It would be great to believe that human beings have evolved to the point that we could take a place in a galactic or even universal civilization. Not likely! According to Australian astronomer Charles Lineweaver, the Earth is a young planet, and humans are even younger.

  The world of today would astonish Christopher Colombus with our airplanes, internet and microwave ovens. What a difference a half millennium makes! And so imagine what two billion years would offer a civilization in terms of advances in technology and philosophy. Humans are probably infants in the eyes of such an advanced culture.

  Conspiracy theorists like to point to Roswell or some other event, suggesting that once the Earth gained nuclear bombs the aliens came running to welcome us to the galactic neighborhood. But why would the bomb be of interest to such an advanced culture? We can't even send a probe to Mars, how could we possibly send a bomb to Alpha Centauri?

  Lineweaver, of the University of New South Wales, worked out that Earth-like planets around other stars will be on average about 1.8 billion years older than Earth. He calculates the Earth is a toddler in cosmic terms, making it likely that any advanced life is much more evolved than previously thought. Lineweaver says that if intelligent beings do exist on planets elsewhere they will be so advanced they would think of us as "nothing more than bacteria."

  So even if some little green man cared to watch our particular petri dish, he probably didn't get nervous after Hiroshima. "Oh look, the little ants have learned how to hurt themselves even more. How quaint."

  "Certainly this can be a way of explaining the 'Great Silence,'" said ET hunter Paul Schuch. But he gives the human race more credit than that. He thinks we have no official alien contact becuase it is a big universe our there, and maybe we are not looking in the right places. "I rather think our lack of success is more related to the fact that, on the cosmic clock, we just started looking yesterday. These things take time, and require great patience."