Life on other planets?

I wish I had the speech I gave back in college but I can't seem to find it. It dealt with this and got into the specifics of everything, since I have't dealt with it for years and years then alot of it has slipped my memory.
 
The discovery channel does that to you.*lol*
 
Well, when you consider how immense the universe is, and how mamy incredible number of stars and planets there are, and we are talking in the trillions to septillions or more, I mean come on! There must be life out there.

Or planet was lucky enough to evolve life on it, but the chance of this happening is very very very slim, but when you take into consideration the number of planets in the universe no matter how slim the chances are, because there are so many planets, there is a chance for many planets to evolve life and intelligent life. Although this life may be so far away that it will be an extremely long time before a human being sees one.

Just look at the Drake Equation! That is just looking at the numbers in the Milky Way galaxy. Personally, I have no doubt that there is life and intelligent life on other planets, but obviously we will never get to meet other forms of intelligent life in our lifetimes. If we are lucky, what we may find in our lifetimes is bactercia on Mars or on Europa.
 
Foxtrot Uniform said:
Well, when you consider how immense the universe is, and how mamy incredible number of stars and planets there are, and we are talking in the trillions to septillions or more, I mean come on! There must be life out there.

Remind me of a quote from the "Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy,"

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it is a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

But I am with you, there almost has to be someone else out there, I find it hard to believe that we are the only ones. The Fermi Paradox says "if other life exists, where are they?" but do we honestly have the technology to know? The closest star is light years away. As of right now, I think it is technically impossible to know if there are currently other civilizations, because their signals are still light years away, assuming there are civilizations that are sending signals, and that they evolved at about the same rate us us. Maybe in thousands/millions of years, if we are still around, we may receive old signals from distant planets, but I doubt it will happen in the near future (or that we will be around that long). I have all kinds of crackpot theories about why we can't be the only ones, but I will spare you all from them, hehe.
 
I think he (Fermi) answered his own question there.

The commonly held belief that the universe has many technologically advanced civilizations combined with our observations that suggest otherwise, is paradoxical, suggesting that either our understanding or our observations are flawed or incomplete.

I think that it's pretty obvious that our observations are incomplete. That's apparent in the finding of 100 new planets recently. Therefore, the possibility of extra-terrestrial life exists.
 
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Quote time!

"The best proof that there is intelligent life on other planets is that they haven't tried to contact us."

-Or something like that. (It's from an old Calvin and Hobbes.)
 
mad pierrot said:
"The best proof that there is intelligent life on other planets is that they haven't tried to contact us."
IMO it is unreasonable that there be exactly one intelligent, technological, lifeform in a universe the size of this one.

It is also not very likely for there to be a long established technological lifeform other than us in this galaxy which isn't readily noticable.

My conclusion is that the chance of intelligent, technological, life existing in any particular galaxy is probably << 1.

That's not the only possible conclusion of course but I think it makes the most sense.
 
mad pierrot said:
"The best proof that there is intelligent life on other planets is that they haven't tried to contact us."

-Or something like that. (It's from an old Calvin and Hobbes.)

If Calvin and Hobbes said it then I believe it..they know alot. :D Seriously.
 
to support life a planet needs the right stuff to spark life like water, an atmospere, ect.
we got lucky cause our solar system is very calm and quiet and earth is just warm enough to spark life. THere our other solar systems that astronomers have discovered but are very violent and cant support life. what i feel is if there is intelligent life that its so far away that each of us can contact one another :p
Jupiters moon uropa might have a liquid ocean beneath the surface because jupiters gravity and the other moons grav. is pulling both ways on the moon (kinda like kneading dough) and it heats up the moon. Scientists belive that its just warm enough to melt ice. Hopefully there might be a whole underwater life forms living there but i guess we wont know for a few decades :p
 
Knives said:
Jupiters moon uropa might have a liquid ocean beneath the surface because jupiters gravity and the other moons grav. is pulling both ways on the moon (kinda like kneading dough) and it heats up the moon. Scientists belive that its just warm enough to melt ice. Hopefully there might be a whole underwater life forms living there but i guess we wont know for a few decades :p

Actually, I think NASA has a plan to send a probe to Europa sometime soon which will deploy drills that will drill through Europa's ice layer that covers its subterrainean oceans, and then the drills will become little submarines that will search for life. Though the best the most intelligent form of life they might find be a very primitive fish. If we are lucky...

