Just wondering what are people opinions/thoughts about there being life on other planets or aliens? In all the movies they seem to be bad but if they do exsist would they be bad or just another race like humans?
Think it could be interesting to see everyones opinions on it.
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Considering our knowledge of space and other planets etc, the possibilities are endless. How things would evolve in another environment capable supporting life, who knows ... It'd be a good bet that things would evolve differently from earth anyway.
I'm with Stephen Hawking on this one. Sending messages saying "Here's where we are, here's what we look like, we aren't very advanced technologically or defensively, but here's some Chuck Berry..." probably isn't the cleverest message we could shout out to potential colonialists...
Anyway, I'd settle for finding intelligent life on THIS planet first.
On the way into the stadium, an elderly San Marino Steward waved us in and said "Tonight, may the best team win"
And they nearly did.
It's impossible to conceive (personally) how life would appear on another planet.
Most people are stuck with the Hollywood image of aliens but I think there's no way to accurately guess at how other life forms would be.
Even the slightest difference in their planet's atmosphere would change the conditions for life. Add in formation of their planet factors and possible disturbances to their planet (asteroids, etc.) and the planet's environment and atmosphere would be totally different to Earth's. So obviously life wouldn't form in the same way.
On a side, if I may go back to the disturbances factor, what would life be like if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out? Would animals have evolved differently? Would the world's overrace be like humans or something completely different?
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If we ever find aliens I think that they'll look just like humans but with a bit of morla stuck on their nose. That's how it works in Star Trek anyway.
Dude, just ask Green Tribe. We're all trying to figure out which one she's from...Originally Posted by Kildare Lad
Did you ever notice that in every painting of Adam & Eve, they have belly buttons. Think about that...take as long as you want.
It's a valid point and also made very well by Max Von Sydow playing Ming the Merciless in the ..um ...timeless 1980 remake of Flash Gordon.
"Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void - without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe - anything at all - you would have hidden from it in terror".
Considering the wide range of temperatures and conditions in which life will "take" or find a way to get on I'd say it's highly improbable that there aren't many, many other planets out there where suffiecient ingredients have coalesced to get the primordial stew started.
I would prefer it was us found another life supportive planet rather than anyone from it finding us. A highly evolved, technologically advanced race who arrived in our sky might think to themselves "nice planet, pity about the shoe-wearing infestation ...oh well let's give it a tick bath".
" I wish to God that someone would be able to block out the voices in my head for five minutes, the voices that scream, over and over again: "Why do they come to me to die?"
The Universe is a big place. We can only see a fraction of it.
If you believe in a supreme being creating life on Earth then you would not believe in aliens. If you believe in evolution the odds are the same conditions could create life on a different planet.
Good point from Ming but a better point would be (I think Carl Sagan was one who has made it) that a civilization that had those sort of warlike tendencies would evolve the technology to wipe themselves out far sooner than evolving the technology to come here and sort us out. In other words that level of technological advance has a built-in filter that would weed out the real-life Klingons and their ilk.
To my mind, there's no doubt that there are a multitude of inhabited planets among the mind-numbing number of stars in our galaxy, and among the even more mind-numbing number of galaxies in the universe, but whether any will ever overcome the vast voids between them remains to be seen. I don't believe it has happened to us yet, despite what the nutjobs of the world would have us believe.
There's a lot of things that can reasonably be speculated about potential aliens too. There's good chemical reasons for thinking they would be likely to be carbon-based like ourselves (from the peculiar chemical affinities of the carbon atom), that they would have prehensile limbs with opposable digits, symmetrical body plans, large brains, and so on...
The Drake equation is a mathematical attempt to address the question of how many alien civilisations there are 'on our doorstep', though obviously it's little more than a best guess.
Sagan and Drake were advocates of the principle of mediocrity which argues that there is nothing all that special about our circumstances, and that a consequence of this is that the universe is teeming with life, while the opposing view is the rare Earth hypothesis which argues that our circumstances are actually very rare indeed.
