life out there?
Discussion
jmorgan said:
Time is often forgotten, we are here now, they may have been there then but no more. Or still a puddle of ooze waiting to kick off. If we ever find evidence, it will be out of date as to their existing status.
Yep - even if there was a star as close as 300 light years away that harboured human like life and they are at the same level of technological advancement as we are now - we still wouldn't be able to detect them because from our perspective they would be still be sailing round in gallons, shooting with muskets and having their equivalent of the Jacobite rising.Moonhawk said:
jmorgan said:
Time is often forgotten, we are here now, they may have been there then but no more. Or still a puddle of ooze waiting to kick off. If we ever find evidence, it will be out of date as to their existing status.
Yep - even if there was a star as close as 300 light years away that harboured human like life and they were at the same level of technological advancement as we are now - we still wouldn't be able to detect them because from our perspective they would be still be sailing round in gallons, shooting with muskets and having their equivalent of the Jacobite rising.Prof Prolapse said:
It's simple probability. You don't even need the numbers.
1) Are the conditions required for life unique? - No.
2) Are the conditions required for the development of intelligent life unique? - Almost certainly no.
3) Is the universe mindboggling f
king massive? - Yes.
4) Does this mean intelligent life is likely to exist elsewhere? - Yes.
5) Does this mean we are likely to find other intelligent life? - No, see (3).
Indeed. If we do find evidence of intelligent life, because of (3) it could well be from a society that died out millions of years ago.1) Are the conditions required for life unique? - No.
2) Are the conditions required for the development of intelligent life unique? - Almost certainly no.
3) Is the universe mindboggling f
king massive? - Yes.4) Does this mean intelligent life is likely to exist elsewhere? - Yes.
5) Does this mean we are likely to find other intelligent life? - No, see (3).
For mybrainhurts
http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
Edit.
Oh el, just found the forums
http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
Edit.
Oh el, just found the forums
Edited by jmorgan on Tuesday 21st July 14:28
RobM77 said:
Of course, for us (SETI etc) to find a signal, the lifeform that sent it must evolve to the point where it can put one out (if we assume evolution occurs! Another assumption..). If you look at the history of the earth for example (our only example!), it's around 4.5 Billion years old and it's taken until the last few decades for us to get to the point where we can reliably listen and send signals beyond the planet. A related question is how long sufficiently intelligent life lasts for before it would go extinct, i.e. blow themselves up due to wars started by the sorts of superstitions intelligent life can be susceptible to, or ruin the planet they live on - think of what happened on Easter Island as an analogy, etc. I'm inclined to think that intelligent life might exist on earth for a blink of an eye - and I don't mean 'exist up until now', I mean exist at all - the planet may be barren in no time at all (i.e. 100k-200k years from now, which is nothing at all if you add it onto the time since life started).
But we ARE the only intelligent life here on Earth evolved after 4.5bn years. There was no earlier intelligent life otherwise we'd have seen the fossils? Takes a long time to get this clever 
plus millions if not billions of chance happenings along the way which may never get replicated anywhere else.TX.
Terminator X said:
RobM77 said:
Of course, for us (SETI etc) to find a signal, the lifeform that sent it must evolve to the point where it can put one out (if we assume evolution occurs! Another assumption..). If you look at the history of the earth for example (our only example!), it's around 4.5 Billion years old and it's taken until the last few decades for us to get to the point where we can reliably listen and send signals beyond the planet. A related question is how long sufficiently intelligent life lasts for before it would go extinct, i.e. blow themselves up due to wars started by the sorts of superstitions intelligent life can be susceptible to, or ruin the planet they live on - think of what happened on Easter Island as an analogy, etc. I'm inclined to think that intelligent life might exist on earth for a blink of an eye - and I don't mean 'exist up until now', I mean exist at all - the planet may be barren in no time at all (i.e. 100k-200k years from now, which is nothing at all if you add it onto the time since life started).
But we ARE the only intelligent life here on Earth evolved after 4.5bn years. There was no earlier intelligent life otherwise we'd have seen the fossils? Takes a long time to get this clever plus millions if not billions of chance happenings along the way which may never get replicated anywhere else.TX.
Exactly my point. The earth existed for absolutely ages with no life at all, and when it did arise and evolve to this point, it may become extinct shortly afterwards - we may be looking at a very quick flash in the pan over that entire 4.5 billion year history, which given how we're treating the planet and each other, may be typical of intelligent life. That said, see my comments about our earth not being ideally suited to life.As Eric and others have said though, it's very difficult to speculate when we have a sample of one. However, I personally think it would be more unusual for life to be unique than for life to be abundant, because I can't see anything particularly special about the Earth and the Universe is so big that you don't tend to get unique things in it. If we look at life on earth and how special or not special that may be, yes, the Earth is rocky and not gaseous (but we don't know the ratios of the two because the planets we are able to discover around other stars are pre-disposed to be quite large, because they were large enough for us to detect them), and yes, Earth exists within a band where water is liquid (if that's even important for other lifeforms), and yes, we have geothermal activity; but if all of that occurs here, then why not elsewhere? It's all just guess work, but I've yet to be convinced that we're in anything that seems like it might be unique here on planet earth. Can anyone even hint at why life on earth might be unique?
Here's another way of looking at it: if we limit ourseleves to look at the biology of life on earth as we know it, so at least we can start somewhere, there are a number of places in the solar system where life as we know it in some form could exist and to be honest I wouldn't be hugely surprised if it did.
This is all just opinion of course, I can't draw on any facts, but neither can anyone else - it remains just an interesting topic to discuss. If I had to place a bet on there being life elsewhere in the Universe, I'd say it was there.
RobM77 said:
Exactly my point. The earth existed for absolutely ages with no life at all,RobM77 said:
Exactly my point. The earth existed for absolutely ages with no life at all,The earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years - and has had life on it for over 3.5 of those.
For the first half a billion years or so - the earth was essentially molten or being bombarded - so life had little chance anyway.
In terms of a planet with a solid crust - earth was without life for probably less than 500 million years.
Edited by Moonhawk on Tuesday 21st July 16:01
Moonhawk said:
Einion Yrth said:
Exactly my point. The earth existed for absolutely ages with no life at all,The earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years - and has had life on it for over 3.5 of those.
For the first half a billion years or so - the earth was essentially molten or being bombarded - so life had little chance anyway.
In terms of a planet with a solid crust - earth was without life for probably less than 500 million years.
Actually Einion Yrth said:
Earliest life appeared between 3.5 and 3.7 billion years ago - about as soon as it could really. I'm not suggesting that a billion years is the blink of an eye, but life has been on the planet for longer than it wasn't.
Could you correct the misattribution, please? Ta.Einion Yrth said:
RobM77 said:
Exactly my point. The earth existed for absolutely ages with no life at all,. That wasn't the point I was making though. Let me try again: What I was saying is that if we look at the whole known history of the earth, the earth probably spent up to a billion years (0.8 - 1.0 billion) with no life at all (which is "ages" in my opinion!), and then the majority of the the following billions of years with life not intelligent enough to build a radio transmitter to communicate its presence. To put the earth in context with other possible planets, we would of course need to know what the future holds, but personally I'm quite pessimistic about humankind's chances, and even if we stretch on for another couple of hundred thousand years, intelligent life capable of communicating would still be a relatively tiny proportion of the earth's history. That was the point I was making - I hope that's clearer now?Gassing Station | Science! | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff