Do you believe there is life in space?

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 4:36 pm

Do you believe there is life in space?

I don't know anyone that don't believe in aliens, i do and i hope they can visit us sometime to tell they exist.

And of course if they do i hope they friendly or we will end up like they did in Independence Day .
(i can't spell it so i may wrote the name wrong) Anyway it a great movie Wink

if you ask me.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 4:46 pm

Many churches preach pre-tribulation rapture, which is completely unscriptural, but unfortunately the typical "christians" eat up whatever their pastor feeds them without question. This is all just a setup to shake their faith later. There will probably be "visitors from space" that will come and "rapture" up these followers of this scientology garbage. In turn, these "christians" will believe that those raptured were the true remnant and turn away. The Iron Mountain report also enlists extra terrestrials as necessities to maintain a globalist society without war.

At least this is a fairly common and accepted conspiracy among many theorists. Then again, some believe the higher-ups answer to "reptiles". Shocked

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 5:54 pm

The universe is just too big for there not to be life else where but at what stage of evolution they are at is another matter. Lets say they are more advanced ....well it makes no difference to us as they will never get to earth. Why you ask......well i will tell you....To travel the vast distances they will need to go to get here they would need to travel at the speed of light and im afraid that is just not possible.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:18 pm

HOLDONTOYOURWIG wrote:

The universe is just too big for there not to be life else where but at what stage of evolution they are at is another matter. Lets say they are more advanced ....well it makes no difference to us as they will never get to earth. Why you ask......well i will tell you....To travel the vast distances they will need to go to get here they would need to travel at the speed of light and im afraid that is just not possible.

I would indulge you, but I cant be bothered.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:26 pm

HOLDONTOYOURWIG wrote:

To travel the vast distances they will need to go to get here they would need to travel at the speed of light and im afraid that is just not possible.

Not quite true. Just because we aint figured it out doesn't mean it's not possible. Who's to say they dont fold space, or use alternate dimentions? We're probably quite primitive, and what 'visits' there may have been are probably famlies on a day trip to see the apes. If one did decide to land I think it would show us how inferior we are, and how wrong we are in what we perceive to be the way of things. And thats if they were freindly. Laughing

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:37 pm

If aliens exist, based on the life we know, chances are they will not be nearly as smart as us. They will , in all probability, be primitive single minded beings with only the instinct of survival and all that comes with it. They will vary in species and there planet will most likely resemble ours - without humans.

And yes, matter does travel at the speed of light. But even then they would sure have to wait a very long to get here - based on our mortal macroscopic timescales.

Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 7:01 pm

Quote:

If aliens exist, based on the life we know, chances are they will not be nearly as smart as us.

But that assumes we are the oldest, most intelegent race in the multiverse. This simply can't be the case. The fact that we have evolved to such a degree in a minute ammount of time (astonomicaly speaking), means there is a good probability of more advanced races in my book. I think most peoples inability to grasp the fact that other life exists is largly due to there inability to comprehend the vastness of space. Closed minded and their comfort zone extends no further than pluto. Throw in the possibilities of alternate dimensions, and their heads really start to fry.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 3:59 am

joenobody wrote:

Quote:

If aliens exist, based on the life we know, chances are they will not be nearly as smart as us.

But that assumes we are the oldest, most intelegent race in the multiverse. This simply can't be the case. The fact that we have evolved to such a degree in a minute ammount of time (astonomicaly speaking), means there is a good probability of more advanced races in my book. I think most peoples inability to grasp the fact that other life exists is largly due to there inability to comprehend the vastness of space. Closed minded and their comfort zone extends no further than pluto. Throw in the possibilities of alternate dimensions, and their heads really start to fry.

Dinosaurs were around for a good 250+ million years (i think) and they didnt evolve into uper duper intelligent beings. If you watched that torrent reccomendation I posted in the lounge, youd see why we are so smart Wink

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Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:42 am

Quote:

Dinosaurs were around for a good 250+ million years (i think) and they didnt evolve into uper duper intelligent beings. If you watched that torrent reccomendation I posted in the lounge, youd see why we are so smart

Are you as smart as say Steven Hawkin? And say if he was a race? wouldnt he find you insignificant and a lesser being, whats to say there is not a more intelegant race out there? and visiting, if they had the technoligy to travel here from where-ever, you could also assume that they had the technolgy to not be detected by us at any point.
Whos to say were not in a jam jar, seeing only what were alowed to see?
But to know that means you would be the holder of the Jam-jar, Being John Malkovich comes to mind.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 7:13 am

Dinosaurs were stupid, with a small brain capacity. Or thats what we think. Fact is we just dont know. There is also evidence that the other homonid race that our species eliminated was of superior intelect to us. I dont think we are so much evolved than manufactured. If we come from apes, where is the in between, the missing link. I dont think there is one. We are aliens, and this is not our planet. And I still dont get how geographical location is the answer for the different races here on earth. A white dude in africa will always be white, I find it difficult to beleive that after a few millenia, we'd be black. Or if we lived in the Asian sub-continent we'd eventually gain black hair and a squint, whatever.
If we had evolved from apes, we would have to have evovled from different speices of ape, even more unlikely.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 7:26 am

