To step away from my singularity argument for a sec, the most accurate equation we currently have is the Drake equation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

If we're going to throw around wild assumptions and guesses about numbers, lets plug them into this equation.  A conservative set of numbers results in a 0.05 % chance of intelligent life existing in our galaxy.  Obviously we are here, so probably we are alone.  However, 0.05% is huge when considering there are billions of galaxies and, at 0.05%, there should be one intelligent race in existance for every 200,000 galaxies.  According to NASA, there are roughly 125 billion galaxies in the universe.  Using these numbers, that means there would be 625,000 intelligent races in existance right now.  You can imagine how conservative your estimate would have to be in order to come up with a likelihood that there is only one intelligent race in the universe.  Remember, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, again according to NASA.

Ok first off stop talking about "proof."  You're not using deductive logic, even informally (or any other kind of logical {in the technical sense} reasoning either). 

Anyways, currently, the rest of the solar system is more or less worthless to us right now.  If the moon had valuable materials that we could get at easier than we could get at them on earth, we'd be doing so.  Right now, doing anything in the rest of the solar system is far more difficult and less efficient than doing it here on earth, so we do everything here and just get really good at it.  Regardless, the development of self augmentation and the double exponential growth curve have little to do with available resources.  We're already on the curve, and rapidly approaching the point where we can directly augment ourselves with our own advances.. at which point we will be on the very cusp of learning all there is to know.  It really has nothing to do with the fact that there may be other resources in our local space.

I'm not sure what your point is here.. I'm not arguing either that there is life out there or that there isn't, only that when you take the singularity hypothesis into consideration there are only 4 possible situations for the existance of alien life.  First that there is none more advanced than us (we are the first race ever to approach singularity).  Second that there is (and have thus achieved singularity), but they're way too far away to interact with us, even with FTL travel.  Third, FTL travel wasn't discovered and isn't possible, meaning there could be many, many post singularity societies that are just far enough away that we haven't received any kind of signal from them (that signal would be traveling at the speed of light).  Lastly, there could be one or more post singularity societies near us that do not want to be detected.  Given the full knowledge available to such post singularity societies, it seems reasonable that they could mask themselves from us completely. 

There simply is no state of advanced technology short of achieving singularity.

Life as we define it, most probably... but it wouldn't have been created (only) since it has been evolving here from total emptiness through multiple genetic mutations. Conditions may differ but i doubt God stopped at Earth to provide highly diversified "environments" in this Universe -- we're far from still being in Eden if you wanna get religious or mythologic about the issue of extra-terrestrial life potential.

Creationism is a philosophy and for some people - a belief, Scientology is yet again another opinion that gathers the sheep for domestication while others speak of facts and/or demonstrable evidence.

It's simply arrogant to consider ourselves unique or the exclusive representation of intelligence by somehow conscious reasonings based on assumptions or deductions. Human brain might be a miracle of odds beyond comprehension, it's still NOT as sophisticated as Dolphins (considering THEIR fishlike situation, btw), for example.

If mortality is our burden, survival of the fittest made it all the more evident; You are dust and you will return to dust. They are (insert your favorite chemical, biological, physical manifestation of strange molecular combinations here as you please) and they will return to (sic).

If i knew about Frank Drake's formula when i was trying to prove that We are NOT alone for a thesis (statistical analysis in maximized or optimal computational environments -- sort of virtualization about AI potentials based on speculative conditions, btw) in '00, i think i deserve being perceived as being logic or respected for opinions, buddy.

I realized back then that i was being outrunned & outgunned by tons of books on the subject and by doctorate holders safely tucked in their own rational activities. Imagine the summary nightmares i had to go through to put some order in that superb chaos.

The language barrier strikes again, i guess.

Why else do you think we move Oil by cargo or pipelines?

Or use robotic probes to study the neighborhood?

We are a bunch of explorers, i give us less than 50,000 more years to own and operate more than ONE Earth -- minimal. Be it far away or close enough to host populations or yet again, more curious & intelligent explorers. At that rate we're bound to find equal or superior lifeforms.

Problem is, you're stuck in a loop believing Kurzweil as being the ultimate truth bearer. I claim he or anyone else (including me) aren't by a fair chunk of rational deductions based on *CURRENT* means & known facts.

Mask themselves? Cowards might be a better word, bet it a cunning way to conquer_invade_eliminate *us* or not.

Life is so abundant here because it only takes one spark. Everything on Earth evolved from one base organism, and once that organism was created (however it happened) diversity was sure to happen.

Also, FTL travel in the normal sense is impossible. The only way it could happen was if we used wormholes, and so far, we have never observed one. According to Einsteins equations, they are possible, we just haven;t found one yet. Also, we would have to construct a craft capable of withstanding the emmense pressure they would be under. And I don't mean wormholes as in black holes. Once you get to the center, the force ripping at you is pratically infinite. I mean a different kind of wormhole, a fold in spacetime, something we haven't found yet.

I would only have repeated a number of already published "items".  I did make a PPT file for a quick summary at the time... but it's buried deep on an old PC or some CD gathering dust in a drawer somewhere. MS doesn't make backward compatibilty any easier and newest PowerPoint viewers never could load it last i checked some 5 five years ago from a dreamy mood swing.

Oh, but he's also right in that "situation"; it's only that the parameters and model are everchanging. I doubt that in a decade or more, we'll have less to work with. As any good scientific quest can demonstrate.

