Intelligent Life

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Today, I'd like to explore the possibility of other intelligent life, and I'm not referring to monkeys that can peel and sort bananas. I'm talking about alien life. The whole time I've been alive, I've been thinking about the possibility of other intelligent beings out there in the cosmos, but if I try to bring up the topic, there's so much stigma attached to the topic that it's not unlikely that I'd be dismissed as a crazy person. Sure, I'll concede the point that we haven't found any intelligent life yet, but Voyager I (launched in September 1977) only exited the solar system in August 2012 and averages a speed of 38,210 mph (17 km/s, if you use the sensible system). The version of the Andromeda that we see at night, from Earth, is 2.5 million years in the past. Put short and sweet, space is vast. Traveling at the speed of light (known to some as c), it would take eight minutes to make it from the Earth to the Sun (and vice-versa). The first radio transmission was two days before Christmas in 1900, and transmitted human speech for almost a mile, and the Taldom transmitter [Передатчик Талдом] in Taldom, Moscow, RF is (at the time of my writing, supposedly), the most powerful (longwave) radio transmitter in the world, transmitting on 153 kHz @ 300 kW and 261 kHz @ 2500 kW. To put it in perspective, if you want to hear Sputnik [Спутник] (Formerly Voice of Russia [Голос России] (post Soviet-era)/Radio Moscow [Pадио Москва] (Soviet-era)) on the moon, best of luck to you! You'd need an absolutely massive antenna and a way of filtering out background noise; as far as I can tell, you can pick up the signal at 4/3 the distance of Earth's circumference away from Taldom, but the moon is roughly 28/3 the circumference of the Earth away (assuming I haven't trailed off too far, English isn't a good language).

Put simply, again, good luck.

Still, that brings us back to the topic of the lack of communication from other space-faring civilizations- we don't know the frequencies they're broadcasting on, they might be too far away to pick up with the background radiation, and we don't know what equipment they're using, if they're using what we call radio waves at all. Before I go any further, though, yes, I know we use high-power dishes to listen into space for any signals, but I wasn't about to go through an amount of research that would sate NASA for the sole purpose of one of my articles, plus I know most of you have listened to a radio in a car and know how it sounds when the signal of a station fades out on a car trip. Still, though, I would like to put it out there that I do consider myself arrogant enough to believe that there are aliens out there, but we can't detect them for a number of reasons (looking in the wrong places with nowhere-near-enough-powerful equipment), so, assuming the Drake Equation is correct, it's entirely likely that there's another planetary civilization out there, not unlike us, with its people looking up at the night sky with the same questions. In short, do I consider the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations to be evidence against them? Obviously not, primarily because I live by the statement "Correlation doesn't equal Causation". We're still looking, we have SETI, so unless there is a sign that, without reasonable doubt, proves we are alone, I'll believe otherwise.

After all, when you played Hide-and-Seek as kids, you wouldn't assume a very-good hider had stopped playing, just because they hid in the closet next to the front door, would you?