As for intelligent life elsewhere, I also think there is intelligent life in our galaxy because of its immense size too. We inhabit the very edge of our Milky Way Galaxy, and there is so much out there its unbelievable.
 
They will be sending a machine to scan Europa by 2008.
They wanna see if there is water under the ice.
The problem is if there is is sending humans in ships.
The thing is it is giving off a crap load of radiation which(and I quote from a show on the science channel I saw last night)"Will kill a human in the means of 10 min."

The other thing i'd like to add is yes many planets may not be able to support life like on earth, but what says there isn't a life form that adapted to the type of area that is on these planets. Just because it can't support our life doesn't mean it can't support some other life form. Don't let that slip your mind.
 
you saw that last night too lol :p

you say that too last night but ya the probe will only have 30 days to get its 2 missions done then it will become a victim of radiation
 
Not even that is what they are worried about.
The whole breaking into the ice and going to the water(if there is any) is a big concern as well because they stated they wanna find a way to search for new life without disturbing anything.

And yeah you can tell I watch to much of this stuff.*lol*
 
Cross platform I like your pic (Dr Zoidberg)

Now down to the question, yes i do believe that we can live on other planets (But not at this time).
I was watching a program one time which was yapping on about Mars and we as humans could live their in the future.
How we do (what they said was) to build reactors that triggers (on earth the green house effect) but on mars they say it would have the opposite effect and create life. :cool:
Very interesting you agree?

p.s Now we just got to get their, which would take aleast 10 years :D
 
Arekkusu said:
The other thing i'd like to add is yes many planets may not be able to support life like on earth, but what says there isn't a life form that adapted to the type of area that is on these planets. Just because it can't support our life doesn't mean it can't support some other life form. Don't let that slip your mind.
I fully agree there! There are bacteria who have adopted to living in hot springs (100?C and more). Life can adapt to extraordinary conditions very quick. Also, while all our life forms are carbon-based, it could also be possible that life forms exist which are based on other elements, like e.g. silicone (which is very close in its properties).
 
I know it is abit of an old thread, but I feel I must post. I do beleive there is life beyond our own solar system. How advanced it is or whether it is intelligent, we cannot say. There are over 500 000 million stars in our galaxy alone and our galaxy is one of millions within the universe. To say ours is the only one is a little conceited IMHO. We also think as life must exist in our norms for life, an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, when life could evolve in another type of environment. Just because our level of genetics and understanding of life is not that advanced it doesn't means that it cannot exist.
As for contact with life beyond our solar sytem. Think of the following; we have been beaming radio signals out into space for about 100 years. If there is life within 100 light years it must been at a stage when they could hear our radio signals. It would then depend on whether they would think about answering. would you answer a random radio signal? If they did answer they would then have to send it back to us. Even at the speed of light it would take years. Maybe we have been detected and answered, it just the fact we haven't recieved the answer yet.
 
there can be another option - we just didn`t understand that we were answered
 
My one concern is; at a 100 ly's distance, would the radio signal that is at the amplitude 1/10,000th of the amplitude at 1 ly's distance be meaningful enough to be 1) detected 2) decoded ?
What about the possiblity of a weak signal becoming indistinquishable with background noise ? Wouldn't it be like shouting into the Atlantic from Land's End and trying to pick it up with a high-end receiver at Tokyo Bay ?

Another concern is reflection. Short wave radio signals were chosen to reflect back down to earth's surface; not much escaping into outer space ?
 
I personally don't believen life on other planets. The whole idea is just to unbelievable for me. :eek:kashii:
 
Maybe real life is like Star Trek - the aliens are out there and waiting for us to be advanced enough to be worth talking to.
 

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