[DocShane]

All this discussion of alien life has reminded me of an old Arthur C Clarke book: "The Songs of Distant Earth". What if we are the aliens?

The book takes into account the improbabilities of travel to other stars. Our sun is discovered to go supernova in 800 years. Mankind is doomed. Unable to physically travel, instead, we build ships that contain libraries of DNA of humans, plants, and animals. Hundreds of computer controlled ships drift in the vastness of space, looking for suitable planets to settle, then experiment using local resources to recreate human life.

Eventually we do discover quantum drives and can travel at about 10-20% spead of light. One million humans in suspended animation leave and arrive on a planet colonized hundreds of years earlier. How would our descendants receive us?

Good reading for any interested.

Personally, I believe there is life out there, but we are so hopelessly separated by the vastness of space and time to ever meet each other. I think if we are ever to meet, it will be by targetting worlds suspected to contain life by radio or laser transmissions. These worlds will be detected by interferomety. Of course, that is assuming such life is oxygen/water based. Then if we can overcome our language barriers, we can share libraries of information, realizing that it may take hundreds of years to transmit and receive. We will talk, but never actually meet them.