Elisetee: If I Was Talkin To You T Shirt

Sunday, April 23, 2023

If I Was Talkin To You T Shirt

A fundamental premise of physics is that the If I Was Talkin To You T Shirt are the same everywhere. That implies whatever initial conditions led to life as we know it will almost certainly occur elsewhere. Only a few years ago, we had no evidence there were even extrasolar planets. Now we know there are thousands relatively nearby, so it looks like our solar system is somewhat typical for stars like ours and that our star is for better or worse, utterly typical. Ergo there are billions of planets out there in our galaxy alone. The argument that we are the only sentient beings because we haven’t heard from any others is (of course) theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. Given the argument above, it’s far more likely the universe is literally teeming with life at various stages of evolution. But even in our little corner of the Milky Way, we don’t hear from them because they are just too damn far away. One light year is 9.46×10^15 meters. None of our own random EM radiation so far would be more than (say) a thousand watts/m^2 at its origin and most of it far less than that. A fraction of that would actually make it out into space where it would just spread out in a spherical wave front. Let’s assume for giggles that it all does and that our alien buddies are also shouting randomly at the cosmos at roughly the same volume (power output).

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