And if it ever does happen, I'd bet the first contact will take place pretty much in the way it does in the book / film of that name. That chap of the Sagans was a bloody visionary I tell ya!
Last edited by stann; 10/12/2007 at 12:23 AM. Reason: more linkies
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Well we came from outer space so there is a very very good chance that there are other life forms.
It would depend on the atmosphere on the planets but id say looking at the weird crap on earth (like those fish at the bottom of the sea with lights on there heads and all the teeth) that we probibly have weirder stuff here.
No we didn't. Don't go down that Panspermia road, there only lies derision and ridicule, and the inevitable fall into the clutches of the Scientologists.
There's no need for it anyway, it's not like we can't explain things simply enough without recourse to extra-terrestrial origins.
By the by there would be a lot more factors than the planet's atmosphere involved. The local gravity would decide the general size and shape of the organisms for example, the type of light chucked out by the parent star would determine the manner in which they saw the world, and so on. A fascinating subject, really.
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I always thought the Rare Earth hypothesis had far too many holes in it to be take seriously. The Fermi paradox at the start of that wikipedia article ""If extraterrestrial aliens are common, why aren't they obvious?" isn't answered by "The conclusion...that complex life is not common, it is rare", it's answered by "Where are we?"
I think I also saw somewhere (could have been a book called "Life out There" by Michael White which I read many years ago) the argument that Earth has needed millions of attempts to generate intelligent life (insert standard joke about Americans here), so the odds on life on another earth-like planet are small. This of course ignores the point that earth managed to have millions of attempts at generating intelligent life, so the odds of a million-to-one shot happening after a million chances greatly approach 1, which means the whole argument was based on some dcfcsteve branch of logical maths.
Or dinosaurs, or cavemen, or Newgrange or many other things. But without wanting to open up the is there/isn't there a God argument again, I don't think a belief in aliens is a barrier to a belief in a God. It just means we aren't as special as we thought we were.
Once again, Science will have to bow to the overwhelming Religious evidence to support this.
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This is statistics abuse. You can't use the earth itself as evidence for or against a rare earth hypothesis since we were always going to live in the planet we live in. To gather evidence you need a measure of how similar other planets are to earth.
That reminds me of the funniest quote I read in ages:
"We know that at least one star system (our own) within the Milky Way Galaxy has developed intelligent life . . . that suggests statistics of at least one civilisation per galaxy . . . So, there should be billions of star systems with intelligent civilisations." It's quoted here, from this book.
If you don't find it funny, don't worry, you're normal.
If you don't get it, ask yourself what lets them take the galaxy as their unit of space instead of, say, solar system, or universe.
You can't spell failure without FAI
I'm comparing life forms, not planets?
If we define intelligent life as being of our own intellectual capabilities (or above), we can't very well complain that intellectual life forms haven't been in touch with us when we haven't been in touch with them.
Fine, I'll bite.I'm comparing life forms, not planets?
If we define intelligent life as being of our own intellectual capabilities (or above), we can't very well complain that intellectual life forms haven't been in touch with us when we haven't been in touch with them.
Assume there are absolutely loads of civilisations in the galaxy. Further assume that the state of development of these civilisations varies a lot. Statistically, there should be someone else miles ahead of us, far enough ahead to be here already.
Now, assume that there is sweet f-all other life in the galaxy. The chances of anyone else being here are very small.
Earth doesn't come into it.
You can't spell failure without FAI
they might have a prime directive about not interferring with pre-warp cabable worlds.
jaysis wasn't star trek great though?
" I wish to God that someone would be able to block out the voices in my head for five minutes, the voices that scream, over and over again: "Why do they come to me to die?"
Hmmm...touche. Never actually thought of it that way...Suppose I'm happy to believe that interstellar distances are such that it's quite possible it's practically impossible (as in, impossible in a practical sense) to cover them, which would also explain where they are.
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