If so it went un-noticed by me.

Yeah humans change the enviroment around them by interacting with it... so does every animal, plant, insect e.t.c. that has ever existed... its part of being alive it really doesn't matter what life form you are talking about... it interacts with its surroundings and changes them *YAWN*.

I get the general point, that us humans do go in and mess things up, and maybe we humans should be a LOT more careful about what we do (well actually there is no maybe there) but articles like this are so patronising and lame they only make intelligent / rational debate next to impossible.

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I've been a life-long admirer of Albert Einstein, and not only because of contributions in science. He was also a Socialist and he was a Human.

His efforts together with those of others brought us one of the most monumental advances in theoretical physics and the Theory of Relativity; momentous like Copernicus! A great leap in Knowledge of the Universe (and for those few left who don't disparage and devalue philosophy of the Cosmos). Yes Knowledge, but not so much in Understanding, this we must still struggle with, and we must!

For their were others, not involved in theoretical questions but concerned with Practice, Pragmatism, Utility and Use and, of course Profit (not only in dollar terms). Simultaneously with Einstein's efforts were these other more practical humans eager to Apply. And we got what we wanted: the Atom Bomb, and lots of room for Power and for Hubris.

A High Achievement together with a Low Achievement; the possibility of annihilating or altering not only ourselves but all existing things. Ecstasy and Agony. As with all knowledge, especially those dualist kinds which make Good and Evil, True and False distinct and independent of each other. As with all those Idealisms that attempt to reverse positions with Reality.

Like living, theoretical and practical right here on our planet, this same Agony and Ecstasy will accompany at every step that search for living on other planets when we remain in these dualist and idealist ways of thinking, researching and doing. We might reach great heights and take great leaps in advances and progress or maybe not; historical evidences show us some of both. Then again, maybe all those forms of living that are possibly elsewhere in this universe have long ago "written us off" as un-deserving of the least bit of attention and are engaged in better efforts.

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"1) Observe, but do not contact."

How do we know that is not being done to us here on our planet right now?

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> Observe, but do not contact.

Well, first, the presence of methane in a planet's atmosphere only has interesting implications if it occurs in a non-primordial atmosphere containing plenty of free oxygen. In such a situation methane has a half-life on the order of a decade (or decades), and so it must have been created recently in order to be observable now. Martian scientists could easily deduce the presence of life on earth from all the methane our cows and decaying vegetation produce. Jupiter has plenty of methane in its atmosphere, but it's primordial and no big deal.

Second, the author seems to be presuming we'll necessarily be the superior power in any intragalactic match-up, but the odds of this are 50/50 at best and may well be way worse given that we're likely the techno-newbies in the galaxy. Perhaps we should hope that they have a prime directive, since our best Bruce Willis type efforts may stand up as well as wet toilet paper if they don't.

Third, "contact" is ambiguous. We've already launched a bubble of radio wave radiation out into the galaxy which we can't recall. It's now 50-75 light years in diameter and encompasses quite a large number of stars -- and it's expanding at the rate of another light year each year. If there's anyone out there with even relatively primitive technology, contact may thus be inevitable. Even without being able to decode the signal information (eg, a TV picture) -- because it's encoded at much lower power levels than the carrier waves -- they can still figure out an awful lot about earth and likely determine that the radiation is not made by mundane natural processes; i.e., that life or something resembling it (as we define it) is responsible.

In terms of us making direct physical contact, the distances involved are so vast that that really isn't of any concern at the moment. We can barely sustain a low earth orbit "occupation" at the moment. The nearest planets we might be talking about are on the order of a billion times farther than even the moon. So nature and the galaxy impose a sort of natural quarantine on any upstart trouble-makers which might arise that is of a wholly different sort than island/continental populations confronted as humans spread out across earth in search of dominance over resources. By the time we're capable of spanning such distances in a reasonable amount of time, if we ever are, we'll likely have transitioned to an entirely different type of society. Maybe I'm being optimistic.

