surian

I really think that we limit ourselves when we think about what life could be on other planets. We only think about it in narrow terms such as what we see on our own planet. Our prerequisites for life are water and warmth. There is a really good short story from Arthur C. Clark where he explores this issue a little bit. In his story there is a planet on the edge of the solar system that has an atmosphere of liquid helium (I think it was helium). Anyway, the surface was a conductor of electricity and it was supercooled to nearly absolute zero thus making it a really good potential computer. That's exactly what happened. The planet's surface eventually organized itself into a system that resembles what we know today as a computer's CPU. Again, over millions of years it evolved into a concious entity and began to construct offspring which it sent out to the far reaches of the universe to explore. The end of the story is that the computer reaches other planets that have "invented" computers and decides that they are a threat so it starts destroying the stars in their system... eventually reaching earth. The point is though, we shouldn't really be thinking so narrowly about where to look for life. Life will thrive wherever it can, and we only see a tiny fraction of where life could thrive. There's another story from Arthur C. Clark where there is intelligent life near the core of our planet, and the reason we have never seen it is because we never looked for it there (and they never looked for us either because they thought the same way we did about life).

The answer to your questions, and indeed the answer to life, the universe and everthing is: 42. Hope that helps.

Technically Doom3 Isn't out until Aug. 4th in the US but I have my ways (usenet)... not exactly shall we say... legal? But I don't care because I am going to buy the game anyway in a couple days, I just couldn't resist the early test hehe. They deserve our $$$, they made an amazing game and I'm more than willing to buy it. I have it running on High settings at 1024x768 (low resolution still looks amazing... it's weird, i thought i was at 1200x1024 at the lowest until I checked) also I have 2xAA on and I have no problems whatsoever, in fact I could easily get it going much higher than that but I havn't tested it yet. My system is pretty good though, Athlon64 3200+ ATI 9800pro128Mb 1Gig Ram. I had a friend install it on his machine to see the difference, he has an AthlonXP 3000+ 9700pro128Mb and 1Gig Ram and was able to get it to run at my specs with ease (hence my guess that I could pump it up a bit more.

I just got a copy of Doom3 today and it is now my favorite game of all time... it's seriously the scariest game I have ever played in my life. Plus the graphics are absolutely breath taking.