We simply have hypothesis, at the moment.

Ah now here's a topic I know a little about

Evolution in a nutshell:  Resources are scarce.  Self replicating matter will replicate to use up all possible resources.  When there are not enough resources in a given area to support the amount of matter (life) that wants to duplicate, some of the organisms will be unable to do so.  If every individual in the entire population was identical, selection concerning who dies off would depend only on the placement of resources.  However, the genetic code that makes up all life is susceptible to variation by a number of means.  This means that there is some minor variation among individuals in the population.  Certain mutations will randomly happen to be beneficial to getting resources, so individual organisms posessing those randomly beneficial mutations will be more likely to duplicate themselves.  In this way, there is a higher percentage of the randomly beneficial "gene" in the next generation than the one before it.  Over time, the entire population without the successful gene will die out and be replaced by the new, genetically adapted variant.

The reality is rather more complex, but you'd have to read a textbook for that.  The theory of evolution can be easily demonstrated through simulation, examination of fossil records, experimentation through selection on controlled populations, and on observation of wild populations.  The theory of evolution is a description of a process.  It cannot and does not attempt to explain how the process began, i.e. how life got started is outside the realm of evolution.  Evolution is only concerned with what happens once self replicating matter exists.

Cylinder *could* even create a time bending effect as speculated by Frank Tipler...

I'd also recommend a closer look at Hawking's causality conjecture though.

Basically, it's not energy consumption but if speed is stable enough to provide point to point precision during space "opening" calibrations.

Richter scale kinda stuff, the exponential growth near FTL is an accidental singularity (not of the technological Kurzweil kind, btw ) threshold which must be kept ahead (of whatever dares traveling to THAT point) long enough to sneek in at the right moment (which is infinitely static, btw) or else you'd be crushed like a split two dimensional matter TO infinity measures.

Risky, you say. Pffftttt, think again.

According to BlackHoling dynamics, there's no exit. UNLESS - you bounce off fast enough to catch your own past -- perpetually.

Hold it, it's more complex even.

You're out safely. You must reproduce that space "opening" calibration from the guess of a resulting point target blank ALREADY in the future. Gimme a crystal ball please, i'm lucky but not that much.

Otherwise, there's always good'ol velocity and gravity pulls in a vacuum. Experimentally impossible to produce in this Universe, btw.

Well if God is all-knowing then he certainly wouldn't create just one oasis of life in the universe.  Hmm, sometime in the future the dominant species on this planet will build nuclear weapons and make the whole ecosystem go out of whack with global warming.  Yeah, I think I'll go and work in the sandbox a bit more, over there.  He might have faith in us to overcome these trials we keep inventing for ourselves, but he knows what the odds are so it's not a bad idea to have a Plan B.

I disagree; fossil records show otherwise.  Fossil record show stages instead of gradient.  Evolution would be supported by gradient.  Also our ecosystem is in equlibrium instead of constanly "evolving" with some species dominating others.  I think its more about the ecosystem as a whole than individual species.  In fact the species that are already extinct are not necessarily less fit.  Prehistoric organisms are arguably more fit than the organisms that are still around today. 

Don't believe me?  I went to dictionary.com and look up evolution; here is at the bottom of the page:

Our Living Language  : Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection assumed that tiny adaptations occur in organisms constantly over millions of years. Gradually, a new species develops that is distinct from its ancestors. In the 1970s, however, biologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed that evolution by natural selection may not have been such a smooth and consistent process. Based on fossils from around the world that showed the abrupt appearance of new species, Eldridge and Gould suggested that evolution is better described through punctuated equilibrium. That is, for long periods of time species remain virtually unchanged, not even gradually adapting. They are in equilibrium, in balance with the environment. But when confronted with environmental challenges—sudden climate change, for example—organisms adapt quite quickly, perhaps in only a few thousand years. These active periods are punctuations, after which a new equilibrium exists and species remain stable until the next punctuation.

What that means?  They know that Darwin's theory contradicts what data we are able to gather.  They try to salvage that by shortening the time, but that means instead of evolve through long periods of time, now it has to happen in a hurry.  Evolution has not been reproduced nor observed (changing from one specie to another).  If evolution can't be observed in microorganism, how do you suppose it happened with creatures that has many cells?  If this is a puzzle, there are too many missing pieces.

How do you explain branching of the Amphibians where some grow back severed legs and other species don't, then?

There are numerous adaptative genetic makeups which are recursive or become static at some point.

Homo Sapiens to Erectus, Chimps or Gorillas may have taken awhile in generation terms -- but, it's still Evolution.

DNA is not a number of appropriate "slots" for creature X, it's a coding definition that mutates when conditions enforce it.

I think that knowing for sure either way would be mind blowing.

In my opinion aliens do exist, they have NOT visited us.

When we find them we will end up going to war sooner rather than later. Look at are past is there a single year in the last 100'000 years or so of human exisitance when we have not been killing each other or animals?

Further to that we define are selves by the wars in are history. English, American, Canadian, French, etc are all terms fromed by the wars we have won (in away)...

If we do come across aliens in the next 50 years or so I imagine the main powers will invest vast amount of resourses into space travel and space weapons for 'self-defence'. 

If we do come across them soon, maybe some part of si-fi will come true (faster than lift travel ftw)