Do you beleive in extraterrestrial life ?

[Clark Kent]

No proof of aliens: There has to be aliens.

No proof of God: There is no God.

What the fuck.

What I choose to go with:

Find proof of God: God

Find proof of Aliens: Aliens

Till then they are both just faith based non scientific assumptions or more accuratly "invisible people in the sky."

Well the difference here is that if something god-like existed, it would be unnatural to biology studies that are the basis for many things in the human society. F.ex. medicine etc. If there's life somewhere outside this planet, it would not be unnatural. Actually it's very unlikely that earth is the only place in existence with life and that kind of thought derives from religion like the bible f.ex. which still states that the earth is flat.

But yes you're right. There are no 100% facts of god nor alien life forms.

I find it silly that people always assume that if aliens exists they are going to destroy the earth and be some kind of humanoids etc. That's like the most un-original theory you could come up with.

If we find bacteria-like organisms outside the earth = sign of extraterrestrial life. I think that should be easily possible if not already proven to be true but under further investigation.

I just think this will be another question human beings can't answer. We're debating if plants have thoughts and emotions and we can't even answer that.

 

[Notuern]

True that it's technically possible to imagine some other type of base of life. However, this lowers the odds even more. Simply because carbon based life is based all around the simplest and most abundant elements in the world, hydrogen, azote, carbon, oxygen, which have the simplest liaisons possible, and in the columns, are the most stable and lightest. I think it's fair to consider there is most chance to meet another carbon based lifeform, but hey, everything is possible when you have no idea what you are looking for. It's true it's not provable either though, just it's a fair asumption imo.

Yeah, its most probable to meet with carbon based life.
My point is that non-carbon based life could be sustained under conditions where carbon based life might not, I'm not saying its necessarily any advanced lifeforms at all.. but to ruling out planets as inhabitable just because our life cant be sustained is a bit flawed imo(Even if its most likely.).

I also think if there are any other, there shouldn't be so many "intelligent" lifeforms out there, because I'm one of those who think that reaching this point is a climax and there is not much more to expect from it, and therefore, the odds of being 2 at the same time in the same portion of the universe are small. I'd love to be proven wrong though

Yeah, and the odds for even us to have reached this far is actually staggering.
One gamma ray burst, one asteroid hit or even more "local" dangers such as super volcanoes is enough to cause mass extinction.
Considering how lucky we are to have the perfect conditions for evolving and the fact that we haven't been torn to shreds before evolving this far, it seriously makes me doubt that there is likely that there is any life as intelligent as us.. but then again, i could be wrong, but i doubt it.

 

[Clark Kent]

Then again what we consider to be intelligence may not be the measure for these extraterrestrial life forms if they exist. F.ex. human beings invented time and money as measures which may not be measures used by others. Carbon based life is how it works on this planet but is it the only possible way just because it's the way life exists on this planet? I think it's more about us being narrow minded and only seeing things through the human perspective. The thing I said about plants having feelings and thoughts was an interesting study. Basically there's this type of network in the roots of some trees that is connected to each other that f.ex. know when other trees are being cut down and when this happens the other trees around it will start to spread a mild acidic scent to try and secure themselves.

What we know about outer space seems to be a) very limited or b) very classified and both of these outcomes support the fact that extraterrestrial life could easily exists.

 

[colonel kurtz]

i think an intelligent being could be described as one that is self-aware, and capable of decision making

of course i just pulled those parameters out of my ass, and they could very likely be much better definied, or even shown to be total bullshit

 

[Metal Overload]

I don't know about any god or aliens, so i just cannot claim both exist or not exist.

 

[Uros]

 

[DanLights]

No proof of aliens: There has to be aliens.

No proof of God: There is no God.

What the fuck.

What I choose to go with:

Find proof of God: God

Find proof of Aliens: Aliens

Till then they are both just faith based non scientific assumptions or more accuratly "invisible people in the sky."

