Minix? hah! Architecturally clever, practically useless.

L4 is nice though.

Sure, but in a larger-scale unix system, you'd be suprised how much of it is sh scripts, and other things that depend on it like perl.

It doesn't automatically trim it's content in Leopard for your architecture anyway? Eeugh.

Kubuntu is a pretty awful Linux distribution, just saying.

Please, please, please, *please* shut up. No one cares about your stupid ip addresses.

Really, wha you want is L4 in terms of OS kernels.

It is perfect, just perfect.

Then you just need to build a similarly amazing userland stack on top.

OSX has good multitasking? Really? Ever actually used Mach?

They can pour their huge profits into improving and making the best OS in the world, and make a truckload of money a year for a hundred years.

Or they can not, and make two truckloads of money a year for fifty years.

Which is better to the average executive who will be there a total of 5 years?

Linux's GUI configs may suck, but Windows' are DEPLORABLE. OSX is closest to good, SUSE's YaST isn't bad either.

Ergh, UI Design? I was tired. I meant OS design.

0) There is a thing called a POSIX standard which Linux tries to implement, mandating a shell.

1) Putting userland applications spawning straight from a kernel is really bad UI design. Even windows doesn't actually do this, even though you might think so. NT has a sort of magic hypervisor behind it all which fullfills a similar role to the unix shell although it is never seen.

2) Many unix applications and system functions depend on a bourne-compliant shell running in the background

Why not just tell them (via the intuitive GUI) to add a user and give him sshd power? Then you can type your silly 10-15 char commands.

Actually, Market is just one of many distribution channels. Source can and usually is available.

Your existence is, to me, just an idea. So "an idea" is the only thing we have.

The other thing to note is, you are saying that they could be underestimating the likelihood of various civilizations. In that case, Fermi's paradox holds even stronger.

If there are all these aliens with time/space manipulation technology from other galaxies, surely we would have seen those! These guys are just demonstrating that with a minimum speed of 0.1c for interplanetary colonization, it would be possible that we wouldn't have seen these life-forms yet.

If this speed was faster, or there were more aliens around, the likelihood of us seeing them is higher - which means that, because we haven't seen them (probably) - the likelihood of these species existing actually ends up being lower.

No, it is not a recognized possibility.

None of the "possibilities" you gave here would work for an interplanetary civilization. They would still need a communication device that would work for long distances over a vacuum. Certainly, Radio is actually rather unlikely because of the problems with long distance and timing, but no means of telepathy such as we understand it would work across a vacuum. Radio isn't a means of telepathy - we have no way to project thoughts into another's brain via radio, nor have we observed this in any life on earth.