I don't think the Bible should be taken so literally.  Unless you can give me a ref. to a verse where God actually says "the Earth is flat", or some such, I still say this: the people that wrote the Bible were humans, just like us.  They didn't know everything (with the obvious exception of God/Christ).  The Apostle Paul wouldn't have written that "the earth is round, and it rotates around the sun", because there was no way for him to know.  I don't think the Bible should be used for talking about geography/astronomy.  It's a religious book, not a high school science textbook.

Exactly, Aarojw.  And anyway, in one of the minor prophets (Amos sticks in my head for some reason), it refers to the earth as round.  And where on earth are you getting that bit about Noah and Job...?!  Enoch walked with God.  But Job never said that no one walked with God.

As for you, alway, non-interference assumes that what they're doing is fine.  You seem to say that exploitation is wrong, but if an alien race we, hypothetically, encounter is exploiting a third race, our non-interference policy tells us to do nothing.  You contradict yourself.

The idea that the universe is infinite is absurd.  As I said before, it goes against the laws of thermodynamics, the most fundamental laws in science.

Hey lets talk about pie in the sky.  We don't even know how to cure one flu.

WHAT?

Ah I see your point Zyx, and its a hard one to argue against since we only have out planet to look at as a reference.  My understanding of the principles of evolution suggest that in any environment resource rich enough to sustain life, said life will use as much of the resources as possible as fast as possible.  Why?  Because genes that survive get passed on.  That is to say, if there are genes that make one better at getting resources for survival and procreation, one is more likely to survive and procreate than someone else with "couch potato" genes.  Now its certainly possible that some life will evolve based around something other than genetic code, but I would argue that in order for higher order life to arise at all, there needs to be random variation with some kind of selective pressure to weed out the random variations that are less able to get resources.  The surviving variations are inherently better and more efficient at exploiting resources, and they will procreate until they have reached a population cap given the resources available.  No matter how rich a starting environment you have, life will always evolve to fill every niche and expoit it as fully and as efficiently as possible.  Look at the amazon and at volcanic vents in the oceans as examples.  Jungles have incredibly dense biomass because there are more energy and resources in those locations.  However, life will use up any energy that is available, even if it is in an exotic location, such as an ocean vent.  You would more or less argue that because there is so much more energy available in the jungle that there shouldn't be competition.  Of course the opposite is true.  A race as you described it would arise in an extremely competitive, biomass rich enviroment full of competing creatures.  They would also almost certainly compete amongst themselves, since resource rich environments allow for solitary life and individual gain.  I don't mean to be explaining evolution and biology to you though, its all out there if you're interested.

The basic argument I make is this:  in order for a society to choose not to continue pursuing technological growth, it must first become dominant over all competitors and then actively limit every single individual of the population to prevent competition.  Since the culture must first be incredibly dominant before choosing to become submissive (while at the same time maintaining its dominance over any competitive challengers), this seems extremely unlikely.  If it fails to dominate rivals, those rivals will eventually figure out how to beat it.  If it fails to completely eliminate competition within itself, factions will arise out of power differences as individuals compete for resources.

In any case its a hard argument to make since our only sample is earth itself and the human race.

