Walking the Razor Wire

Regan has a post up over at The Orange Orb called The USSR Cause for Roswell? - Muddled Disclosures, about the new book by Annie Jacobsen, Area 51 - An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. The book's theme is that while there are indeed mysterious events taking place at Nevada's infamous base, they are not alien in nature. At one point, Regan points out that when it comes to the mainstream, the general attitude is "No, it could never be aliens."

I have posted a response (that may still be awaiting moderation, so if it's not there when you read this, that's why), which basically brings up the dreaded Occam's Razor argument -- which I'm not opposed to, depending on it's application. But our understanding of the greater universe is still a very human understanding, and is therefore definitely limited. So, when discussing these sorts of unknowns, such as possible highly advanced extra terrestrial civilizations and their capabilities, it becomes more difficult to apply Occam's Razor in those contexts. On one hand, you could say that the argument is applicable based on what seems more likely:

1. Aliens from a far off star system have honed in on planet Earth, a tiny spec among billions of other orbiting planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and have successfully made the long voyage only to be defeated by our primitive technological systems causing one of their vessels to crash in the New Mexico desert.
2. Roswell was a Cold War tactic to convince the Russians that America possessed superior technology (or other such military experiment).

Obviously, scenario 2 would seem the more likely. On the other hand, our body of knowledge is a drop in the pan and we learn more and more about physics and the universe every day. This means that we do not currently have all of the answers -- a shocker, I know. A Type 0 civilization (based on the Kardashev Scale), which is what we are considered, has far less understanding of universal physics, than say, a Type 1 or Type 2 civilization. Taking that into consideration, the capabilities of an advanced civilization is largely unknown, and can't be dismissed so easily. And actually, I personally believe we have no way to accurately incorporate such an unknown into something like Occam's Razor, realistically.

This lead to a brief mention of possible civilizations in the known universe, and that if a large number of civilizations exist in any given galaxy, at least a few of them are bound to have similar characteristics and composition to humans, and come from a similar type of planet. Some of those few might reach a point where they need to search out habitable planets, much like we are currently doing. Since the number of Earth-like planets in at least the Milky Way is probably less than the number of non-Earth-like planets, it narrows their options, making the actual Earth a potential candidate. Yes, there's a lot of if's there, but it further points out that what may seem improbable, certainly isn't impossible.

Coincidentally, after reading Regan's post, I came across this article, by Michio Kaku, called The Paradox of Multiple Goldilocks Zones or "Did the Universe Know We Were Coming?

I like Michio - I'm not the Michio aficionado others are, but I appreciate his openness to possibilities such as the above, as well as Time Travel. In this article he talks about Goldilocks zones and just how many of them might exist in our universe:

But now, cosmologists are facing this paradox again, but from a cosmic perspective. It turns out that the fundamental parameters of the universe appear to be perfectly "fine-tuned."

This begs the question of how many of the Goldilocks zones there actually are. If you begin to count them, you will soon realize that there are so many of these instances, it simply boggles the mind.

If there in fact are a mind-blowing abundance of Goldilocks zones, this would help support the idea of a large number of possible life-giving planets, therefore giving support to the possibility of a large number of civilizations. This doesn't mean that they are all advanced, as some would undoubtedly be primitive -- even compared to our own civilization. Some, however, are bound to be thousands, if not millions of years above our own -- assuming that on average, civilizations aren't habitually destroying themselves in their respective nuclear ages.