Extraterrestrial Life: Your views?

I don't see why many church officials say that the idea of alien life is blasphemous.

The way I see it, other alien life forms would cement the existance of God.

Think about it. What are the chances that our planet would be in the right place cosmically and contain the right mix of minerals to create intelligent life? Let's call it 1:100 (I know that it's way more than that, but bear with me here). What are the chances of 2 worlds doing the same? 1:1000? 3 planets? 1:10000? 4? 1:100000?

Once is a fluke, but 4 or 5 or more is a miracle.

Most definatly we are the first, because He created the universe about a day or two before He formed the Earth. But who says He stopped with us? Also, who said we were the only ones He made on the 2nd or 3rd day? Surely God can multi-task.

What about Jesus? He's God's "only begotten Son." He died for our sins, but who's to say that life on other planets need Jesus? Maybe they are a bunch of Ned Flanders's the whole time and God didn't need to send Jesus to them. Maybe they practice Judeaism. Who know?

It would bolster my faith if God made other life forms, beating the odds time and time again.

 

*rolls eyes but refrains from commenting*


VaderLaMent, say what? Could you translate that into English for us less knowledgable people in the Sciences?

 

I thought that was fairly self explanatory, try not reading the letters to the formula, just the paragraphs concerning each.

Its just a way to look at how many stars form, how many planets form around those stars, how many might be life bearing, how many might give rise to intelligent life etc..

 

This might help too, you can do your own calculations.

CalculatingDrake

Enjoy.

 

I just hope that if there is life out there...they don't pick NOW to come visit.

There should be a big sign orbiting the Earth saying...

"PLEASE COME BACK IN 1,000 YEARS"

 

ok heres my thought, i didn't read the previous posts, most are too long, but heres mine, also might be long...

i always thought their was other life, simple as that, i saw signs fri night, sat night my freind threw a party out at the bon fire we discussed it. cause we saw something in the sky that looked like a slow moving shooting star. it started our discusion. quite interesting, we came up w/ this.
we ave to be ignorant to think their is nothing else out their, in that very large galaxy. in our universe alone we haven't seen 1/3 i believe. they might not have visited, and yet they might have, i din't know. what i do know is i believe, my freinds have the same view, others have different, but thats their opinion, one day maybe not in our time or our kids, i think we will find out the truth.

 

...but right now I'm skeptical that alien life has ever visited this planet...

Ever read the Andromeda Strain (or however its spelled...i suggest you do if you haven't.

 

is that a magazine or something?

 

There has to be little green men out there,who knows how many light-years they are away. My guess is around 100,000.

 

Here is a somewhat depressing thing to think about.

How could in theory an intenegent species that socially evolves evolve in such a way that they are a united species? Like start with groups of hunter gathers, and try to imagen somehow where they all are friendly and will be one society (not like us, with 200 or so diffrent nations). How will they avoid conquers, will it be possible for one group to conqure all? Will that one group always be powerful? Like Rome...just something to think about. But no one I have talked to has been able to come up with some good sernairo. No one I know of can think of a reasonable way in which a society can evolve in a united way.

Not saying it cant happen (hopefully it can), but no one has been able to think of how it could happen. Then again, maybe some aliens are so alien that we could not think of a way. Then again, the only example we have shows that

What does this have to do with ET? It means that they probably wont be that much better than us. Yeah, they will have better stuff and ships and tech, but socially they could be like us, with diffrent countries, strife, war, and what not. Bummer.

Then again, once we see aliens, maybe that will unite us and them. Nothing like a common enemy to unite people. And odds are we wont be able to get rid of them. The longer we are 'against' a common enemy, the better the chances of staying united later.

 

EnforcerSG

Here is a somewhat depressing thing to think about.

How could in theory an intenegent species that socially evolves evolve in such a way that they are a united species? Like start with groups of hunter gathers, and try to imagen somehow where they all are friendly and will be one society (not like us, with 200 or so diffrent nations).

I'm not going to give a whole scenario, but I think one powerful incentive for a species to remain united is the need to unite in order to overcome danger, be it another species or natural danger: as long as there is competition outside the group, competition is less likely to occur within the group.

just my 0.02$

 

It's unfathomable to think that our planet is the only one of billions that can support intelligent life. While I'm pretty sure we're not going to make First Contact during my lifetime, I do believe that it is at the very least possible that E.T.s have visited this mud ball.
How about Extradimentional Life? Has anyone seen The Mothman Prophecies? Perhaps alien life is among us but we are as of yet unable to detect it.

 

I have little doubt that there is intelligent life existing out in our universe somewhere, but I am highly suspicious of the claim that any extra terrestrials have actually visited our planet.

Certainly there is the possibility that a means of interplanetary transit which we cannot understand has been created, but based on the physics we know and understand right now, it seems far-fetched to think that any being might have crossed the billions of light years to visit this little blue pebble.

 

Life is out there someplace. Thats for sure.

 

On what Enforcer said,
One major point for union is transportation. The easier travel becomes for everyone the smaller the world gets. And travel will become easier as time goes on, right along with faster means. This might not mean that everyone under the Sun is going to be buddies, but as more people go out into our solar system because of cheaper access, the more cooperation there will be.