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They have become the most hostile species on this Earth, mainly due to their religions that alienate their consciousness from the System that supports life on this planet. The most advanced civilization has even wrecked the family system that is necessary for human sanity with its materialism. This is the worst ideology that has struck mankind, more dangerous than all other ideologies as it tampers with all aspects of life. It kills not only innocent human beings, it even tampers with the essential qualities of the human mind leading to the large scale collapse of culture.

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The military may even now be looking into the forseeable future and exploring weapons that will be able to exterminate any form of life that may be found on other planets. This may be why they have now developed an airborne laser capable of melting a tank from five miles distance.
Death and destruction is their keyword on this planet so why not on that are likely to be discoverd in the years to come?

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The notion that we should respect the sanctity and "right to exist" of any extraterrestrial life we find is a worthy idea indeed. There seems a fair possibility that we may come into direct contact with such life here in our own solar system. Microbial life may exist on Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and possibly even Titan. If and when we do detect such life, preserving and protecting it should be of utmost importance.

But the author has a few misguided premises that form the basis for his article:
1) That Humans will detect intelligent life but that their civilization would be more primitive than ours.
***************
There's arguably a greater chance of there being no life anywhere else in the universe than finding a civilization that actually has inferior technical capability than we do. The reason?

The ages of Star systems differ on the order of millions of years, typically hundreds of millions years, sometimes *billions* of years. That means the difference in age between any two stars is typically no less than several hundred million years. Timescales in the universe are incredibly vast.

Homo Sapiens arose roughly ~150,000 years ago from a specific branch of evolution that began about 3 million years ago. If the evolution of our species is no more than the blink of an eye on a cosmic timescale, than the 10,000 years since the advent of agriculture is unimaginably brief; we could say it's less than a microsecond.

Since our Sun is a fairly young star, and the difference in age between any two stars is on the order of millions of years, it's safe to assume that any extraterrestrial civilization in our galaxy will have existed for at least several million years longer than we have.
In a few thousand years, we've gone from the birth of written language to remote-controlled robots on Mars. There are no reasons to think that the rate of our technological progress will stop; indeed it's faster today than it's ever been.

If we've achieved such technology in a few thousand years, the technology of a civilization that's millions of years older than we are is probably beyond our imagination.

If there are other civilizations in our galaxy, they need only possess the technology to spectrally analyze the composition of the atmospheres of other planets (a technology we already possess) to know that there is life on Earth. Since there has been life on Earth for billions of years, it's very possible that every intelligent civilization in our galaxy is already aware of our existence and has been for some time. If that's the case, then Star Trek's "Prime Directive" would be *their* rule, and we would be the primitives they choose not to disturb.

2) That the hunt for extrasolar planets will yield evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations:
***********************
There is no government-funded program anywhere in the world to detect extraterrestrial intelligence. Extrasolar planet detection would only yield evidence for the existence of terrestrial planets in the so-called "habitable zone" (where surface water is retained in liquid form); atmospheric spectral analysis of such planets could detect the existence of life...but such life would likely be microbial (for most of Earth's existence, the only form of life on the planet was microbial). Extrasolar planet hunting is also very limited in scope given the utterly vast size of our own galaxy; only our nearest neighbors are being analyzed for the existence of planets.

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There was a great line in one of the Star Trek films, referring to the war-like Klingons as "the alien trash of the galaxy." To respond to a letter writer above, perhaps _we_ are the alien trash of the galaxy and are under quarantine, lest our parasitic ways spread their contagion...
Sagan has nailed it. We are newcomers as far as "intelligent" development. On this planet, simians/mammals developed consciousness. Who's to say that had a wayward meteor not struck 40-60 million years ago, reptiles would not have developed consciousness?
We have no precise idea under what circumstances certain life forms may develop "consciousness." We assume the brain and neurons make new connections as a result of struggles within, and adapting to, its environment. Hence, at some point "consciousness" is _reached_ by this evolving, struggling, adapting brain.
Will we evolve to the point of harnessing/overcoming/understanding our hard-wired (ironically, by evolution) impulses, such as the acquisitive impulse, the sado-masochistic impulse, the territorial impulse and the insidious tribal impulse?
Till then, I suspect, we will remain off limits to technologically advanced civilizations.

