(October 13, 2010 at 7:57 pm)R-e-n-n-a-t Wrote: It could be anything. Personally I'm hoping it's mostly vacant. As awesome as it would be to meet intelligent aliens (and shock humanity by dating one, lol) it's not worth a probable intergalactic nuclear war. Human's aren't tolerant, even if other organisms would be; we'd nuke the s**t out of intelligent life in no time flat. An empty planet, on the other hand, can just be used to solve the population problem for a few more thousand years.
Given that we've had nuclear weapons for only 65 years or so, and the universe had 6-7 billion years to get an earlier lineage of evolution going somewhere else before our ~4.0 billion year lineage started on earth, I suspect the odds of us running into someone intelligent, technological, and we can shove around is vanishingly small. Most likely we will be obliterated without a trace should we attempt to make ourselves inconvenient for any intelligent, technological species we encounter.