I see your point, but difference is statistics highly favour one and highly go against the other, and that's a science too. That's why it's more "reasonable" to incline towards a yes in the aliens part.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

The universe is far too big for there not to be more life out there.

This is EXACTLY like a ID theory person saying the fallowing:

"Life is way to complex to not have been designed."

The universe is big so there has to be more life out there? No there doesn't, it doesn't mean there isn't, but it also doesn't mean there has to be either.


This is why no I do not currently believe there is other intelligent life out there.

 

[Trevoire520]

No it's not.

I'm talking about statistical probability. It is incredibly unlikely that in the billions and billions of planets out there that life only exists on ours.

 

[LeSedna]

This is EXACTLY like a ID theory person saying the fallowing:

"Life is way to complex to not have been designed."

The universe is big so there has to be more life out there? No there doesn't, it doesn't mean there isn't, but it also doesn't mean there has to be either.


This is why no I do not currently believe there is other intelligent life out there.

I'm totally with you.

A friend told me about a very, very nice analogy. He told me he had a math teacher that one day, to explain something about statistics, asked his students :

"Ok, so let's say, I am going to throw my pen to the whiteboard. I wanna guess which atom on that board is gonna be the very first one to have contact with my pen"

He marks a dot on the whiteboard, and says "I just chose one, I cannot technically choose an atom but let's imagine the one I chose is the one in the exact center of that dot".

Then he goes at the back of the class, and say "Now what are the chances that from such a distance I can throw the pen and hit exactly my atom first before the others, and not another one ? They are pretty low, aren't they ?"

After that, he throws the pen, which missed the target, and prints another dot half a meter away from the target.

"Damn I missed it. It was nearly impossible anyway, don't we agree ?"

But the beauty of the demo is this :

"The thing is, even though the chances were next to zero, so little that we cannot even imagine how many zeros there are after the coma... it happened for one atom, the one I hit with my pen. Improbable is not impossible".

-

I like that demo because it basically means "We are life, and however you wanna see it, very common or unique, it happened, and it doesn't mean in the slightest that because it happened once, it cannot happen again, or it happened many times, it just means it happened once, it can help building a theory about the likelihood of it happening again around us, but it doesn't prove anything, because the fact it happened is an axiom for we are here thanks to it"

Also it shows one basic psychologic thing that is pretty awesome. A human being can only comprehend and imagine something that is from the same scale as the one he uses, lives with, and interact with. So for a human being, it is possible to imagine and be pretty acurate into declaring "there is 1/4 of a chance this can work" with a little imagination. But when we come to extremes, we like to say "there is 99,99% of chance for it to happen" or "it happens once out of 10 times" etc. While in the first case, maybe the chances are 98.87, in which case, he was wrong and guessed a number 123 times too low.

That's why it's pretty tricky even today to talk about statistics for extraterrestrial life and use it as a strong argument in either camp

 

[Jind]

No it's not.

I'm talking about statistical probability. It is incredibly unlikely that in the billions and billions of planets out there that life only exists on ours.

See, someone else that thinks logically Statistically speaking of course.

 

[DanLights]

This is EXACTLY like a ID theory person saying the fallowing:

"Life is way to complex to not have been designed."

The universe is big so there has to be more life out there? No there doesn't, it doesn't mean there isn't, but it also doesn't mean there has to be either.


This is why no I do not currently believe there is other intelligent life out there.

No it's not, because that person would be wrong, we couldn't have been "intelligently designed" because we are ridiculously flawed, the chances of us being designed by a perfect god intentionally are as slim as the chances of there not being extraterrestrial life. See my point?

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

No it's not.

I'm talking about statistical probability. It is incredibly unlikely that in the billions and billions of planets out there that life only exists on ours.

How is it not? They see it the same way, we are to complex in composition to be explained any other way than being "designed".

The universe is to big for us to be the only life...

Same shit, things are complicated and large numbers blah blah blah therefore must be how it is.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

No it's not, because that person would be wrong, we couldn't have been "intelligently designed" because we are ridiculously flawed, the chances of us being designed by a perfect god intentionally are as slim as the chances of there not being extraterrestrial life. See my point?

