Life is opportunistic. If it gets started, it will spread to occupy every environmental niche it can reach. That property itself is also one of the key criteria to define life. Another is that it locally acts to decrease entropy, where as nonliving matter tends to increase entropy. Intelligence is much harder to define. Our definitions are founded on the assumption that we are intelligent. But since it is a circular definition, what we ehhibit IS an example of intelligence. But as we are the sole unequivocably known example, it is difficult to define what the absolute criteria of intelliegence are. Definitions aside, it all depends on whether you believe life will take root where there is previously none. The Miller-Urey experiments of the 1950's, and others, showed the biochemical building blocks of our kind of life will form under very simple conditions. As long as there are similar conditions elsewhere in the known universe, life is likely to take hold. It's also very likely that there are many other chemical environments that also exhibit the properties of life in other conditions. However, there is also the position that a Divine spark is needed to cross the boundary between non-life and life. Ten the question comes down to whether our tiny chunk of wet rock around an unremarkable star in a run of the mill galaxy was sigled out as the only abode for life by this transcendant Creator. I find that an extremely arrogant assumption. So, in a very long winded way, I suggest that it's nearly impossible that only our Earth is teeming with life. We are not alone.
I will believe other intelligent life forms exist when someone proves it. Until then, I'm not concerned. There's far too much going on inside my planet's atmosphere.
i sure as bleep hope not!... i'd hate to think the inhumane human race is the best the universe has to offer... that said, considering the size of the universe, it's the height of arrogance/ignorance/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, to think we're the only sentient life around...
Are you suggesting that human beings are intelligent life? Maybe the aliens stay away because they don't want us to shoot atomic bombs at them? Perhaps we're being observed by space invaders from another planet because we actually exist in a tiny universe in a drop of water under a microscope? Maybe God created us, ran screaming, and left us all alone so that we'd simply die out before harming the rest of the Gods in heaven? However, intelligent life? I have to disagree. We're rather idiotic cavemen who beat each other with heavy clubs and chant battle cries with blood paint on our faces, just waiting to leap from the confines of our planet and wreak destruction upon any living being in the univers - until they're dead, dead, dead. Uh, or maybe the intelligent life on other planets is just like us: unable to span the gazillion miles from their planet to ours without help of a time-warp teleporter capable of deconstructing living flesh into molecules and sending it through black holes to be shot from one end of the universe to another in a quick enough time for the living being to not die of old age 0.00000001% of the way to the first nearest star. Or: We're really octopus men living at the bottom of the ocean and the ocean is really the sky, and at the center of the earth, and octopus God lounges with a pitchfork and a couple mermaids sleeping beside him in hot bikinis. I dunno. But, sometimes, I wonder.... are their bikinis red or blue?
I tend to think of life as being imprisoned here in this enormous universe so as to keep us from harming the real life that's out there. Sort of like, the earth is Alcatraz, or Siberia; the gods want to keep us so far away from them that we'll never be able to escape this prison of a universe in which we've been living in exile. Or, the mermaid theory.
Since I do believe in evolution, here is my thought. I think we are not alone. Considering the fact that there are a good number of planets of similar environments as ours, there has to be at least another one that come to life by accident, the same way we came to existences. However, the idea itself that the foreign "life" capable to evolve into a human race is extremely unlikely, let alone the possibility of an ideal infrastructure within their societies to obtain modern technology. So, I am saying that that we probably will never find out since such a place like that would be too far away and is too specific for our spectral devices to detect Well... I lied. I've come across a scientific article saying about how there is a way to move past the speed of light. I think they say something about utilizing the expansion, which is faster than the notorious limit, of whole space itself to our advantage. Maybe, there might be potential in that as they said for space travelling.
There are occasionally theories like that popping up, but to date, every single one has failed to stand against peer scrutiny. Usually the mathematics are flawed, or invalid assumptions are postulated. The speed of light remains a firm limit for physical or information transfer though normal space throughout the scientific community, and it has other ramifications in physics that reinforce it. FTL travel remains wishful thinking.
I seem to remember that some time ago extraterrestrial life in our own solar system was hypothesised. I have to admit that I don't remember the exact details, but I do remember that conditions were found on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which may have been conducive to bacterial life, if nothing else. Do I believe we're alone in the universe? I believe we're anything but alone in the universe. The conditions needed to start life in its most primitive form are relatively simple, and - in the classic argument of a man who doesn't have much of a clue, but does know his statistics - the law of averages dictates that if it happened here, it can happen elsewhere, and given the size of the universe and the likely number of Earth-like planets it's virtually certain to have happened hundreds - possibly thousands, maybe even millions - of times over. Sentient life has only arisen once from the millions of species that have grown up on this planet, and it took nearly 4 billion years to arrive on the scene after the first bacterial life (and 4.5 billion years after the formation of the planet). Taking this into account, the number of sentient species in the universe will be small, but I have no doubt that they're there. I'm also one of these eternal optimists who believes that if they have the technology to contact us over the gulf of space in a manner faster than a probe that sends the pop culture from what will be thousands of years ago by the time it's picked up, they'll be intelligent enough to have rid their society of war and such primitive ideas.
Paraphrase: You must be the change you desire to see in the world. I've always found that, as well as his life's work in the equivalent of that, to be one of the best quotes ever. He sewed his own clothes. On a little machine, a little man sewing: and while that was small, effecting changes in the world that were enormous. The mermaid theory is the exact same theory as the link, and I'd assume it comes from the same foundation of ideas - the universe is intended to be just as it is: and there is no escape except in death. A nihilistic approach. However, I do believe that there is something else going on here. Something deeper. We cannot eliminate all that does harm, because it is part of the system. But we can struggle for it in futility. One of my favorite ideas comes from Kafka: We must fail. If we struggle in futility, we'll fail. But there's no other struggle. Thus: We must fail.
