[geoschmo]

Singollo, that's quite a deep thought. I suppose that it is entirely possible we are the only intelligent life right now. That would depend on the 'life span' of intelligent species. One of those Drake variables we have no concrete data on.

It reminds me of a story I once read. The theory goes that the universe is expanding, and that eventually it will stop expanding and collapse back into a single point, and then blow up into a new big bang and form a new universe. This race had developed very late in the life of the universe during this contraction phase. It had interesting parallels like they had discoveries of blue shifts instead of red shifts, and so on. IIRC for them the big bang was harder to conceptualize becasue all there evidence told them the universe was contracting and always had. They didn't like the fact that there exsistance was going to end "early" just because they had the bad luck to come along so late, so they were trying to figure out a way to leave a message for the next universe. Just a "Hello, we were here" kind of thing.

I would expect the desire to make contact is quite strong with most if not all intelligent creatures. It would be a sad irony indeed if the vast distances made it impossible to do so.

Geoschmo