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They need that don't they..?

Man is a doomed, flawed, failed, species bound for extinction..

Simple as that..!

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It makes no sense to condemn humankind as a whole. Certain belief systems maintain that nature should be destroyed. These are the monotheistic religions. These monotheists have effected an unnatural balance that destroys not only cultural diversity but also natural diversity. As unforgiving homogeneists, they are the enemies of both culture and nature.

It's like the Borg from Star Trek, referenced in this article. Borg are made up of many races but they have absolutely no cultural diversity. The Borg also relentlessly destroy nature for the sake of an illusory fake ideal of progress. Monotheism is a mind control cult like the Borg.

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Sagan, the poster above, almost got it right. There has been life
on earth for 3800 million years [3.8 American billion years].
Science began with Galileo. The space age began in 1957.
Dividing, the chances are 76 million to 1 that life we encounter
will be pre-space age. Almost all life will be bacteria only by 7.6
to one. The life we encounter will be no more than Homo
Erectus by 7600 to one. Mars has only very primitive bacteria
living deep underground. Titan might have precursors to life.
Europa may have something more than bacteria, but multi-cellular
life is unlikely. Anywhere we go, we will be increasing life.

We haven't treated the world any worse than the dinosaurs did,
and the dinosaurs didn't have a space program. The dinosaurs
either ate or trampled everything, usually both. Every life form
that ever existed had some effect on some other life form, usually
by eating the other life form. Assisting the other life form is rare,
but symbiosis is how eukaryotes were created from prokaryotes.
The dinosaurs were incapable of defending Mother Earth from the
giant impact that killed the dinosaurs. We can do better. We can
blow Haley's Comet out of the sky with our smallest nuclear
bomb, the backpack nuke. We can defend Earth from something
bigger than the thing that killed the dinosaurs and so much else on
earth. We can also carry earth life to other planets. We are
Earth's defenders AND earth's sex organ. Seeding other planets
with earth life is planetary sex.

We should allow time for research before colonizing each other
planet, but not infinite time. The more primitive the life found,
the shorter the time allowed for research. Most worlds are dead,
and zero time is required for researching indigenous life. Mars
requires only a few years since our colony won't interfere with life
underground in any case. Europa is a chancy place to colonize
because the surface is ice above a global ocean, and any colonist
is likely to get dunked. Our colonizing will not harm life we find
in our solar system because of these conditions. We, as the most
advanced life, have what I would call a natural right to colonize,
and a duty to colonize to protect ourselves, the most advanced,
from extinction. Not that anything ever had any right to anything
at all. Nature never gave any organism as much as a right to a
quick death. The more planets we colonize, the less likely we are
to go extinct. If the authors of the article don't have a survival
instinct, then let them suicide. That is their problem. The rest of
us want to live, and life demands growth. The earth is over
capacity already, so growth has to occur off-earth.

In 33000 years, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star and a member
of the Centauri Cluster, will be in our Oort cloud. That will be an
opportune time to colonize the space around Alpha and Beta
Centauri. We can do it by having people in out Oort cloud by
then. 33000 years is not long enough for another intelligent
species to evolve. By making jumps to passing star systems, we
can colonize our galaxy in only 64 million years. Since 64
million years is a short time compared to the age of the galaxy, we
must be the most advanced in our galaxy.

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I would be highly suspicious and apprehensive if an alien civilization came here to Earth and wanted to:

1. Mate with us.
2. Sell us something for a profit, and make our planet a factory for them.
3. Kill us if we didn't assent to the previous two items.

A primate anthropologist once told me, when I asked him casually if we are smarter than apes:
"Chimpanzee politics are FRIGHTENLY human".

