We are alone in the Universe, unless we guess otherwise.

[Brian Peacock]

Blummin' simple-celled malingerers.

[JimC]

After a while, life on Earth went viral...

[rainbow]

After a while, life on Earth went viral...

...so you mean like we're just "like" messages sent from a higher intelligence?

Good shit you must be smokin, dude

[JimC]

Unfortunately, all that smoking of the good shit is in the past - I got allergic to it...

[rainbow]

Unfortunately, all that smoking of the good shit is in the past - I got allergic to it...

Must say the new stuff is rather more than the old system can take, myself

[Woodbutcher]

The smoke just put me to sleep...couldn't hack it.

[rainbow]

The smoke just put me to sleep...couldn't hack it.

Made me hack, couldn't sleep.

[pErvinalia]

Made me anxious, counter-intuitively.

[Brian Peacock]

That's because you were doing something illegal and you knew they were watching you.

[rainbow]

That's because you were doing something illegal and you knew they were watching you.

Quite a bugger that. Now it's legal, I've grown out of it.

[laklak]

You poor souls.

[Brian Peacock]

What I miss is the occasional pot of 'shroom tea.

[Galaxian]

Ah, but we have definitive evidence from Galaxian!

Indeed we do. Prof. Kipping says:
"Kipping weighed up a number of evolutionary possibilities for life on Earth: life is common and often develops intelligence; life is common but rarely develops intelligence; life is rare but often develops intelligence; life is rare and rarely develops intelligence."
Galaxian maintains that life is common and usually develops intelligence.

An astronomy professor acquaintance sent me an article from three academics at Oxford University ("Dissolving the Fermi Paradox". Anders Sandberg et al). The article was banal & quite unaware of Darwin's work of 170 years ago... Insinuating that Earth is the only planet with 'advanced' intelligence!

So Galaxian set him straight: "Life developed within a few hours of any wet tract of Earth reaching a temperature of 10 to 40 degrees Celcius." And that was a conservative assessment, since my calculations had actually shown a few seconds! The reason is that biology is a concomitant of chemistry, and if it takes a million years for an experiment in a 10 litre flask to produce life, a volume of 100km x 100km x 20m deep would only take 1.6 seconds to do so. If you allow for some mixing of necessary chemicals, a few hours is generous.

Having developed life, it is merely a matter of Natural Selection pressures to evolve discrete organisms of that life towards intelligence, since intelligence is a powerful selection force.

Galaxian has known this for many decades, so why is it so difficult for PhD academics to grasp it? They don't think rationally

[rainbow]

So Galaxian set him straight: "Life developed within a few hours of any wet tract of Earth reaching a temperature of 10 to 40 degrees Celcius." And that was a conservative assessment, since my calculations had actually shown a few seconds! The reason is that biology is a concomitant of chemistry, and if it takes a million years for an experiment in a 10 litre flask to produce life, a volume of 100km x 100km x 20m deep would only take 1.6 seconds to do so. If you allow for some mixing of necessary chemicals, a few hours is generous.

Yes, but if it takes a trillionty trillion years to produce life in a 10l flask, then it would take 50 billion years.
...since the Earth is only 5 billion years old, life has not yet emerged, never mind intelligent life.

Which proves by your logic that you don't exist

[Galaxian]

So Galaxian set him straight: "Life developed within a few hours of any wet tract of Earth reaching a temperature of 10 to 40 degrees Celcius." And that was a conservative assessment, since my calculations had actually shown a few seconds! The reason is that biology is a concomitant of chemistry, and if it takes a million years for an experiment in a 10 litre flask to produce life, a volume of 100km x 100km x 20m deep would only take 1.6 seconds to do so. If you allow for some mixing of necessary chemicals, a few hours is generous.

Yes, but if it takes a trillionty trillion years to produce life in a 10l flask, then it would take 50 billion years.
...since the Earth is only 5 billion years old, life has not yet emerged, never mind intelligent life.

Which proves by your logic that you don't exist

Yes, some extreme advocates of Quantum Mechanics postulate that "if a tree falls down in a forest with no one to see it, did it actually exist or fall down?" We can extend this to "If Rainbow is not directly aware of Galaxian, does Galaxian even exist?"

That is a moot debating point worthy of academia... cosmologists eager to conjure up their next bogus grant from our taxes.

The 10 litre flask and million years scenario is actually from experiments done in laboratories to create life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2 ... experiment
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet ... ns-of-life I was already too generous with the time it would take (a million years), so the trillion2 period that you suggest is truly exorbitant.