Does Life Exist

[Atrocities]

I would like to be up front about what I believe to be the truth of the universe and that is that life does not rampantly exist. That life as we know it, or imagine it more than likely does not exist on more than a handful of worlds. Given what we now know about how unique our planetary situation is, and how lucky we are to have had the events in our planets history that fostered life on our world, one can not but help deduce that the odds of it happening else where in the universe is astonishingly astronomical to a number and degree that is beyond our ability to comprehend. How the moon played a pivotal role in creating life on our world and how it still plays a role in keeping our planet stable enough to support life coupled with the rare combination of h2o and gasses that make up our atmosphere, our distance from the sun, our distance from the center of the galaxy and so on. Life is extremely rare and even more so in the universe at large.

I do not believe that Earth has been “visited” by aliens, nor do I believe that we, even after a hundred generations to the 10th power, will ever encounter alien life similar to anything that we have imagined. At best we will find only microscopic simple organism or odd plant life, but no humanoid or intelligent life.

If you look at the facts as they are presented today, the truth is but a simple thing to see, we are alone, and if we do not take care of what we have, we will loose it.

[Slick]

Not an argument, judgement or a statement, just something to read if interested.

http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious..._equation.html

Slick.

[JurijD]

Hmmm I don´t agree with you at all. What you are describing (the distance to the Sun, the influence of the Moon, H20 etc. etc.) are all conditions that had to be met for a planet to turn out the same as Earth... but life can exist in countless different contidions. If Earth had a SO2/CO2 atmosphere mix (with 0% oxygen) and a temperature of say 150°C, forms of sulfur bacteria (that we know of today) would be plentiful all over the globe... and with those kind of gasses in the atmosphere it would get so dense that even water could exist in liquid form at temperatures higher than 200°C...Life is very very tough...the usual range of 0 to 100°C + water + oxygen is only limiting to very complex organisms (that we know of!) what I am trying to say here is that you must not limit yourself to planets that are similar to Earth. One of the best "conditions" for life is the presence of water and a rich "soup" of anorganic/organic compounds in the planets atmosphere and crust. I think life will be very plentiful in the universe, we will prolly find it in many solar systems... another question all together is how much of that will be intelligent and not only a green blob of goo on a rock somewhere... that noone can answer because we just don´t know how frequent intelligence comes around (we only know of one example on earth) we´ll just have to wait and see.

[Atrocities]

The moon keeps our planet anchored and thus we suffor few and minor wobbles that would otherwise decimate our climate and reduce the liveable life supporting time of our world to nill.

There is no proof, none what so ever, that life exsits on any other planet within our solor system. That is eight other planets and their moons with nothing.

I did state that life such as simple or extremely complex forms of it, bacteria, single celled ameba, and such can and more than likely do exsit. Hell I'll conceed that it is likely there are planets with oceans simular to Earth a billion years ago that may be teaming with life, but nothing like us. No developed life formes in the sence that they have a society like ours, advanced, and on the verge of exploring space.

So life can and probably does exsit on other worlds, but no life like we humans.

[General Woundwort]

Atrocities, have you been reading Rare Earth, by chance?

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, a brief summary of the Rare Earth argument can be found on this page...
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw102.html

[JurijD]

making statistical arguments like ... there are 8 other planets with moons in our sol. system and none of them has life is very argumentative. First of all we might discover life on some of them and even if we don´t the fact that there is life on only one of them tells us nothing about the rest of teh galaxy... Here are my conclusions:

- I have read the Rare Earth hypothesis and it is very similar to Drake´s assumptions but for one small difference. The guys that did R.E. assumed that there is little life out there and Drake assumed that there is a lot and both tweaked their equations to produce the desired affect. It´s the age old optimist vs. pessimist tug-o-war. The real problem is that none of the factors in their equations can be estimated and not to mention all other factors they left out.

- the real questions is how many intelligent life forms are out there ATM. Well given the fact that we´ve been monitoring the EM band closely for the Last 70 years and found no TV, radio or other transmissions comming from outer space one can resonably conclude that there are no human-like aliens (close to our tech level) in a radious of 70 light years around Earth.

- for the remaining 90k light years of our galaxy who can say... we simply don´t have enough knowledge to make a resonble estimate. It´s just not possible.

- what we can say is that if we do find aliens (or they find us) they will either be very very far ahead of us (tech like) or very very behind us. (since it is very very unlikely two cultures will be at the same tech level at any given time) ... but since we just barely climbed out of the stone age ourselves (10.000 years is nothing cmpared to the eones passed) any aliens that we *might* find will most surely be hugely superior to us

ID4 all over again

[Atrocities]

Good point, if there is life out there, and it has the ability to travel the stars, will it be friendly or hostile toward other life? We are a resource devouring race therefore I believe that if there is life out there, and I do not believe there is life, then they to will be a race dedicated to self preservation above all else and if we meet, we are food.

[Suicide Junkie]

I just concluded that with a big enough radio antenna one could pick up the first transmissions from our system... and vice versa

Well, broadcasting does send a lot of waste signal into space.

If you want to be communicating over long distances, cheaper and with less interference for others doing the same thing, you start using fibreoptics, and narrow EM beams from satellites and cell towers directly to your customer, rather bLasting it out everywhere...

Propaganda and distress signals are about all you'd want for omnidirectional signals, which unfortunately get the 'ol 1/r^2 fading.

[JurijD]

- Don´t EM transmissions fade at 1/r^3 ?

- Yeah but even with todays directed EM (cell phone, satellite comm.) a lot of it is reflected from structures and the earth itself and is rediated back out to space... I´m sure that if we were say 34 light years away we could watch Armstrong land on the moon... and if we were 2 light years away listen to Aaron talking over his cell phone with his phone company complaining about yet another problem

[Cirvol]

if any aliens did use standard energy to communicate, (and they were more advanced than us), they'd be using narrow band laser-type communication devices...

due to the minimalized signal strength fall off at long distances...

if not something so conventional (ie, if their tech was higher, they'd be using either tacyons or even most likely - Einstein coupled particles (where changing spin on one of them instantly changes spin on its 'brother', regardless of distance)...

these really are the most likely forms of long distance alien communication, which is why we need to get it