Ah the arrogance, of course we're not alone. The universe is so big that it's on the borderline of human comprehension, if we can really comprehend it's size at all. There is pretty much bound to be other life out there, but 30 years of searching.... radio waves will probably take millions of years to reach our planets, so once a planet manages to create "intelligent" life, and if/when they invent radio equipment, we have to wait a few million years for our signals to reach them or ours to reach them. The probability of there being other life in the universe is high, the probability of us meeting them or even communicating with them is extremely low.
Agreed. Life, as Cogito said, came into being on earth rather simply. The necessary elements for life are existent all over the universe. Given the size of the universe, it's not far fetched for those elements to exist somewhere else. However, the space from earth to the nearest star would require - what - billions of years to ever traverse? And that's only the nearest star. Unless we find a means to enter a black hole and exit somewhere else in the universe, we're pretty much stuck here. But, life has proven inventive. I have little doubt that if we can survive long enough (read: without blowing ourselves up), we'll find a way to travel faster than we can presently imagine. If not us, then the cockroaches that survive our nuclear war. Little cockroach men in space suits. Now that's likely.
That's the same for me, but rather about God/s. I may not completely comprehend the physics involved in finding this out, but I find the fact that they believe it to be finite is in contradiction to the fact that we can't even see the edge of the universe. We can only see 14.5 billion light years away. Or rather, 14.5 billion years ago. Apparently, the edge of this "finite" universe is further away than this. Could it also be that our laws of physics are not absolute? Could there be something that we're missing? On topic though, I am uncertain. I believe that there must be microbial life out there. Some sort of cell that can reproduce itself in some way. But sentient life? Life more complex that single cells? I don't know. The Rare Earth Hypothesis really makes me wonder....
Ah, but that shows such die-hard faith in the fact that our physics are correct. One hundred years ago, people had yet to see an airplane. Who knows what kind of scientific/technological advancements the next one hundred years will bring. It would be a travesty if all physicists just ascribed The Einstein Bible and stopped trying to prove him wrong.
We shouldn't just believe FTL will happen one day just because planes or olestra(do they still make that?) happened; we shouldn't think aliens are real just because they could be.
@Hsnodgrass Scientists are trying to prove Einstein wrong every day. And there are observations that have been made that are not 100% consistent with General Relativity. However, given that Einstein offered outcomes to situations derived directly from his theories, and that each of these outcomes was shown to be correct, despite some of it working against common sense, it can be considered that his theories have some validity. Those scientists who work to prove him wrong are testing the boundaries of his theories, not the basis of them. In short, nothing stops anything moving FTL as long as it always did. You can't go faster than the speed of light (c) because you are only ever moving this rapidly. You move at certain speeds in the x, y and z axis, and through time (t). The faster you move in a certain direction, the slower you experience time. Therefore if you add the speed with which you are moving through x, y and z and subtract it from the speed of light, this gives you the amount of time that you are spending interacting through time relative to the stationary object that you are measuing your speed against.
That isn't how it works. Einstein didn't prove Sir Isaac Newton wrong. What he did was find a realm in which Newtonian mechanics did not apply (actually, his contemporaries identified this realm), and devised a theory that would emcompass both disparate sets of observations. Newtonian mechanics is an excellent approximation of Einsteinian mechanics in the conditions under which Newton was taking his observations. The conditions under which Einsteinian mechanics and quantum mechanics have been developed are exactly at proximaluminal velocities (near light velocities), extending down to zero velocity, and from supergalactic sizes down to subatomic sizes. Where there are discrepancies, theories are constantly being developed to broaden our understanding. But there are no observations that call into questioin the fundamental reliability of the limiting nature of the speed of light. In fact, new observations only reinforce the notion that we have it right. Believe me, the brightest minds on the planet HAVE been trying to find ways around the lightspeed limit, and not just to reach the stars. All they have managed to do to date is to further verify the absolute nature of that limit. I am a scientist. That is my training, that is how I think. Scientists don't know everything, but they know where some of the fences are that cannot be crossed. They can state that as long as certain conditions exist, you cannot get from A to B. The possibilities all lie within the realms where those conditions do NOT exist. And that is always preceded by observations that don't fit the predictions. At this time, all the hopes of bypassing the limit of lightspeed would require bypassing spacetime completely. So far, we have no way of making the necessry observations to accomplish that.
Your argument makes perfect sense. What I was getting at is more of a limitation of the human comprehension of the universe to this point. Wasn't it the Greeks who thought that four different humors filled your body and they had many researched theories about it? Then a while later, they proved that to be fundamentally wrong. I think certain aspects of Einstein might be found fundamentally wrong. Just my two cents. I am, however, no where close to a scientist.
Carbon = Messy Silica = Clean Except in the case of respiration where carbon dioxide is an easy to get rid of gas and silicon dioxide is a not so easy to expel solid.
Given that there are roughly 70 sextrillion stars in the universe, a 100 billion in our galaxy alone, and that with almost caveman planet finding technology (in comparison with the technology that's coming) planets in the hospitable zone have been found, there is no doubt in my mind there is life out there and intelligent life at that. Since scientific method came in to use, one discovery after the other has shown us how special we are not. In fact, I think alien life won't even be that different from our own. If you look at convergent evolution, there are a striking number of features species on earth have evolved completely separately. Our common ancestor with the octopus for example, had no eyes, yet here we millions of years later and humans and octopus nearly identical eyes and in the same quantity.
