Originally posted by Commander Drax:
Sorry for getting wacky now but I personally belive that our solar system has been interdicted by Intelligent extra terrestrial life as after all we are a developing species and currently too dangerous to let loose on an interstellar level (like an IISS red zone!), and that perhaps our solar system has been deliberately shielded from any radion noise generated by this civilisation. Recently we've lost contact with the Voyager probe so perhaps it passed through the shield! Yes I agree I do sound nuts right now, but this belief is no less valid than all of the other trains of thought and rationals described so far in this forum, in that it cannot be proved. (And before you reply I am aware that the official sources said that the nuclear powerplant on Voyager simply ran down.)
Well, yes, you are being silly. This is a textbook example of Occam's razor - you interpret the fact that we haven't seen any evidence for alien life as being because we're in some big 'Red Travel Zone', or behind some big shield. I on the other hand assume that either it's out there and we haven't found any yet (either because it's too far away or we don't have the right technology to detect it), or it's not out there at all. While neither option can be proved as yet, my more rational assumptions are much less ridiculous and crazy-sounding than yours
.
But anyway - for starters, both of the Voyagers' RTG power supplies are still up and running and they're still broadcasting. In fact, last month the data received from them indicated that they were getting to the edge of the Sun's magnetic field
(see
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ for details).
Second, there's no 'principle of mediocrity' in science. The fact that we're on an ordinary (if not slighly large) terrestrial planet around an ordinary G-type star in a reasonably ordinary (if not somewhat large) spiral/barred spiral galaxy was not assumed beforehand - it's just what we've discovered through rational observation.
The problem all stems from religious dogma of our place in the universe - it's not that science has a 'principle of mediocrity', it's that religion has a 'principle of specialness' that states that everything was made solely for us and we're the most important beings in the universe. Mankind really has to get over its ridiculous ego - there is no reason whatsoever to assume that we
are special in any way, yet we still have a tendency to believe the 'comforting lies' that some religions (Christianity especially) tell us about how important we are. The reality, as best as we can tell, is that we are utterly insignificant in time and space, and if we die out, if any observers exist outside our planet then they won't even notice our passing (in fact, in all likelihood they haven't even noticed we're
here, since we've not noticed them either). While this undoubtedly scares some people, it's something we're probably going to have to get used to/come to terms with.