A new book by prominent astronomers predicts that evidence of intelligent alien life will be discovered by scientists before the year 2025. The authors of the book are Professor Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI institute and widely regarded as the 'guru' of SETI, and Alex Barnett, chief executive officer of the Chabot Space Centre. In the book, titled COSMIC COMPANY, Shostak and Barnett use calculations based on two modern predictive equations - Moore's Law, which predicts that computing power will double every 18 months, and the Drake Equation, which estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. "It is simply a matter of statistics," Mrs Barnett explained to the UK's Guardian Unlimited. "There are two figures you need to know.

One is what our estimate of how many civilisations there are in the universe that are sending out signals into space [about 10,000] and the second is how long will it take to search through enough stars in the universe to statistically have a chance of picking up those signals." Once the figures are plugged in to the equations, the resulting estimate is 2025.

View: Full Article | Source: Phenomena Magazine

Unless they stop by to borrow sugar before then

Yes, I have always been a fan of plucking numbers out of thin air, and then making wild assumptions.

***SARCASM ALERT***

Chris Low.

Yes, I have always been a fan of plucking numbers out of thin air, and then making wild assumptions.

Based upon what Athlon64 has said it would then be correct to assume that Einstein sat at home, stoned off his mind, and thought up his General Theory of Relativity followed by another session and then the actual Theory of Relativity. In this he MUST have plucked numbers out of thin air and then made 2 wild assumptions.
If this is so, then I suppose it is correct to assume that most scientific 'breakthrough's' and theories "concocted" since Einstein must be offshoot's of this WILD ASSUMPTION and therefore can and/or must be discredited. Where would that leave us now?
If it were not for these 'wild assumptions' we would probably still be marvelling at the wonders of electricity.

Einstein didn't just guess everything when he developed his theory of relativity. He used Newton's laws of gravity as a base point (in other words, factual information), and then progressed from there. Like I have mentioned in another thread on these forums, most of the variables in the Drake equation are so poorly known to any degree of accuracy, that statements such as "evidence of intelligent alien life will be discovered by 2025" are utterly pointless.

I understand what you are saying with respect to making educated guesses to help the advance of technological progress, but that just isn't possible in this case. We need to collect a huge amount of additional information before we even begin to get a reasonable idea of the "Drake number".

Based on our current information, there are a total of ZERO extraterrestrial lifeforms in our galaxy. That's because we do not know of any other terrestrial (Earth type) planets at this stage, making the value of that particular variable zero. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. Q.E.D.

Evidence of intelligent alien life may very well be obtained by 2025, but there is absolutely no way that this can be deduced based on our current evidence.

Chris Low.

I hope much sooner then 2025, i will be an old man by then, well older

2030 were all dead!