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Originally Posted by analog
The most important image ever taken will be one that proves the existence of life outside of Earth. Until then, they're great advances and wonderful discoveries... but one day, we'll catch a glimpse of life from somewhere else, and it'll blow all these other pictures away.  |
Well, one of the things this image shows is how unlikely that is to happen. The universe is such a huge place that there can be millions of active civilizations, and we still won't likely ever discover any of them. For us to even discover their existence, 1) we need to develop the technology to clearly see planets far away in other solar systems, possible all the way across our galaxy, which we're VERY far from doing and 2) the civilization needs to have existed at the right point in time (if it's on the other side of the galaxy, it's about 52,000 light years away). On top of that, it means that by the time we see the civilization, in the extremely unlikely circumstance that we do, that civilization will probably be long gone.
The unlikelihood that we'll ever discover other intelligent life in the universe is summed up pretty well by the current estimates of the Drake Equation, which say that the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which we might hope to be able to communicate is a whopping 2.
There's TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONS of life out there. It's just dwarfed by how absolutely massive the universe is.