But what if there's not millions of planets out there with life? Life is pretty delicate, the slightest change in the earth's environment would wipe us all out. For example, it looks like the extinction event that happened 650 million years ago was caused when the oxygen level on earth dropped by something like half. Over billions of years changes like this can't be that unusual in a planet's history. Perhaps we won a sort of galactic lottery. Perhaps earth is like a guy who flipped a coin a million times and it always came up heads. Sure, it's possible, but very unlikely. Perhaps earth is the only planet that's ever gone 3 billion years without an event that would make life impossible.
These extinction cycles might be galaxy wide. Perhaps the black hole at the center of our galaxy sends out a pulse of gamma radiation every 65 million years or so, wiping out most life throughout the galaxy.
Still, it's going to come one day. And maybe not that long from now. The basic science behind a nuclear bomb is not that complicated. What happens if someone discovers an easier way to purify uranium? Or a method of causing hydrogen fusion that doesn't take a fission bomb to start?
And on a galactic scale, how does a species survive the point when one individual in the species can destroy the whole species?
Oh, I'm not arguing with you there. But as technology advances, the amount of energy one man can control increases. What happens to us when technology advances to the point where one man has the power to destroy the earth?
Or maybe technology always advances to the point where one member of the species has the power to destroy the whole race, and no one ever get past that.
What's going to happen to us when a bin Laden can blow up the world?
If so, wouldn't have least one of them have built self-replicating robots? Not necessarily intelligent, just advanced enough to discover sources of ore and build other robots.
In a billion years they should be all over the galaxy by now. Where are they?
Then why don't we see evidence of them? Earth went from molten lava to us in three billion years. There should be 7 billion year old civilizations out there. We should be seeing stars surrounded by dyson spheres and all sorts of structures only an intelligence could create.
Hell, at the least our space craft should be seeing alien trash floating around, like coke bottles washing up on the shores of south sea islands.
Something seems to be killing them off soon after they get into space. Perhaps the SETI project is not such a good idea.
Why don't you go up to your grandpa, suck his dick, then let him stick it up your ass. Then come back here and tell us whether you think you're ever going to forget about it.
Yes, I'm an idiot. But when you read of actual battles, the Germans don't have fleets of 10's of thousands of planes. That always confused me.
"A final drive on Moscow before winter brought the climactic moment of the campaign. Operation Typhoon began in late September and scored spectacular victories against a Soviet high command again caught by surprise. Three panzer armies, supported by more than 1,500 aircraft, slashed through the strung-out Soviet defenses. Flying over 1,000 sorties per day, the Luftwaffe was a major factor in the breakthrough. On 5 October Soviet reconnaissance pilots reported a German column over twenty-five kilometers long driving along the highway between Smolensk and Moscow; the reporting pilots were almost shot for defeatism by the NKVD on their return. In early October the German advance encircled two vast pockets at Bryansk and Vyazma; by the time the fighting had died down, the Germans claimed to have captured over 500,000 enemy soldiers."
It's doubtful we would have had air superiority against the Russians. The Germans thought they would have air superiority too, but the problem was the Russians produced incredible numbers of war planes, I believe over 30,000. The 4000 planes the Germans had didn't have a chance. German aces were racking up hundreds of kills each, yet that didn't even match Russian production.
What you guys are missing is that we did have a war with the Russians, and the Russians won, at least initially. The Russians conquered half of Europe. The Normandy invasion was not about Germany, it was about getting enough troops and war material into Europe to convince Stalin to keep his promise to stop at Germany. By this point he was thousands of miles from his war factories, and needed the troops for the occupation.
Nah. China obviously offered to open up her markets to us if we got out of 'Nam. Remember Nixon's big trip to china?
Also, Kissinger was big on this theory that there was a coming stuggle over resources, especially oil, and wanted to change our focus to the middle east.
and stopped breeding? That would explain it. 