Sigh, please don't think I buy into the ID theory...

But if even one of our chromosomes is fucked (or there is an extra, whatever you want to do up), we become retarded literally. We need DNA to come together correctly or shit gets fucked up.

I would say we are pretty complicated. It doesn't really matter though, being perfect or flawed is subjective in most cases anyway since we are the ones measuring.

But anyway, my opinion stands. If they ever come up with proof, consider my mind changed.

 

[LeSedna]

I really don't see how "we are complex" leads to "we have been designed".

 

[Mutant]

Look at the extremely wide range of conditions in which life exists on Earth.

From so called "ice worms" drilling tunnels inside icebergs in Arctic, through frogs that can survive being frozen in the winter, and snakes and insects living on hot sands of Sahara, to various micro-organisms living in geysers in toxic sulfuric water close to boiling point or even in much higher temperature and great pressure deep in the ocean close to hydrothermal vents at the ridge of tectonic plates.

Saying that there is no place in the entire Universe that would be similar to all these places on Earth is like saying that it is impossible for more than one player to win at the Meganumbers national lottery on the same drawing.

 

[DanLights]

Sigh, please don't think I buy into the ID theory...

But if even one of our chromosomes is fucked (or there is an extra, whatever you want to do up), we become retarded literally. We need DNA to come together correctly or shit gets fucked up.

I would say we are pretty complicated. It doesn't really matter though, being perfect or flawed is subjective in most cases anyway since we are the ones measuring.

But anyway, my opinion stands. If they ever come up with proof, consider my mind changed.

For a person who doesn't believe in intelligent design, that's a pretty lame argument for it. I think it's pointless to discuss that in this thread, but seriously, lame, inconsistent argument in favor of ID (and you're not even in favor it). Ask Neil De'Grasse Tyson his opinion on intelligent design (he calls it stupid design) and then his opinion on the chances of there being life in other planets, just do a YouTube search.

And no, being flawed is not as subjective as you make it out to be, if a part of your body is not working properly for example, you are flawed.

 

[LeSedna]

Look at the extremely wide range of conditions in which life exists on Earth.

From so called "ice worms" drilling tunnels inside icebergs in Arctic, through frogs that can survive being frozen in the winter, and snakes and insects living on hot sands of Sahara, to various micro-organisms living in geysers in toxic sulfuric water close to boiling point or even in much higher temperature and great pressure deep in the ocean close to hydrothermal vents at the ridge of tectonic plates.

Saying that there is no place in the entire Universe that would be similar to all these places on Earth is like saying that it is impossible for more than one player to win at the Meganumbers national lottery on the same drawing.

Except to me this argument is not valid since that's the logical sequel to the beginning of life, it evolves following different paths depending on the problems it encounters. It's amazing, but has nothing to do with the existence of life itself.

The problem of "life" is what is needed for its creation, and what are the odds for this to happen. So far, the creation of life is a matter of carbon based molecules luckily forming the beginning of what could be a very basic unicellular entity, and then the show starts. Or at least that's how I understand it.

Once it happens somewhere else, there is no doubt it becomes as rich as on earth, but that is not a factor. A implies B doesn't mean B implies A

 

[Mutant]

The problem of "life" is what is needed for its creation, and what are the odds for this to happen.

What is needed are few basic building blocks that exist almost everywhere, a fluid environment these elements can mix in and some energy source that would keep the whole mix in motion, then after a billion years of shaking that big blender a single organism that can self replicate is enough to populate a whole planet if conditions are not too extreme.

And the odds ? Irrelevant if they are not 0%.

Heh we only "know" planets in our system so we can say that the odds for an intelligent enough to be able to create a civilization life are 1 in every 8 planets = 12,5% and 1 in every 1 star system = 100%

 

[Skinny Viking]

you guys could fuck up a wet dream, you know that?