oh no!
Is there still time for CERN to beam out a neutrino encoded message of apology to arrive shortly before Bebo’s unfortunate content?
An international team of boffins has ranked the various extra-terrestrial planets and moons known to humanity in order of ability to sustain life. It's bad news for the human race, as the planets of the Gliese 581 star system are near the top of the list: and if an intelligent race is present there, we have already mortally …
...will be when the Glieseian invasion fleet finally arrives, after having spent thousands of years tearing across the empty wastes of space, and finally dives screaming onto planet Earth, only - due to a terrible miscalculation of scale - to be accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Once the US gets around to masturbating about Space Hitler instead of about <random country of interest du jour> Hitler, they will loosen some freshly printed money for Star Conquest Operations again.
Forever War in Space, here we come! SIEG!
Very interesting, however being habitable and having life are two quite different things.
There are many theories that require not only a habitable environment, but a sequence of ‘luck’ events to kick start life in the first place. Until we understand how life starts, it is possible that even habitable planets could very well harbour no life at all.
And of course, having intelligent life is quite another thing entirely – even Earth for the vast majority of its life bearing time has not had intelligent life.
Oh, and I don’t think much of those comments!
We were kidding about all that dancing with the stars, we are really replicators on our way to suck all the resources out of your planet, and turn it into space dust, we wanted to keep you calm so you wouldn't try to escape. Man I am hungry now, see you soon food planet!
This will stave off the attack for sure! USE Fear. like the DHS does
To be honest I'm not bothered about an impending alien invasion.
I'm more concerned that those boffins who have come up with the index system didn't use Star Trek as inspiration.
Whatever happend to M-Class!
Though I suppose there's still time for that, given that "M" stood for "Minshara" - a Vulcan word...and we've not met them.
Yet.
Hope they are not like the aliens in Galaxy Quest.
Imagine some aliens rocking up to take a geriatric Kirk to defeat the nasty Alien overlord, only to find he will not even leave the ground in a Virgin spaceship
p.s. Quoting E.E. (Doc) Smith is seriously sad, there will be references to Arisians next!!
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Well, according to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/17/blighty_exoplanet/ the Gliese D environment is not unlike Middlesbrough, and consequently any life that will have evolved there will be too dumb to realise it can't have evolved, and therefore will have.
Whether they'll be dumb enough to realise you can't build an interstellar fleet without some rocket scientists around, we'll find out in a couple of decades.