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I think that is agreed. Noone on here seems to disagree.
Why though?
I find it amazing that we even exist in the first place. Imagining the billions of different factors that needed to be just right life to appear is mind boggling. If anything as minute as temperature had been different during the primordial soup, life wouldn't have developed.
Yes but imagine the trillions upon trillions of planets there are in the universe. Logic says life will appear at least in one other place in this universe. They're probably writing threads on their internet about us as we speak!
Not wanting to be pedantic, but the first steam turbine was invented in 1551 and Da Vinci was designing gliders, helicopters and a tank in the early1500's.:p
Not quite sure I'd describe development as exponential - it's had plenty of stops and starts int he last 5,000 years (the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the end of the Mycean civilization, etc) as have the advanced civilisations across the world.
I think you can make a strong case for an exponential increase post the industrial revolution though - for all the good and ill it's brought.
As to the actual question - I'm always interested by the studies of Venus that seem to imply to was pretty close to having the same conditions for life as Earth but the environment was just too harsh. There is an implication that life occuring out of organic matter (which fills the universe and planets, just isn't living - chemicals, etc) isn't as rare as we'd like to believe.
The bigger issue is whether or not wormholes or other scientific theories can ever allow faster than light travel. It's possible they could, but it's also possible Einstein is right and nothing goes faster than light. If that's true then even at the speed of light the nearest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years away -
That's 4.3 years traveling at 186,282 miles per second or 25 million million miles
Proxima is the dim red star near to the Twin stars of Alpha and Beta Centauri, btw.
When you consider that is just the very closest star system then the question does seem to be not whether life is out there but whether we would ever, ever find each other.
Well worth checking out this map then keep clicking on zoom out
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/12lys.html
However if someone did come across life that was on a different planet then I'd imagine they'd immediately check it out and what to make contact, study it, communication for the same reason we would - overwhelming curiosity.
But if they had the technology to contact other life by the time they found us they might have already found thousands of other intelligent life forms and we'd be of no more interest than discovering a new species of beetle.
Man, you do realise how many 1000's of people on Earth do get paid to discover new species of beetles don't you
That's what UFOs are - the Galactic equivalent of Beetle hunters...:chin:
We may in fact be a protected species and no-one is allowed to contact us or their could be an intergalactic version of the Site where aliens are arguing over whether its right to contact humans or whether it would destroy our culture...
http://vbulletin.thesite.org/showthread.php?t=127823
I'm actually ambivalent on whether there are aliens, but there could be plenty of reasons why we haven't been contacted
How about these toys from an Egyptian pyramid ...around 3'500 years ago?
However, the Chinese had toy bamboo helicopters around 400BC
The Egyptians of the day weren't exactly known for crude and they look nowt like birds.
Look at toy birds and paintings of from the period.
Surely the tail is the wrong way up for a bird?
The Chinese claim to have invented everything. They claim to have invented the camera around the same period. Shame they didn't invent two so they could take a photo and prove it.