formation of ever-larger scale structure and increasing
complexity that characterized the matter-dominated universe has reached
an end, and now the universe is headed towards a period that is
ever-emptier and structureless."

"The fine-tuning and cosmic coincidence problems are vexing. They are often
posed
as a paradox: Why should the acceleration begin just as humans evolve? In
desperation, some cosmologists and physicists have been led to give renewed
attention to anthropic models (Weinberg 2000). But many continue to seek
a dynamical explanation which does not require the fine-tuning of initial
conditions
or mass parameters and which is decidedly nonanthropic."

I see nothing at all inconsistent with the idea the universe is, or will be,
full of life. Yet we never make contact.

Several points.

Several points.

1) We will need to colonize from the point of view of self defense. If
we don't get in first someone else will. If I were a Native American
and somehow history was reversed and I had a technological lead over
Europe I would feel obliged to colonize Europe. In 1421 the Chinese
risked oblivion in the same way.

2) If we had a 4AU diameter radio telescope you could listen to a
mobile phone on Alpha Centuri. If there is life out there it WILL be
found. That is unless it is so advanced as to be able to make itself
stealthy. Something which is a theroreical possibility though not
likely in fact.

3) The question of coincidences and the Anthropic Principle is a
subject for a posting in itself. Clearly a weak anthopic principle
exists in that we would not be here observing if the Universe were not
friendly to life.

There is probably NO other intelligent species within about 1000 LY of
us and we will have to just get used to this fact.