“I am forgetting, Clodia, the wrongs you have done me; I am putting aside the memory of what I have suffered; I pass over your cruel actions towards my family in my absence; pray do not imagine that what I have said was meant against you!”

Oh the irony.

Oh look, it’s New Comedy!

Your email is attached to the message (you have to enter it to post, I think); I will send you an email to follow up.

Although quickly; confirmation is at the start of the process (well, one year in), not at the end of the process.

Scot.

I know what you mean about the captcha. There is a small reload button if you get one that’s unreadable. Unfortunately if I take it off I spend all day de-approving spam.

Do you need those captcha’s, by the way — they’re nearly impossible to complete.

http://airminded.org/2005/11/18/latex-the-pain-the-pleasure/

I’m now using it to produce the book ms., though there the process is a bit different — instead of printing out the final product, I’ll turn it into RTF format (probably in Scrivener, which I’ve also started using recently) per the publisher’s requirements.

The universe is 13.7 billion years old (or thereabouts). But life hasn’t been able to be around for that long. The first two generations of stars (Population III – all gone – and Population II – lots still around) wouldn’t have had any planets – the elements heavier than helium all come from Population I and Population II supernovae. So you need a Population I star (like ours) – but they are quite young, by comparison.

You get older ones closer to the galactic core – but the radiation levels there are higher, and life may not be possible. (I’m not talking about background counts – I’m talking about massive sterilising pulses of radiation from ‘nearby’ exploding stars). It’s even possible that further out that this is a problem – one theory for 2 of the major extinction events on Earth is that they correspond to periods where the Sun’s orbit through the Milky Way took us through more populated areas. It may be that you need to be on a planet in a quiet area of a galaxy to get complex life.

Given that, it’s quite possible that a sentient tool-using race may not be much older than humans. Life started on this planet almost the week that the water cooled off – but it took 3 billion years to get to complex multi-cellular. After that, evolution made complex animals pretty quickly, with only a couple of hiccups. Arguably, the earliest a sentient being _could_ have appeared on Earth was only a few hundred million years ago.

While it’s not _likely_, it is very possible that humans may be one of the first (if not the first) sentient species (hey, somebody has to be!). There just may not have been enough time for any others.