[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Alien life, does it exist? (Page 1 of 3)
Posted: 1/23/2010 7:56:56 PM EDT
| is earth an anomaly or is there life out there somewhere? |
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I think so.
Too many stars, with too many planets, with way too much time for there not to be other life. However, I suspect sentient tool-users pass each other like ships in the night, missing each other by millions, if not billions of years. The races that "make it" to outlive their planets and even their home star are so advanced, there's no basis for communication or understanding, or even detecting them. Although, some of what we think is the natural universe may actually be their works or evidence of their passing. In essence, a race that is advanced enough to cross interstellar or even intergalactic space does not care about that kind of exploration to come visit. It would be like monkeys trying to understand what we're doing late on a Saturday night here on the Internet. |
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Quoted:
I think so. Too many stars, with too many planets, with way too much time for there not to be other life. However, I suspect sentient tool-users pass each other like ships in the night, missing each other by millions, if not billions of years. The races that "make it" to outlive their planets and even their home star are so advanced, there's no basis for communication or understanding, or even detecting them. Although, some of what we think is the natural universe may actually be their works or evidence of their passing. In essence, a race that is advanced enough to cross interstellar or even intergalactic space does not care about that kind of exploration to come visit. It would be like monkeys trying to understand what we're doing late on a Saturday night here on the Internet. Explain please. |
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Its mathematically impossible for their to be no life out there. There are BILLIONS of stars out there, each with a possible solar system simliar to ours. In our galaxy alone there are millions of systems that could possibly hold life. The sky is full of other galaxies. these are just a few interesting ones 
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I would be very, very surprised, and absolutely disappointed, if the answer was no. I think that there are races out there that are far more advanced than we are. And races that are nowhere near as far along as we are, too. I think that many of those races will have technologies that are very familiar to us. It won't all be as strange to us as some sci-fi shows might have you believe. They'll have similar machines to do similar jobs. I think we may have been visited by some of them in the past, and I hope we are in the future, unless of course they're out to eat us or use us as slaves. (Sex slaves may be OK, if they're very hot!) I think that the only barrier to interstellar travel is our current level of technological achievement. We will eventually be able to go out into the universe at effective speeds far beyond the apparent speed of light. If I knew how that would be done, I'd be doing the research, making the prototype, and getting the patents. CJ |
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Considering the huge number of known galaxies I believe that there has to be some sort of life, and probably intelligent, technologically adept life as well.
But unless we find some alien life forms in our own solar system; any existing extra terrestrial life may be too far away in space and time for us ever to know for sure or deal with in any manner even if we do pick up some sort of signal. And then there is The Great Filter to consider as well. |
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I personally doubt it, but I don't feel too strongly about that opinion.
But if there is life, I do feel very strongly that we are highly unlikely to make contact. Not just because of the distance, not just because of the difficulty - I think that if there is life, it is probably so very different from ours that we might not even be capable of interaction. The biochemistry is likely to be completely different, when you consider life that exists in, say, a liquid methane environment, such as on Titan. Another sentient life form might communicate primarily with color or some reflected electromagnetic radiation outside the visible spectrum. They might even communicate with something similar to pheromones. There's no guarantee their senses would be complimentary to ours - the physical world and constants would be the same, presumably, but they might 'hear' or 'see' totally different frequencies. Our light might be their dark; our speech might be out of their hearing range. They might live in environments that would kill us in an instant, and vice versa. See the liquid methane environment, above. Finally, out of all the life we find on our own planet, there is a grand total of 1 sentient lifeform. I think it is more unlikely that there are other sentient life forms out there than it is that there are other planets with life on them. And again, sentience could come in many flavors that might be difficult if not impossible for humans to understand. It would be pretty cool, though. |
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Space is regarded as being infinite, we can't be the only ones. I was reading about this and some theory that I forget the name of...anyway it goes like this.... If, in fact, the universe is infinite there are many other identical solar systems to ours, that have identical planets and identical beings doing the exact same thing, at the same time. When you factor in infinity all probabilities are realized. How's that for a mindfuck. |
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Quoted: Quoted: I think so. Too many stars, with too many planets, with way too much time for there not to be other life. However, I suspect sentient tool-users pass each other like ships in the night, missing each other by millions, if not billions of years. The races that "make it" to outlive their planets and even their home star are so advanced, there's no basis for communication or understanding, or even detecting them. Although, some of what we think is the natural universe may actually be their works or evidence of their passing. In essence, a race that is advanced enough to cross interstellar or even intergalactic space does not care about that kind of exploration to come visit. It would be like monkeys trying to understand what we're doing late on a Saturday night here on the Internet. Explain please. I think what he meant was that the likelihood of two life forms from different places in the universe: Being alive at the same time, Being able to find each other, Having the technology at the same time, Being able to communicate, etc, etc, etc is exponentially unlikely. |
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The universe is big enough that extra-terrestrial life is almost a certainty. It's also old enough that they could have died out a billion years ago, and we'll never know anything about them.
