Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

...and what do you base this on? Your own pessimistic view?

Nah, I'm hoping that one of the Mars rovers will accidently stumble upon some microfossils to spite you. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

All in good humour of course.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

RandallW:

Are these real examples of lifeforms from Earth's past? Or possible forms that life could have taken?

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

They are real. basically someone found a set of fossils from long ago (whenever simple life was forming, but a bit above amoeba and such) they looked at this set of fossils and it was "Ok, I recognize these ones with the backbone and legs, but what are all these fossils with no bones or odd numbers of legs?". (ME) Then again how do you have a fossil with no bones?. I seem to recall the circumstance was there were all the different forms of life coexisting in a lake when a cliff fell on top of them.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I would love to be proved wrong CK, but I won't be. I have spent a life dreaming about other planets and such and over the course of it, I have gained a new appreciation for our world and how rare and unique it really is. Doing essays on it, and researching the probability of life on other worlds and how life began here has lead me to my "own pessimistic view" of things. I am not alone, and more and more people are coming to understand just how rare our little blue planet is.

I am not trying to be negative CK, I am simply stating the fact that there is no life like us out there. If life exsists it will be ooze and geew.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I may be getting OT, but I started this thread so I get to bring up new stuff.
Does anyone know of the dicovery where fossils from a billion years were found. Now we are one "form" in so far as we have a Skeletal system AND a backbone AND symetry (2 arms, 2 legs, 1 on each side). I am no expert so I will say in my example there are 5 forms of animal still living, we mammals and 4 others (such as worms, with no backbone or skeleton etc). Anyway in the example I mentioned there were 20 "forms" of animal found. Thats the 5 current ones, and 15 "types" that are extinct. basically 1 billion years ago there were 20 possible templates for the creatures that would occupy the earth but 15 got covered with a landslide and only the other 5 survived (I am simplifying this alot, and my numbers might be wrong, but I am trying to point out something). So what if instead of the 5 that survived, 5 others survived. The earth might be populated by animals with no backbone and 3 legs and a head with an extendable mouth.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

The most alien aliens that spring to mind for me are the kif in C. J. Cherryh's Chanur stories. The main thing I remember about them is that the rare times they communicated, the "translation" was a two-dimensional matrix of words, rather than "normal" sentences.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

I basically agree with you Atrocities. I think that IF life is found on other planets:

1. I will be long gone.
2. It will at the most be plant life, or something similar, not sentient life.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Holy bitterness Batman! You might want to rethink that whole uniqueness aspect though. Just look at our own solar system. Just in this one tiny corner of the universe there were three potential candidates. Earth seems to have won out (yeah us!), but Mars seems to have had a good start (plenty of water, just needed a little more gravity/sunlight), and even the hellhole that is Venus seems to have had some promise (before its greenhouse effect went all coo-koo).

Think about that. Three possible candidates all around one little star that is distressingly mundane. Chances were pretty good for life to develop in this system. The odds may not be so bleak for others.

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

Don't forget about Europa! There could be a nice big sea under that icy exterior. And you know what they say about water...

Re: Alien, I mean really Alien.
 

Atrocities:

While I believe you are correct in that we may never meet another sentient species, I find that I cannot agree that it does not exist.

It is generally accepted that there are approximately 200 Billion stars in the Milky way galaxy. Furthermore, most scientists agree there are approximately 100 Billion galaxies (some suggest upwards of 125 billion). Seeing as our milky way is of average size, a pessimistic view holds that there are 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif . While the chance of life springing up in any one star system is remote, there are a huge, huge number of stars.

If you wish to believe that no life exists elsewhere, well, not much I can do to change that. You're entitled to your opinions, as am I http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif