Building an observatory is nothing. Thats the easy part. Having a source of income (which I do not) to populate it with the never ending slippery slope of gee gaws and bigger, more advanced, etc.... now thats the hard part. My observatory, while nice, and very enjoyable, probably housed $10K worth of total investment in the building and equipment. The amazing amateur ground based images you see daily are often made with equipment purchased by doctors, lawyers, and others who have invested between a quater and a half a million dollars in their "hobby" lol.
Start attending star parties. Even if you have to travel a ways and camp out. You'll get to look through monsters scopes. But once the bug bites you. Hold onto your wallet.
The extreme vastness of the universe is almost incomprehensible to us. No, actually, it is incomprehensible, period. We can pretend to understand it, and sometimes I do think I can, but also logically think it's not possible. If we had started to explore space when the first humanoid came into existence, we'd still only have gone as far as one grain of sand relative to the size of the earth. Plenty of opportunity for other life forms to be "hiding" in the sense that their signals haven't reached us.
My favorite fun theory is that we are in someone's lab. Those "people" are who we have perceived as gods and they are infinitely larger than us. Much like keeping an ant farm.
When I said earlier that I thought other life was inevitable I wasn't considering intelligent life but less developed forms. I often wonder what the odds are of early microbial life developing into self awareness and intelligence (such as it is). That, plus the extraordinary set of very fortunate astronomical coincidences William Adams mentions that allows life to develope and elvolve from primitive forms certainly reduces the likelihood of other intelligent races. Not saying it's not possible. Just remember, we owe our very existence to a random astronomical event 65 million years ago that provided an environment suitable for development of mammals. Regardless of the odds of initial life to develop on any world, the odds may be greater that primitively life would have the geologic and astronomical stability to develop. Add the two together and i think the odds of other intelligent life is very small.
My three favorite things are the Oxford comma, irony and missed opportunities
The problem with humanity is: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology. Edward O. Wilson
One night in the observatory I mentioned a friend had the same theory in a different bent. It would be like imagining if our entire observable universe, were the nucleus, of a molecule, that is part of a skin cell, that is being shed off some off some other life forms scalp lol.
Even looking at our "sister" the Andromeda galaxy with binoculars it's amazing that the photons entering my eyes started out 2.5 million years ago.
I never built an observatory but I do get out the telescopes for small and large kids. Favorite targets for kids are Saturn and the moon.
This is last August at the solar eclipse at John Lucas's place here in TN. I used an 8" solar filter and also projected the image from a small scope inside a cardboard box.
eclipse_IMG_6607.jpg eclipse_IMG_6651.jpg eclipse_IMG_6662.jpg eclipse_IMG_6613.jpg eclipse-total_Charlie_es.jpg
BTW, I aimed some 5x night vision binoculars at the sky once and was surprised at how well they amplified the starlight. We took a photo of the Andromeda galaxy with a iPhone by holding it up to the eyepiece of the binocs.
JKJ
One free, on-line science fiction story which does examine this sort of thing is Schlock Mercenary --- took me a while to get into it, but the author is a very intelligent person, with an excellent grasp of physics and cosmology and scale, and the attendant sociological problems --- also notable for having ancient civilizations from first generation stars (our sun is a second generation).
Freefall, on purrsia.com is another well done webcomic whose author has done the math (and published it, see the site "Atomic Rockets" at projectrho.com) and it has an interesting spin on how difficult interstellar travel / communication is, and how few intelligent species there are likely to be.
Hal Clement had some pretty cool stories on this sort of thing, and I really recommend his "Halo" (can't say more than that or I'd spoil it).
I have to disagree. Much too large of an area for me to say it's very small. Quite opposite. What's to say they need the same conditions as we do?
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I'll look it up, thanks!
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The corollary is that there are SOOOO many other galaxies and solar systems that the odds become very high of having the exact same coincidence.Add the two together and i think the odds of other intelligent life is very small.
Also, we tend to only think of intelligent life as meaty carbon-based life, but there are many other possibilities.
I love this short story...
THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT!
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html