Maybe this post is a little off topic but I do have an interest in astronomy and cosmology and it does tie in with the theme of this site.
In the August Sky and Telescope magazine, starting on page 20, there is an article by Jeff Hecht which essentially covered the earth through geologic time as well as the progression of life through the 4.56 billion years of the planet’s history.
It is often asked by many outside of the scientific community, “Why haven’t we found life or at least some sort of signal from an intelligent race?”
We have only been looking for a few decades and our first radio transmissions have only penetrated a scant 90 light years into space so it is likely that no one has heard us either. I was watching a video recently of a talk that Dr. Sara Seager, (Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at MIT) gave on the search for life in our galaxy. Early on in her presentation she showed a graphic of the Milky Way Galaxy with a red dot on it signifying our place in the galaxy. She then asked rhetorically, “Where do you think we are looking within our galaxy for life?” She paused a moment then continued, “Within the red dot”…
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