This telescope, if it is eventually built to its final 100 meter designed size, will be able to provide images of our solar system's planets and other objects that are about as finely-detailed as images that "fly-by probes" have provided.

And, even if this telescope is scaled down to a 80 meter final size, it should be able to spectroscopically analyse Earth-size planets around the 40 nearest sun-like stars.

(A 100 meter size primary mirror is really, really big (wider than a football field is long). And, they say it's feasible...at a high cost, of course (~2 Billion USD). But, it is of a modular design...they can start out with a smaller primary mirror size (and lower initial cost) and add onto the primary mirror, over the course of 5 to ten years, to eventually reach its final 100 meter size.)

If it is infinite, they are not just possibilities but inevitabilities.

The universe is teeming with life, it's finding it and breaking through the wall of isolation that's the trick.

Unfourtunately the wall of isolation is light-years of time.

People are crazy to even think that there's not life out there and the really stupid ones are the people who think alien life would waste it's time visiting us

Wow you are a bright one...

See my question about a super scope scheduled to be launched. I just posted it before I open this topic. It will filter all light from the stars and give us picturesof solar systems we have never seen. I don't know it name or launch date.

Well we have been shooting off radio signals for 50 years. Multiply that times the speed of sound and you have a substantial distance. It WE received the same would we not launch a probe if we could pinpoint the origin of the signal? People assume any thing that could come here is manned. It would make better sense if it was a probe. Life as we know it cannot sustain the time required to enter other solar systems. We don't understand how long these distances are. The radiation in space alone would kill life over the thousnads of years required to get fron one system to another. Carl Sagan said "I'll believe in visitors from outer space when I see one".

I assume you mean the speed of light.

Yes, and it would take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star. For an alien to come here, either in person or by robot proxy, in our lifetime as a direct response to receiving a signal from Earth, his craft would have to travel at a very large fraction of lightspeed, thus his technology would have to be in advance of our own. If his technology were in advance of our own, he would have been transmitting signals longer than we have and we would therefore have received his signal before he received ours. We haven't received any signals, ergo, there are no sufficiently advanced aliens within 100 light years, that being roughly the amount of time we have been transmitting.

I wouldn't even be that optimistic. If I saw a "visitor from outer space", I'd first want to know why he chose, out of all the vastness of space, to come to this locality, because, given that the galaxy is at least 100,000 light years across and we have been advertising our presence for only 100 years and given also that we are capable of imminent self-destruction, our presence represents not just a needle in the haystack of space, but also of time. A random alien, from any place or time in the galaxy, would have a vanishingly small chance of finding us even if he knew precisely where to look. And for him to be able to actually land here presupposes at the very least that his body can tolerate Earth gravity and why should it?

I'd be inclined to ask the alien, who will no doubt speak suspiciously good English with an American accent, who did his make up, beep beep!

It is impossible to attempt to characterize life from another galaxy. Think what we will be one-five billion years from now. If we survive long enough to be alive when the sun implodes we will be some type of life form existing on a man made space station. Even that is impossible to imagine.

Speed of radio waves 2X10(ms-1 Speed of light 3X10(ms-1