If Trump is re-elected I guess that we can call it 35?
Maybe that’s fake news from Uranus
I was thinking that the organisms that reach us might not be biological, but electronic creatures. If AI and robotics was sufficiently developed enough, who would we send to terraform a planet or shoot into the milky way? Humans/Animals are very sensitive creatures, having a very narrow Goldielocks zone, with relatively short lifes.
Maybe when galaxies collide some worlds will still support life AND be in close enough proximity for travel between inhabited planets.
Astrophysicists predict that the Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in 4 to 4.5 billion years time but Earth’s oceans will have boiled away 3 billion years before then as the sun goes into it’s expansion phase before eventually exploding into a supernova or something.
Astrophysicists have also determined that the window of life as a percentage of time in the known universe compared to the overall existence of the universe before it becomes inert or ‘burnt out’ is a decimal point followed by 83 zeros then a 1.
Spatially represented, if that ‘1’ is as one centimetre then the remainder of the graph wouldn’t fit into the universe.
But none of that minimises the significance of online flamewars of course.
I have no doubt there are probably many forms of intelligent life out there somewhere. I also doubt if they ever show up here, it will be a good thing.
Don’t think they’ll be welcoming us into the Federation or anything like that. I think it will be because we have something they need, and I don’t suspect they are going to ask us nicely for it.
I think we’re too far away for any meaningful contact
Unless they can bend space via wormholes
And yeah, it’d likely be a resource mining mission rather than a goodwill expedition
based on what earth animals tend to do at least
Much more likely they destroy themselves before their tech evolves too far
Or AI destroys them first
Possibly if they have a hive mind they wouldn’t
But anything with competing interests…