I’m just wondering how many of you guys/girls think that there is life on a planet or star other than Earth. If you do belive that there is something else out there do you think that it is intelligent/more intelligent than humans?
Personally, I think that there are other beings out there. Where? I don’t know…Europa? Titan? Maybe. The universe is just so huge why wouldn’t there be something else alive somewhere beyond us? However the thing that gets me mad is when scientists are like, “oh well since there is no water and it is too hot, there can’t be life on that planet”. It’s like, HOW NARROW MINDED IS THAT? Just because humans couldnt live on it doesnt mean that nothing could. Please give me input, I find this a really interesting topic. Do you think that humans will one day inhabit another planet? I hope so.
BTW: Did anyone know that flying cars are going to become available in 2009 and that engineers have made a bathtub that you can call on your cell phone and tell what temperature of water you want? Cool huh?
And I’d vote that there’s other intelligent life out there. That microorganisms exist elsewhere is a good indication… and there’s no reason there couldn’t be another planet with good conditions like ours. In fact, there are a few which scientists have their eyes on…
Whatever anyone tells you about micro-organisms, trust me - the jury is still well and truly out. No-one knows if there are or were alien lifeforms of any kind whatsoever elsewhere in the universe, apart from one’s we’ve sent out accidentally on space probes. There is no consensus on whether or not alien micro-organisms have been detected.
(though I personally side with those who say the microfossils in ALH8001 really were microfossils, not so sure about the Viking results but it doesn’t seem so clear-cut as it once did)
Personally, I think that there are other beings out there. Where? I don’t know…Europa? Titan? Maybe. The universe is just so huge why wouldn’t there be something else alive somewhere beyond us? However the thing that gets me mad is when scientists are like, “oh well since there is no water and it is too hot, there can’t be life on that planet”. It’s like, HOW NARROW MINDED IS THAT? Just because humans couldnt live on it doesnt mean that nothing could.
It’s not humans so much as life as we know it. True, there might well be life “as we do not know it” (personally I think there probably will be examples of this) but by definition we don’t know how to detect it, because we don’t know anything about it. Concentrating on searching for the conditions for “life as we know it” is really the only option. It gets a bit tedious to say “there can’t be life as we know it here” every time so, since we have no way of knowing about totally different lifeforms, may as well drop the “as we know it”.
I agree, the chances of amino acids naturally forming in a chemical soup is 1 in 10e67. The chances of those amino acids forming an average sized protien is 1 in 10e123!!!
Here is an illustration of how long that would take "To illustrate the magnitude of this impossibility, let’s have a contest. Suppose we give a snail moving at the speed of one inch every million years the task of moving the entire earth atom by atom over to the other side of the universe and back.
Then, imagine the length of time it takes light to travel one millimeter, and a million proteins forming in that length of time hoping to form one protein with all left-handed amino acids. Guess what! The snail would win, many millions of times over before even one left-handed protein would be formed!"
Now, imagine the chanced of DNA forming by random chemical collisions, the chance is 1 in 10e40,000!!!.
If the universe is 30 billion yrs old as most scientists suggest, then there are “only” about 9.46e18 seconds. I can’t even begin to image the chances of DNA forming even if trillions of reactions occured every second.
These odds are so ridicously small, the chances of life forming once are insane, let alone occuring multiple times across the unverise.
The universe isn’t infinite, otherwise it would be infinitely bright and wouldn’t be expanding (by principle, if something is expanding, it can’t be infinite and vice versa). This would mean that during the night everything would be perfectly white because of all that visible radiation; similarly during the day.
I voted “other”, on grounds of insufficient data. I think there is the possibility for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but we don’t have enough evidence to prove or disprove its existence.
Dunno about that. A good atmosphere etc. are not sufficient. Take Earth as an example of good breeding grounds for intelligent life.
The area surrounding the U.K. houses of parliament has good rainfall, a minimum amount of sunshine, the air is of reasonable quality and yet they still haven’t found any sign of intelligent life there…
Who cares ?Even if intelligent lifeforms exist we will possibly be unable to contact them because of the really huge distances.
