October 30, 200718 yr Nope. Can't remember where I first heard this, but if you assume that the universe is scaled down so that the sun is approximately the size of a basketball then set that basketball in downtown Los Angeles, then at that scale, the nearest star is a basketball in the middle of Greenland. Our own solar system would still be the equivalent of a mile wide. Humans have never gone faster than 25,000 miles per hour (one of the Apollo missions I think). At that speed, it would take 100,000 years to reach the nearest star. So multiply that by whatever factor you think aliens can travel at. Even if we multiply it tenfold, it would still take 10,000 years just to get here from the nearest star, and that's longer than the entirety of human civilization. There was a guy on NPR the other day who said that the most difficult challenge in proving the existence of intelligent life on other planets wasn't the means of travel, but overcoming the immense odds against two technologically-advanced civilizations actually running into each other. If we sent out a giant ship with a way to sustain its own civilization for countless generations, then if the 10,000 years or 50,000 years go by, what's the likelihood that we'll be around to get whatever message they send back?
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