And it's possible that intelligent life is plentiful in our own galaxy, but it's all primitive, stone age type intelligence. Neanderthal was intelligent, but they didn't have spaceships or radio beacons. |
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The universe is big enough that extra-terrestrial life is almost a certainty. It's also old enough that they could have died out a billion years ago, and we'll never know anything about them. And it's possible that intelligent life is plentiful in our own galaxy, but it's all primitive, stone age type intelligence. Neanderthal was intelligent, but they didn't have spaceships or radio beacons. Maybe they're like us, and they're trying to find other life. |
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Statistically it has to be possible, but making contact is more than unlikely. If life develops given certain conditions, you would have to assume that another set of beings came into existence with equally favorable conditions, at just the right time and just the right location, for us to make contact. I can't fathom that being possible. - BG |
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There's a pretty good chance the Mars rocks have a form of life on them, that will be determined this year. If that's the case, then the universe is probably filled with forms of evolved life, but life that's actually at a technological level for us to see or hear them, is remote given the size of the universe. Simple forms of life is probably pretty common. |
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I think so. Too many stars, with too many planets, with way too much time for there not to be other life. However, I suspect sentient tool-users pass each other like ships in the night, missing each other by millions, if not billions of years. The races that "make it" to outlive their planets and even their home star are so advanced, there's no basis for communication or understanding, or even detecting them. Although, some of what we think is the natural universe may actually be their works or evidence of their passing. In essence, a race that is advanced enough to cross interstellar or even intergalactic space does not care about that kind of exploration to come visit. It would be like monkeys trying to understand what we're doing late on a Saturday night here on the Internet. Explain please. I think what he meant was that the likelihood of two life forms from different places in the universe: Being alive at the same time, Being able to find each other, Having the technology at the same time, Being able to communicate, etc, etc, etc is exponentially unlikely. Yeah... That is what I meant. That was a really shitty mixed-metaphor. Sorry. 
Even if a race in our galaxy built Dyson spheres to capture an entire stars energy, and output all that was practically possible as friendly SETI-style messages just trying to cover the 21cm Hydrogen "water hole", it's iffy if that would reach the other side of the Milky Way. And of course, it could take up to 100,000 years for that signal to cross to the other side. Perhaps such a signal blasted earth as Christopher Columbus was crossing the Atlantic... Timing is everything. And conversely despite what is said about The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy going out into space forever, unless you do crazy-ass stuff like build a dish antenna the size of an entire solar system, such signals fizzle out into undetectability after just a few dozen light years. If such a nice helpful and very advanced species were broadcasting with a mega transmitter, we'd only have been able to receive such a signal for the past 70 years, which is less than 1% of any likely travel time/distance for such signals. There's other potential things such as a race who constructs Von Neuman self-replicating probes which would try and catalog the galaxy, (they need only make one, it goes to a star, mines asteroids etc. and makes two probes, those go to other stars and make four... ) and such a probe has the luxury of being able to wait for intelligence to arise. (Think the monoliths in 2001...) I think finding such an artifact in our solar system is probably the best bet of proving the existence of intelligent life elsewhere within any kind of human historical time-frame, even over SETI radio signals. |