Depends how far away they are. If they’re within our observable horizon then eventually we could make contact with them. Might take billions of years, but hey, we’ve got billions of years to play with. Or we might discover FTL travel (wormholes, warp drives, other wacky ideas), making things easier.
The universe isn’t infinite, otherwise it would be infinitely bright and wouldn’t be expanding (by principle, if something is expanding, it can’t be infinite and vice versa). This would mean that during the night everything would be perfectly white because of all that visible radiation; similarly during the day.
That’s Olber’s paradox. But it doesn’t work if the universe is sufficiently large, isn’t infinitely old and/or expanded very rapidly - light doesn’t have time to reach everywhere, so the sky can still be dark at night. Current thinking is the universe, if not infinite, may be MUCH larger than is observable due to rapid expansion early on (inflation) seperating regions from one another.
I don’t care much if there is other intelligent life that is similar to ours because if there is, then they would be constrained by the same physical laws that we are.
I believe that since there are laws in place that we don’t fully understand, they were placed there by someone/something who does and that intelligence already knows about us.
It’s not up to us to find them but for them to remove the constraints.
How do we even know that what we think we see in the furthest galaxies is actually real? The furthest any probe has visited is the rings of Uranus (hehe, whoever named that planet deserves a medal).
Actually I think they’ve been to Neptune too. But my point is that why would the universe have been made so big if we were meant to find other species? Is it a challenge perhaps?
If so who made the challenge and why? I don’t think those questions will be answerable in our lifetimes or anyone else’s. As God says to Homer:
This topic is quite cool to post on.
Well my vision on life beyond earth is the following.
Personally I believe there is more life then only earth. As the bible would say, god created the universe, made the stars and earth. But why did he made a universe soo big that we still can’t see the another side of it? It’s sooo much, so full of things we still didn’t saw, that I hardly can believe that we’re the only one in the universe.
What has a human to do with a universe as big as the uncountable, the unreachable and at least but not last, the word end doesn’t exist.
If we were alone why didn’t god made something smaller? why is it so big, and why triggers something us to find out if there’s more then us? There must be a reason why and personally I believe that there is something outside there that tries as well to survive.
But if these creatures or something else are aliens as we know of movies, I’m not sure, but I believe it’s something we don’t know but will encounter one day.
Personnally I really want to be a withness that we discover something out there. At least I want to know before I die if we were alone or not. Else when I’m death I’ll fly around as a spirit to find out if there’s something else. But hack yeah, I don’t know what else happens afther you die.
Most people are scared of that, but well I’m not looking forwards to that day, but I’m really curious what I can do afther I died, fly? see the future? reincarnate myself in a year I want? reincarnate in a creature? I don’t know but I think it would be something cool, at least it would be something that answers all my questions.
“Intelligence” is something that can grow or wane.
We, at our current state of intelligence, cannot see beyond a certain darkness.
I believe this is on purpose, because intelligence is coupled with the ability to comprehend knowledge. And as the old adage says, “Knowledge is power”. Can you imagine a universe full of people at our current state of society with the power to run around and inflict themselves on each other? I think those with greater intelligence expect us to grow up first. (This was the point of old serials like “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, etc.)
The universe, as we understand it, is not infinite, but light simply hasn’t had enough time to reach us from every point. There may also be other factors of which we are unaware.
It is hubris for scientists to ever say “this is how things are.” Sadly, many do. What we do know is a fair amount, and our knowledge expands every so often. But the ends of unenlightened science is “this is how it appears”; we can disprove only, but as yet, never prove.
I think there are other humans in the universe. Some more intelligent and glorious than we.
Also, since God appears to have joined this conversation, I’d like to point out that the idea that science and religion are incompatable is pure materialism --and completely false. (OK, OK, true for some specific religious instances… but only because of fanatic dogmatism.) All truth is truth. At our current state of understanding there are only very few, small truths that we can recognize and accept --both scientific and religious.
/me puts soapbox away/