The chances of us meeting aliens at the same level of evolutionary development as ourselves might be slim or might be good,depending on the variety of alien life out there.
Even a difference of 1 million years(not much in universal terms)would make us so different we or they probably wouldnt even know what we/they were looking at.Look at the difference between neanderthals and homo sapiens,and whats that only 40000-50000 years(correct me if im wrong).
Having said that if anyone finds aliens it will be Team ISOhunt Very Happy

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 7:36 am

I read somewhere that the proof that we are not of this planet is..All other animals on earth are adapted to a 24 hour day cycle. Where as humans actually have a 25 hour day cycle, and have to force ourselves into a 24 hour day. So its a close match, wonder if that means on our planet we get an extra hour of sleep, or an extra hour of work. Laughing

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 8:10 am

We didn't evolve from apes, but rather along side the great apes, from a common ancestor. That's the theory anyway, but go ahead & believe whatever's convenient for you. That we, in the biological sense, are closer related to some current species of great apes than some of the great apes are with eachother, will remain true regardless of what individual people prefer to tell themselves.
It's very much like gravity or photons. That you choose to disbelieve the existence of either won't have any impact of the existence of both. Light won't cease to exist & everything won't fly off in random directions.

ET may or may not exist. Presently it appears to be possible for natural forces to create life. Unfortunately the process of falsification is difficult, so this hypothesis is just that; a hypothesis.

If it is correct, and if there aren't any mechanisms preventing life from occuring naturally, it is a given that life exists elsewhere in the universe. It is a given, because even though the requirements for the process are very specific, the universe is f*cking huge. So staggeringly vast, in fact, that anything possible through natural forces within it, is bound to be present.

Life, though, is not the same as intelligence. We know from this planet that even when circumstances support intelligent life, intelligent life won't automatically occur. Evolution isn't a directed process, and operates towards no goal. Evolution is simply the process of accumulating sustainable variations within organisms, so the individual evolution of every part of every organism is both random & mutually supportive or exclusive, and even the slightest dissimilarity from evolution on this planet may very well result in a planet devoid of complex (and intelligent) organisms. Intelligence is the product of chance & the presence of ecosystems making it advantageous. Remember that while a human-level sentience might always be an advantage, every step leading to that level of intelligence needs to be advantageous as well, for such a level of intelligence to be reached.

It's probably possible that we're within communication range of another technologically advanced species. That said, it probably isn't very likely at all. It would require an Earth-like planet where life did occur and the process of evolution took a path nearly identical to the one it's taken on Earth (which random disasters, local & celestial, play a role in as well). Given the range of possible neighbouring planets, an almost exact copy of Earth, history & all, would seem incredibly unlikely - but winning the national lottery isn't very likely either, yet it happens for some people. Impossibly bad odds doesn't dictate the actual outcome, even when it's on the level of rolling two 7s in a row on two six-sided dice.

The possibility of quick interstellar travel isn't the same as actual interstellar travel. It's not something I know a lot about, but assuming it is possible, the amount of energy required probably makes it impossible in practice. Even with the know-how to pull it off, it seems unlikely it'll be worth it before 4,5-5 billion years from now, when our local star incinerates the solar system.

I seriously doubt we'll ever know if there's other sentient life in the universe. Even if we don't consider the probabilities of another sentient species being close enough to us to make contact, there's still the question of whether it is probable that a sentience based on competition (which I think is the only logical possibility for sentience to be a worthwhile trait to evolve) won't self-destruct when it has the technology to do so. Just consider how close we've been (and still are) to that ever since we became capable of doing it.

I'm agnostic about sentient ETs. I hope there's lots of sentient life in the universe, and I hope some of it is close enough to eachother to meet, and lucky enough not to destroy themselves or eachother. It is just that though; hope.
I'm agnostic about ET in general, but I think chances are good that it does exist. If Europa doesn't work out though, I don't think chances are very good that we'll find ET.

Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 8:16 am

Quote:

I'm agnostic about ET in general, but I think chances are good that it does exist. If Europa doesn't work out though, I don't think chances are very good that we'll find ET.

woo! You just contradicted yourself! You said yourself we cant place odds on life creating because we dont understand the causibility Razz

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Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 8:36 am

iahag wrote:

woo! You just contradicted yourself! You said yourself we cant place odds on life creating because we dont understand the causibility Razz

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*hands Ihag a cheap pink plastic prize*

Congratulations Laughing

You've just caught me saying that I know we don't have adequate knowledge to make any probability predictions, but that I personally think something I have no empirical basis for thinking.

I'll attempt to make it more obvious that there's a difference between the sum of human knowledge & my personal speculations. Hypotheses are a dangerous thing to base opinions on, because although they seem viable, they only do so because we know next to nothing about whatever it is they attempt to explain. My personal opinion is extrapolated from a hypothesis that we only have a very limited ability to falsify at the moment - as I believe I started by mentioning.

In other words; my opinion is nothing more than my opinion. I have next to no basis for it, which is why I tried to make it clear that I'm agnostic about it. I don't know any better.