What if China made first contact with aliens?

[jandl100]

Why so far ahead? Why not far behind? Surely there would be a spread of evolutionary advancement - some ahead and some behind.

I'm assuming a technological society - we couldn't contact them otherwise.

We just happen to have kicked off, say, 200 years ago.
Aliens have had 14 billion years over which they could have got started in the technological game.
Therefore they are FAR more likely to be MUCH older than us, and therefore more advanced.

[RothwellAudio]

Ah yes, I see your point. Still, they wouldn't have appeared and started on their technological development 5 minutes after the big bang.

[jandl100]

True, that was a simplification!

Nonetheless, what's a billion years, or even ten billion, here or there?
Likelihood is that an alien technology would be totally beyond our understanding.

[montesquieu]

It's the inconceivably vast extent of time rather than distance or speed that constrains the likelihood of detecting any aliens.

This. Our moment as a technological society is very very short in cosmological terms.

[walpurgis]

Not sure if that was serious or not.

Of course it is. Why would I believe in the existence of something for which there is not the tiniest shred of evidence?

There is more 'proof' that the Tooth Fairy exists!

[RothwellAudio]

Of course it is. Why would I believe in the existence of something for which there is not the tiniest shred of evidence?

There is more 'proof' that the Tooth Fairy exists!

Simply the odds. What are the chances that there are umpteen billion planets with no life on them and just one planet with life on it? Seems unlikely to me.

[Macca]

Of course it is. Why would I believe in the existence of something for which there is not the tiniest shred of evidence?

There is more 'proof' that the Tooth Fairy exists!

The mathematical evidence is pretty overwhelming. Even if life on Earth is an aberration cause by sheer chance, and no matter how remote that chance, the universe is so big that the existence of other intelligent life is a mathematical certainty.

[walpurgis]

Simply the odds.

But there is nothing to weigh those odds against. Therefore nobody can say what odds (if any) there are.

[walpurgis]

The mathematical evidence is pretty overwhelming

Evidence? There is none. Figures used to suggest something are proof of nothing.

[Macca]

We know that intelligent life is possible since we have concrete evidence (us).
We know the size of the universe and how many galaxies, we can extrapolate from that how many suns, how many habitable planets.

Since it is a fact that intelligent life is possible, then with the other data you can work out the odds of there being more of it out there. And it turns out that the odds of there not being any other intelligent life are infinitesimal.