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It would be statistically improbable for other intelligent life not to exist. We know there are at least two sentient and sapient families on this one planet; unless it turns out that life, period, is rare (which I doubt - this planet developed it very, very early in its history; any other planet with liquid water and the stuff to make proteins would almost certainly do so as well), or that the Oxygen Catastrophe is rare and that anaerobic life doesn't become sentient (impossible to judge from one data point, since the Catastrophe can really only happen once per planet and is more or less permanent when it does), or that multicellular life is rare (again, impossible to judge - it did take quite a while for Gaia to get around to it), it's pretty much guaranteed that there's at least one sophontic species per galaxy. And there are a great number of galaxies.
It would explain quite a bit for the math to work out to only one or two sophontic systems per galaxy, though. Including why we're not picking up someone else's old radio programs. (Hat tip to A. K. Dewdney for the original version of that thought.)
As for feared or sought - unless there turns out to be a reasonable way of dealing with the lightspeed issue, it's pretty much irrelevant. We'll be leaving here on slow boats, and probably not until Sol is nearing the end of its lifetime; by that point we'll have sent out robots to find where to go next. Our neighbors will be moving equally slowly, so if they're unfriendly we'll be gone when they get here.
It would be statistically improbable for other intelligent life not to exist. We know there are at least two sentient and sapient families on this one planet; unless it turns out that life, period, is rare (which I doubt - this planet developed it very, very early in its history; any other planet with liquid water and the stuff to make proteins would almost certainly do so as well), or that the Oxygen Catastrophe is rare and that anaerobic life doesn't become sentient (impossible to judge from one data point, since the Catastrophe can really only happen once per planet and is more or less permanent when it does), or that multicellular life is rare (again, impossible to judge - it did take quite a while for Gaia to get around to it), it's pretty much guaranteed that there's at least one sophontic species per galaxy. And there are a great number of galaxies.
It would explain quite a bit for the math to work out to only one or two sophontic systems per galaxy, though. Including why we're not picking up someone else's old radio programs. (Hat tip to A. K. Dewdney for the original version of that thought.)
As for feared or sought - unless there turns out to be a reasonable way of dealing with the lightspeed issue, it's pretty much irrelevant. We'll be leaving here on slow boats, and probably not until Sol is nearing the end of its lifetime; by that point we'll have sent out robots to find where to go next. Our neighbors will be moving equally slowly, so if they're unfriendly we'll be gone when they get here.
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Date: 2010-03-30 02:15 pm (UTC)...which are, in evolutionary terms, still quite closely related.
Life is almost certain to be common; the building blocks are just too easy to make, and water is everywhere. The Oxygen Catastrophe and multicellularism make it more likely, because more energy and closer proximity = do things faster, but I can totally imagine a sentient anaerobic microbial species. Each cell does the job of a single neuron; sensory and motor activities are done by turning genes on and off rather than differentiation; data is transmitted by horizontal gene transfer, either by plasmid or viral means. An environment with rapidly shifting food sources and ecological conditions could do it -- say a Europan moon under chaotic tidal shifts.
We'll be leaving here on slow boats, and probably not until Sol is nearing the end of its lifetime
Slow boats: yes, barring warp drive or wormholes; and even if we DO invent those, we'll likely site them FAR outside Sol system, because they are too. frelling. dangerous. End of lifetime: no, we'll leave long before that. Brother Sun is only middle-aged; he has five BILLION years left. I expect that even in the worst-case scenario we will have ecologies adapted to deep space within a few million years at most, and then it's Katy bar the door. More realistically, we'll be leaving in a few thousand years.
You're right about the 'bots, though.
Io Hoyle! All Hail Wickramansingh!