There are those of us who would like to live in peace, but we seem to be outnumbered by those who want to fling dung, kill and eat their young, and make money from it.

It's a big universe out there, but I think we have to clean up our act here on Earth and evolve, before we go out to the stars.

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We can look out and examine, observe, and render learned opinions about the nature of our own and other stars, and the nature of the planets discovered orbiting other stars, but we'll NEVER be allowed to visit any of them as we'll be kept contained to our own solar system. You see we inhabit a giant ant farm, much like the ones we use to observe the behavior of ants for our amusement and edification. Of course, letting the ants out of the ant farm is out of the question. Who would want them running loose around the house? Yuck! Our captives are an ancient race of creatures closely resembling huge roaches, who are waiting for the day that we evolve into a less ornery, destructive, and violent species, and are fit to join the other civilizations scattered throughout the galaxy. How do I know this? Wouldn't you like to know!

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is likely too smart to be 'discovered' by us. Honestly, I think humans have too many agendas going, for one thing. Why would we think a different race wouldn't notice that? All they have to do is check out our politicians, for starters.

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Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is a good place to start to consider the ethical questions arising from First Contact and colonization. The Earth settlers in those books divide into political factions, the Reds wanting to preserve Mars in its original state, the Greens wanting to terraform it for human habitation, and the UN which at that point only functions a a front for multinationals who want to exploit Mars.

I for one would enforce a Prime Directive, even with planetary exploration. Hopefully, all our landers and surveyors have been sterilized properly.

And if more advanced species come calling, hopefully they will observe the same rules too, lest they try to colonize us a la X-Files, Threshold, and countless other science fiction series.

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No, humans should stay on earth and finish this off first. No need to endanger other potential sources of life.

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Where else can I read a collection of opinions that tell me:

a. use of the word "illegal" to describe someone's immigration status is immoral because it damages their self-esteem

b. I should be ashamed of my country, and for being white, because the wealth in our country is unequally distributed because of racial history

c. I should feel moral outrage over the death of seals in Canada

d. humans as a whole should not be allowed to exist, because nothing we do has any value, and we destroy, corrupt, and pollute everything we come into contact with

If (as about a dozen readers suggest here in writing) human beings have no right to even exist, how on Earth (or any other planet) can you carp on the "cracker nativist Anglos" that use the phrase "illegal alien?" How can you expect me to feel remorse for the history of slavery, when you say I should not even exist? Why should I feel bad about seals, when there are people on this website who say the human race should be obliterated?

Now that I think of it, as a human being, my self esteem has been damaged, and I am being unfairly discriminated against by this website....I will write an op/ed piece about anti-human, pro-animal-other-than-human bias in America, and the injustice of The System that's holding me --- as a human ---- back.

Or maybe this is just more proof that the supposedly enlightened "progressive" or "liberal" movement is completely anti-intellectual and doesn't even require of itself intellectual consistency.

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Why? so we can destroy it the way we're destroying ourselves,unless of course they're far superior then they could simply erradicate us if we start any of our shit!!!.It would be kinda nice though to find a somewhat inteligent race of beings just as long as we keep our politics and especially religious nuts away,like the Spaniards did for the cardinals in the name of their god!....

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As "Sagan" stated, there are many stars in our galaxy that are
older than our star. BUT they are metal poor. In astronomers'
jargon, there are 3 elements: hydrogen, helium and metal. Our
star is among the youngest of the Seventh Generation stars. Our
star therefore has lots of "metal." There are stars that have more
metal, but they are younger, in general. The universe started out
with only 3 elements: hydrogen, helium and trace amounts of
Lithium. All other elements were made by stars and scattered
into space when the largest of those stars exploded as supernovas.
Our star and our planet is made of the "nuclear waste" of
supernova nuclear explosions. Metallicity has been building up
over the billions of years. That means the percentage of elements
"heavier" than lithium has been increasing as time goes on. The
percentage of elements with more than 3 protons in the nucleus of
their atoms has increased with time and continues to increase with
time. The first 6 generations of supernova explosions built the
elements that went into making the earth and our star. The first
stars, being metal poor, could not have had rocky planets like
earth. The Seventh Generation is the first generation of stars that
is likely to have planets with enough "metal", that is carbon,
oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, iron, calcium, etc. for life to exist
on their planets. Therefore, the existence of older stars does NOT
imply the existence of older civilizations. I repeat that we are
probably the most advanced creatures in our galaxy.