Lets suppose we on Earth do not come together as we develope means to get to other stars. A sapient species does not reach the stars as a whole unless its members cooperate. If not, at the very least, it leads to separatism.
Whats wrong with separatism? Build yourself a colony with 100,000 people and head out while giving the Earth the finger. The first time you run into something or someone you can't handle, whose gonna help you?

Nothing wrong with heading your own way, hell, we will probably see people in the next century or two who move out into the solar system and declare themselves independant the moment they become completely self sufficient. I think the point is to go ahead and go but don't turn your back on where you come from completely.

All of this becomes less extreme if there is no one else in the neighborhood.

 

One of the things that irks me is when people say "Gee, if there is intelligent life out there, duh.... how come I haven't seen them?"

Um, I wonder if they realize that humans have barely traveled past the moon....

 

There is life out there, but it isn't comming here.

 

Olivier. I agree with you somewhat that some outside force needs to be there, but what? Also what happenes when that force is removed/hunted down and destroyed? It really is the only thing anyone has think of though, but it still has problems.

VadersLaMent. Very good points. How I would wish we could open a news paper and hear about a Mars Rebellion or...

One thing though is that lets say some collony rebells, but that collony produces something that more or less comes from that one spot. If they declar independance, earth wont like that since they need the illudium Q-48 explosive space modgulator, or whatever, and that could get violent.

There have got to be ET's out there. What I find funny is that if they can communicate interstellery, there is no way in heck we can detect it, yet we look for their signals sometimes.

If it is just us, it would be an awful waste of space.

 

For near future (100-200 years) the only rebellion I can think off would be from a Moon or Mars colony (Or possibly an orbital one) that can feed, shelter and has energy for themselves who decide they don't want to pay taxes to the U.S. anymore.

I suppose there is the possibility for a scirmish but somehow I doubt anything particularly drastic would take place, if anything at all.

If physice as we know it remains true and FTL is not possible then there will never be interstellar communication. At best it would take the form of a star to star "Interstellar Internet" with information delays taking years. But if there was such a thing and we joined we would upload info into it just like we do with the internet here. We would have to adapt to whatever form this took, be it tight radio(We can do that now) or laser transmission (Just a little beyond us). I suggested this to someone once who replied, "I can't just picture an alien sitting at his computer who gets an email from Earth an deletes it as SPAM." LOL

Sending a transmission to what appears to be a possible life bearing world 5000 lightyears away is pointless since the reply would take at least 10,000 years (And assuming there is someone there and they survived!) 5000 years ago we were building pyrimids.

If there is an availbale FTL communication then that would be why we do not detect signals since we would need to be able to detect FTL events, which we cannot.

 

I should know better than to NOT check my posts for errors.
That quote shoud read, "...CAN just imagine an alien.." I hate it when that happens, really.

 

I know that there is absolutely no way we can be alone in the universe. You are talking about a whole lotta nothing that exists for there not to be intelligent life. There has to be more advanced civilizations out there then us humans.

There is absolutely no way, that we can be the only intelligent life form around. That being said, we have to be visited by the rest out there.

 

Arthur C. Clarke made a short story called The Sentinal, it was about an explorer on the Moon who discovers a pyrimid structure that turned out to be an alien device left there a few million years prior. Upon its discovery it sends out a signal which is implied to have been sent to its "masters".
Later, this story would become the synopsis for the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.

The idea of alien probes is as old as the UFO phenomenon. However there are real world speculations on the possibility of such sentinals in our solar system. Recently one of the prominant SETI scientists (For whom the lead in the movie CONTACT is modeled) made the comment that it is very likely such devices could be here.

It ususally narrows down to two possibilties:
1. The probe is a Watcher. It listens in on our radio casts, sends smaller probes to tap into our hardlines, and periodically beams information on us back to a home system or network node.
2. Maybe not a probe so much as a Leagacy. A wandering alien crew passing through a few million(billion?) years ago leaves a storage device containing their entire history. Also, this tells any beings who discover it that they themselves are not alone, and if the information inside can be deciphered there could be great tech advances within.

Of course, it could be a combination of the two.

Where to put it? If they passed by recently(or examine with a large telescope from the home system) say tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth would be seen as the life bearing system since Mars can't hold an atmosphere, and Venus is the "Hell" of the system.
If this is the case the Moon or an orbit along the Moon's orbit would be perfect. The Earth itself is very active and any device planted to keep tabs would have to deal with shifting plates, earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion etc. Putting a device in space would be ideal. The Moon especially because it could be buried a little beneath the surface for protection. The only major danger would be from asteroid impacts but this is easily solved by leaving more than one device behind.

If a race passed through here a billion years ago then such probes could be anywhere since Venus, Earth and Mars could all have had a chance to support life.

There is always the possibility of spreading multiple devices all over the solar system. Th Moons of Mars, Jupiter's or Saturn's rings, the asteroid belt, all of these would be good places.

I'd assume any truly advanced species would have the tech to hide any active probes via super-stealth abilities so our radar would not see it. We may have to literally stumble over one.

All the above assumes no FTL travel.