Originally Posted by
BLPOG
I find that it's usually a minority opinion on this topic, but I agree with Udaman - the chances we'll ever encounter intelligent life outside our solar system are essentially nil. When I say "we" I do mean humans generally, and I mean on an ecological timescale, not current humans' lifetimes. In fact, I'll go farther than that. I don't think we'll ever encounter alien life at all, intelligent or not.
The reasoning behind my belief is pretty straightforward - if the speed of light is the maximum rate of travel for information (and there are no indications otherwise), it's just not plausible that we will be able to travel the distances required to make contact. It's not just a matter of the time commitment, but of the cost in energy and physical material. It is plausible that we will eventually make it to nearby star systems even without exceeding the speed of light, but there is no reason to believe that life is so common that we will find it nearby.
What's more is that if life does exist in other star systems (and I'd guess it does), we should probably expect it to already be sufficiently advanced to have cracked the problem of faster-than-light, if it can be cracked at all. The reasoning behind that is that the progression of life on Earth from a single cell to humans, while spanning an enormous time, spans just a fraction of the age of the universe. We should probably expect the eventual evolution of intelligence where there exists life at all, and so a good portion of extra-terrestrial life should not only be intelligent, but far more advanced than humans. If that alien life has figured out FTL, we'd expect them to expand across a good portion of space with that tech, and to have been doing it for long enough that we would be able to detect it (there is of course the possibility that we're just missing it, but it would be fairly reasonable to expect more direct contact rather than just long-range traces, IMO). If they haven't figured out FTL, it's probably because FTL isn't possible.
In case that got convoluted, my basic argument is:
If life exists elsewhere, a good fraction* is probably intelligent. (*by which I mean of worlds holding life, a good fraction would have at least one intelligent species)
If life elsewhere is intelligent, it has probably already encountered the FTL problem.
If life elsewhere has solved the FTL problem, we should probably know already. If it hasn't, it's most likely because it can't be done.
Which implies one of the following:
1. We're number 1! The most technologically advanced life in the galaxy, or near enough to make no difference.
OR 2. There is no intelligent life outside of Earth, and probably no life at all
OR 3. We won't ever encounter other life because we can't exceed light-speed.
My money is on #3.