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1969 Rocket

There is more challenge in each square block of city slum
Than in all the galaxy.
Between brother and brother, more awful distance.

It will be written that, in 1969, primitive man canned himself
And catapulted through the void,
While hunger, hate and sickness stalked his earth.
Choosing not to try for heaven just the moon.

The gnarled old man, sitting in the seamy summer of Seventh Street amidst the broken glass,
Is wiser than the scientists at Houston.
He knows what vistas cry to be explored.

-- anonymous

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than to open it and remove all doubt.

We could not possibly hope to reach any of the extrasolar planets that have been discovered recently, with current technology, for millenia. The maximum lifespan of a human is not much greater than 100 years, so by the time you got there you would be a rotting corpse.

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In 33000 years, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star and a member
of the Centauri Cluster, will be in our Oort cloud. That will be an
opportune time to colonize the space around Alpha and Beta
Centauri. We can do it by having people in our Oort cloud by
then. By making jumps to passing star systems, we can colonize
our entire galaxy in only 64 million years. Since stars do not
orbit the galaxy in lockstep, we pass another solar system on the
order of once in a few tens of thousands of years. Stars oscillate
up and down above and below the galactic plane as well as orbit
in many crossing orbits. If I remember correctly, we do 6 up and
down oscillations per orbit around the galaxy. Once we have
colonized the Centauri Cluster, we will have twice as many
chances to jump to neighboring solar systems. The possible
number of jumps per unit time keeps doubling, insuring that we
can colonize our whole galaxy in only 64 million years. All we
have to do is make a start soon. Once we begin to expand to
places beyond earth, the process will continue outward and
rapidly because the economic incentives are enormous. For
example, a 2.5 mile in diameter iron asteroid contains $35 Trillion
worth of 6 elements. Once we start mining asteroids, the speed of
our expansion will astound you, just as George Washington would
be astounded to know how soon the US included 48 states.
People in his day thought that it would take centuries to get past
the Appalachian mountains. We will be mining the Oort cloud a
lot sooner than you could imagine. Once we are in the Oort
cloud, jumping to a passing solar system is almost unavoidable.
All it takes is for one small group of Oort cloud miners, out of
many such groups, to decide to do it. Oort cloud miners groups
have to include whole families because the distances are too large
to transport miners that far otherwise. The habitable planets we
first see in our telescopes won't be the first ones we colonize. So
what? We will get to them in a very short 64 million years.
Remember, the galaxy is 13 Billion years old. Another 64
million years is nothing in the life of the galaxy. The galaxy will
be unchanged by the time we get there. Notice that this method
of colonizing the galaxy is the same method that life has always
used: Just take any opportunity that happens along. There is no
prior planning required.

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Staying on one planet is suicide, as Carl Sagan said.

We need colonies on other planets just in case something really
bad happens here. For example, an extinction event caused by:
global warming, giant asteroid impact or pandemic. A collapse
of civilization on earth could destroy much of our knowledge.
We need a repository of knowledge elsewhere as well. The more
planets we colonize, the less likely we are to go extinct. If
don|51 doesn't have a survival instinct, then let don|51 suicide.
That is don|51's problem. The rest of us want to live, and life
demands growth. The earth is over capacity already, so growth
has to occur off-earth.

As for the life on other planets, we will research and catalog them
and keep them in zoos and reserves.