At one time the earth was flat. Wrong.  At one time flight was impossible. Wrong. At one time faster than the speed of sound flight was impossible.  Wrong.   Spaceflight--you gotta be joking...wrong. How many times do we prove a scientific law or theory wrong?  We have done this repeatedly.  Theory is made by man. The laws of physics have been defined by man and his experiences.  What happens when we experience something beyond our "laws"?  We make new ones to fit.  This has happened many many many times over in our history.  The idea that faster than the speed of sound flight was possible spun off many different ideas as to what would happen to the person in that plane.  Ideas like he would be squished flat against the rear bulkhead.  Guess what...that didnt happen.  I wonder what will happen when we do travel FTL, and nobody ages.  I know, your all laughing at that one.  But then when we broke the sound barrier with proper aircraft and equipment, the man inside didnt turn to goo like all the experts said he would. I'm not making this up...thats what was said. They would turn to goo. Geniuses. How many times do we as a race have to prove ourselves wrong before we realize we don't really know it all?  And another question...why would an advanced alien race want to come see us?  We are self loathing, self distructive beings.  We can't even treat each other with dignity and respect, how can we possibly be expected to treat an alien race with respect? Just short of them wanting some resource we might have that they "might" need, I just don't see why they would stop by.  And for the bible? It was written a very long time ago, using ideas of the time to teach  ideas and principles that DO HOLD UP AND APPLY over time.  How ever, the people of the time would have had no concept or undrstanding of space flight and beings on another planet, therefor God would not teach them about such things.  You would not teach your 6 year old Physics would you? No, you would wait till he had the understanding to accept such teachings.  So at 30 he might be a physicist.  But not at 6.  I don't think the bible would be wrong if another race out there was found.  It was written to to the level of the people of the time.  Just think what might be in the bible if it were written now instead of 2000 years ago.  Now that would be interestin.

Yeah yeah.  Another one of those what if.  I think we can in x years.  FTL??  Haha.

Agreed.

Let's now take this a bit further up the ladder of a unique dominant specie on a planet (such as what WE are right now).

Are we (by definition) intelligent enough to at least explore the entire solar system in order to gather MORE resources for ourselves? Mars, Venus, Satellites of Jupiter & Saturn.

I'll have to cite Gliese 581d (or e, btw just a week ago) to make a match; there are weather pattern probabilities on it that makes the place a stepping stone to reach outbound (if only by snatching some resources from its surface or from its neighboring 581c). In **that* direction of space.

Now, presume it's a regular pattern within 200LYs... how far out can we safely go?

BUT also mimic this specific set of conditions anywhere else along with the "Blue Earth" theory which also would happen to have a complex set of 9+ planets nearby. Do we then have a match of possible Kurzweil's singularities asynchronous to 500,000+/- years worth of Earth own history?

Distance asides and even if not being detectable by current means... can we (as intelligent & conscious) seriously affirm 100% and not 99.99% sure that we are alone in this Universe.

Only fools would calculate that low. And, btw, only fools would try to oppose it as much too.

The evaluation is not some mathematical equation going both ways, by far.

The paradox is a reasoning that leads to a deduction, valid or questionable.

My proof may seem esotheric or speculative, but i highly doubt it can be entirely false.

There is, or there isn't - as far as other intelligent life goes. Therefore, you are either entirely correct or entirely incorrect.

The odds of life developing from inert matter is pretty astronomical. The odds that single celled mitosis would naturally evolve into multicellular meiosis is many orders of magnitude beyond that.

The odds that 2 or more unrelated 'life-forming' events in a single galaxy are an order of magnitude above that. And the odds of 2 or more intelligent life forms developing within the time frame and distance to interact with each other is even more unlikely, by many more orders of magnitude.

Life is a very unlikely thing - unless it is created from an outside source.

So I really doubt that we will encounter ET - especially in our own lifetime.

First off: Moostetek and others who asked where the bible said that "God" didn't create any other life or such. Doesn't the bible explicitely state that "God" created man to be the epitome of creation? Well, if we were to meet aliens who are more advanced than we are I guess that assertion would be proven wrong, wouldn't it?

Secondly: The problem of our search for extraterrestial life is that with our limited fantasy we can not grasp that other lifeforms could exist in a totally different environment. So even if we could travel to the stars on our own, basically we might well be searching at the wrong places.

To step away from my singularity argument for a sec, the most accurate equation we currently have is the Drake equation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

If we're going to throw around wild assumptions and guesses about numbers, lets plug them into this equation.  A conservative set of numbers results in a 0.05 % chance of intelligent life existing in our galaxy.  Obviously we are here, so probably we are alone.  However, 0.05% is huge when considering there are billions of galaxies and, at 0.05%, there should be one intelligent race in existance for every 200,000 galaxies.  According to NASA, there are roughly 125 billion galaxies in the universe.  Using these numbers, that means there would be 625,000 intelligent races in existance right now.  You can imagine how conservative your estimate would have to be in order to come up with a likelihood that there is only one intelligent race in the universe.  Remember, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, again according to NASA.

