Agreed on the Drake Equation findings.
I guess where I'm going is if there's , say, 200 sophont species out
there, and we were all "born" about the same time, and achieve FTL
about the same time (yeah, optimistic) so we can all interact....
Then if there's a total of 500 inhabitable worlds, there's going to be
scrambling for real estate, and higher chances of conflict.
If there's 2 million worlds which have life but no sophonts, there's
lower chances of people getting into arguments over who's planet this
is.

I kinda like the idea of there not being much in the way of wars,
because it's cheaper and easier to just grab the empty planet one
system over.
A peaceful, post-scarcity galaxy would be a nice place to relax.
And, of course, there's still the T-Rex analogues to make things exciting.

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 8:41 AM <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> No sophonts? Or just us? ;)
>
> The odds of their not being (now, then, before) any other sophonts are so long as to be not credible. Somewhere, somewhen, someplace in the many galaxies each with many stars, there is/was/will be (I am asserting but the math seems very likely) at least one other sophont society and quite likely many more. I saw an updated Drake Equation that posited with a conservative bent at least 10 other sophonts in the Milky Way alone. An optimistic view was around 200+. And that's in our one galaxy alone. There are many, many galaxies.
>
> Now, will we ever meet any of them? That's a lot less likely. FTL seems impossible and may be so. Hypercomms might well be impossible too. So we might all, in our own corners of creation (like different bacteria strains in different petri dishes in a lab) end up evolving, growing higher order mental faculties, having our span, be it short or long on a galactic time scale (and humanity and even its distant progenitors are an eyeblink in cosmic time), and then falling.
>
> If we don't get lucky and find another civilization that is a) in its period before it dies out, b) that is able to communicate with us in a way that is meaningful, and c) we possess the tools to communicate, we'll never even get to see or hear or communicate with any others.
>
> In a way, I'm not sure that likely case isn't even more sad than 'no other sophonts exist'.
>
> Cellular level life is even more certain to be encountered. That may be useful for us if we can ever leave this system, but if we cannot, then our span will be dictated by resource depletion, climate change, or the expiry of our star.
>
> Still, that's a long way off, even in cosmic time.
>
> TomB
>
> On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 8:27 AM Jeffrey Schwartz <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> What runs across my mind is we're seeing possibilities of microbial
>> life on Mars and Venus.
>> That really increases the habitable zone for the exoplanets we're looking at
>>
>> From a Traveller perspective, it makes the real world look a little
>> more game like.
>>
>> From a "someday when we get Jump drive" standpoint, I'm wondering if
>> we're looking at a fair number of planets with life but no sophonts.
>> That would be an interesting galaxy, wouldn't it?
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 12:16 PM Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson
>> at port.ac.uk (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Much fuss was made on the news last night about possibly "life" on Venus - although I knew enough to not get too excited.
>> >
>> > Still it was both interesting and interesting to see how it got presented.
>> >
>> > A little bit more detail in this which I've come across and may be more of interest to Travellers looking to either make something of an inhospitable world, or give PCs a surprise when not expecting it.
>> > https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/09/15/what-phosphine-means-on-venus/
>> >
>> > links to the actual science at the end.
>> >
>> >
>> > I quite like the idea that all the while we were looking for life on our neighbour one way it actually turned out to have been on our neighbour the other way!  (This is assuming it gets found of course.)
>> >
>> >
>> > tc
>> >
>> > While I'm here, and related to another thread, I thought this was rather interesting:
>> > https://twitter.com/lynneguist/status/1305527603806298112
>> >
>> >
>> >
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