We haven't treated the world any worse than the dinosaurs did,
and the dinosaurs didn't have a space program. The dinosaurs
either ate or trampled everything, usually both. Every life form
that ever existed had some effect on some other life form, usually
by eating the other life form. Assisting the other life form is rare,
but symbiosis is how eukaryotes were created from prokaryotes.
We have not yet polluted the earth as much as the first green
plants did. The first green plants made a gas that was poisonous
to almost all other life on earth. That poison gas was oxygen.
Almost all other things alive at that time either died or found a
place to hide from the oxygen.

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All good environmentalists should be working to prevent humans from getting off the Earth. Humans have already destroyed this planet, and it would be totally awful for the rest of the universe if they go marauding around the galaxy destroying more. Humans suffer from runaway intellect and ego and underdeveloped sense of wisdom, including a sense of oneness with other life. Until and unless those major defects are corrected, I certainly hope humans are confined to the Earth.

And, BTW, this was the point of the article, for that first poster who pretended to not understand it because (s)he didn't agree with it.

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if your wish is to have no further impact, because that is the only
way you can end your impact. Otherwise, you will have to eat
and breathe and so on. Most people aren't crazy enough to form a
suicide pact with you. We did understand the article. The article
is wrong. I'm with Carl Sagan on the subject of needing more
planets. Where I part company with Carl Sagan is his excessive
respect for bacteria. Jeff Hoffman and Glenn Hurowitz, you are
giving environmentalism a bad name. Environmentalism is
supposed to be saving people by saving the habitat for humanity.

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Judging by recent events, we're still trying to find intelligent life on THIS one.

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No one obviously have any clue as to what our scientist have developed in the last 50 years. The U.S. space program is only a cover-up of what technology that is kept secret from the public. Why do you think scientists are already working on ways to terraform the planet Mars. We have already been there and work is in progress now.

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A friend of mine from Oak Ridge National Laboratory wrote to
me: "The reactor that had the accident at Chernobyl was very out-
of-date (1st generation) design that has to be precisely controlled
to prevent cooling water from boiling. Water carries away heat
and moderates far better than bubbles, and as bubbles form in
water, the reactor goes increasingly unstable. What caused
Chernobyl to blow its top was residual water in the core suddenly
going to high pressure steam and erupting into a steam explosion.
Since the building top was simply resting by its weight on the
walls, not a containment vessel at all, the steam explosion burped
the top off its position allowing outside air in, subsequently
igniting a carbon fire." The United States and other Western
countries DO NOT now build and do not now posses or operate
ANY reactors of such primitive design. Nor do we allow
containment buildings to have easily removable tops.
Containment buildings in the Western hemisphere are required to
be pressure vessels.
The Chernobyl accident released only 200 tons of
radioactive material, as much as a coal-fired power plant would
release in 7 years and 5 months. The Chernobyl accident had a
shorter "stack" than coal-fired power plants. The radioactive
material was released in a short time at ground level. That is why
the Chernobyl accident had impact. The Three Mile Island
incident did NOT release a noticeable amount of radiation into its
neighborhood because it had a good containment building and
because it was a more modern design.
The reason is that the Soviet Union didn't spend money on R&D
for nuclear safety. The US did. Over 60 years, American
reactors have become so safe it is ridiculous. We have way
overspent on nuclear reactor safety, driving up the cost of
electricity. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, coal fired electric
power plants kill 24,000 people per year in the US according to
Discover magazine. Reactors built in the US in 2008 are nothing
like the very first reactor ever, built in the US in 1944. Soviet
built reactors were just copies of the 1944 reactor.
The book: "Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy", by B. Comby
has more truthful information on this if you are interested. Don't
believe the urban legends that were started by coal companies.
Order the book from: http://www.comby.org/livres/livresen.htm
See: http://www.ecolo.org for more information on the book.
Most books on the subject in most libraries may be there because
of coal industry pressure.

I have no connection with the nuclear power industry. Nobody is
paying me to post this. I have never worked for the nuclear
power industry.

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