The Apostle Paul wouldn't have written that "the earth is round, and it rotates around the sun", because there was no way for him to know.

Actually... The greeks knew. They had even calculated the size of the earth. If I remember correctly, their calculation was quite accurate as well.

Ok first off stop talking about "proof."  You're not using deductive logic, even informally (or any other kind of logical {in the technical sense} reasoning either). 

Anyways, currently, the rest of the solar system is more or less worthless to us right now.  If the moon had valuable materials that we could get at easier than we could get at them on earth, we'd be doing so.  Right now, doing anything in the rest of the solar system is far more difficult and less efficient than doing it here on earth, so we do everything here and just get really good at it.  Regardless, the development of self augmentation and the double exponential growth curve have little to do with available resources.  We're already on the curve, and rapidly approaching the point where we can directly augment ourselves with our own advances.. at which point we will be on the very cusp of learning all there is to know.  It really has nothing to do with the fact that there may be other resources in our local space.

I'm not sure what your point is here.. I'm not arguing either that there is life out there or that there isn't, only that when you take the singularity hypothesis into consideration there are only 4 possible situations for the existance of alien life.  First that there is none more advanced than us (we are the first race ever to approach singularity).  Second that there is (and have thus achieved singularity), but they're way too far away to interact with us, even with FTL travel.  Third, FTL travel wasn't discovered and isn't possible, meaning there could be many, many post singularity societies that are just far enough away that we haven't received any kind of signal from them (that signal would be traveling at the speed of light).  Lastly, there could be one or more post singularity societies near us that do not want to be detected.  Given the full knowledge available to such post singularity societies, it seems reasonable that they could mask themselves from us completely. 

There simply is no state of advanced technology short of achieving singularity.

This is exactly how I see it also. We think of ourselves so advance. We think we know so much and yet we know so little. What was it 400 years ago we thought that the earth ws the center of the univers and now we know how the univers works in regard to speeds. What happens if tomorrow we find the existance of a mollecule or whatever that goes faster than light and what if it has mass....  woups....  Our periodic table is not complete and if we think we have them all then as humans we are crazy. We may or may not be able to go faster than light but one thing I can know for sure is that nobody as provenx that beyong a doubt at this time. As Alryq pointed out as a species we have thought so many thruths that were wrong that I will not believe in an impossibility until it's proven beyong any doubts. We are infants in the evolution ladder. We know nothing. Technology as started to appear only in the last 100 years. So please don't tell me we can know anything at all.

As for life out there, once again there is no proof either way, but it as happened once so...  Anybody that tells me no it's impossible is a bit on the crazy side.  I like to think we are not alone, it would be an incredible waste of space if we are alone. (taken from the movie Contact) and I agree with that. We are not special and we are not the center of the univers. If I were an Alien and I needed ressources why waster your energy with a planet that as life when there is so many out there without any. If tyou can travel the stars you certainly would not have any problems gathering from nearby planets and stars. Why bother with a planet that is full of people that seems bent onb killing themsleves because they can't bother to listen to each other and respect each other. We think we are so good and smart, we are small and babyish. I see my kids playing and they way they act makes me think of us on this planet.

We have a long way to go before we deserve the answer to this question. There is probably a reason why it,s so hard to explore the galaxy.  you have to be worthy. sorry to say we are not.

Imagine this: a ship from anotehr worlds arrives and parks itself on top of antartica., It sends a message we can understand and it says... send somebody from this planet to talk to us....

What happens then? I'll bet WAR happens....  Nobody will want to let anybody else speak for them...

The ship leaves after seeing the mahem that it caused and whern it gets to the outer solar system put on a warning boey, stay back they are crazy!

FLT possible: yes, there as  to be away

Are we alone: hell no, but who wants of us anyway.