Alien Life May Be Rare Across the Universe

reply to post by ImpactoR

And what is the point that you psot it, to say that life may not be out there? Well DUH? We discovered America here? Of course, this is the other possibility, one should embrace along with the possibility of life existing..

No but it may not at all be so common.

Originally posted by Wildmanimal
reply to post by Druscilla

 

Interesting principle.
I guess that works for God or Satan as well for that matter?
So What?

Brave Woman?

Essentially, it's Schrodinger.
The possibility of aliens exists in a superstate of any probability and/or any other X number of other probabilities until observed.

Until such time as observation occurs, speculation is masturbation, and/or just as worthwhile as going to the cinema to watch Avatar, or any other science fiction picture show with aliens.

Thus, until observation occurs, So What?

Speculation, like masturbation, may be entertaining and fun, but, it's only ever a product of our own making without the participation of any other third party.

reply to post by Spider879

"It is dangerous to assume life is common across the universe. It encourages people to think that not finding signs of life is a 'failure,' when in fact it would tell us a lot about the origins of life,"

thinking we are isolated leads to our irresponsible behavior. that is proven by our track record. let's change our thinking (to accepting a universe teeming with life) and see if we change ourselves. Maybe then the rest of the universe will want to play with us.

I would tend to assume...that most carbon based life exists in the outer spiral arms of spiral galaxys, that being, the cores of spiral galaxys --- within a certain radius --- is probably too harsh of an enviroment for habitable exoplanets.

Our sun supports the lifeblood here on earth, without it, we perish unless we have the ability to travel to other star systems that have habitable planets such as our earth. Our sun type is rare, so I can only assume... that life is also rare in spiral galaxys --- which gives all the more reason ---- for intelligent civilizations such as the ones who come to occssionally visit us in there starships, inorder to seek out habitable planets such as our own.


Cheers,

Erno86

Originally posted by Spider879
Well I hope they won't be too rough,after all the article didn't say there was no life,just that it was probably scarce.

It's becoming increasingly unlikely that extraterrestrial life is scarce within our own solar system, much less the rest of the universe. There are a number of suitable places for life as we know it to take hold. But as has been mentioned before, it is technically both unlikely and plausible until such time as it is directly observed.

reply to post by Druscilla


However, if the universe was teaming with life, we'd have met them by now. To borrow your colorful analogy, intelligence would be orgy of diversity, not a single species event occurring on one lonely rock in the middle of nowhere.

Originally posted by Spider879
No but it may not at all be so common.

I am sure it's not that common! It's good to at least say it is possible. If any of the alien stories are true, I can see up to few races existing and not 'teeming with life' as some call it, no it's not like Star Wars where you see aliens of all kinds gathering together to have fun.

We seem to be looking for technologically limited forms of life and not technologically advanced forms of life and hence our inability to detect them. Perhaps our state of techonological "advancement" is an extremely limited state and not many stay in that limited state for too long and grow out of it pretty soon.

Reminds me of the physicist Max Plank discouraging students from pursuing a career in physics saying that there is little left to be discovered in physics except accounting for the mass of the nucleus (the neutron was not yet discovered by then) and explaining the failure of the Michaelson-Morley experiment (which later led to realtivity) and the anomolies in black-body radiation (out of which was born Qunatum Mechanics).

Humility doesn't seem to be popular trait with scientists.

Originally posted by Druid42
reply to post by Druscilla

 

However, if the universe was teaming with life, we'd have met them by now. To borrow your colorful analogy, intelligence would be orgy of diversity, not a single species event occurring on one lonely rock in the middle of nowhere.

On who's authority would we have definitively met another species?
The Universe is vast.
The Universe is SO vast, hundreds of Billions of intelligent technological civilizations would have so much room such that every single one of them could go from start to finish, rise, fall, and extinction without ever bumping into any other, even if every single one was actively looking for another.

It's also a matter of Time and Timing.
We, humans, have been around a mere fraction of a blink of time.
Entire civilizations could have risen and fallen a few times over in this Galaxy alone, not to mention the hundreds of billions of other galaxies.

If there were just one single intelligent technological species per galaxy, there'd be Hundreds of Billions, and because the distance between Galaxies is so vast, it's entirely possible for such to be where no one other ever meets or detects another.

All in all, however, as said and maintained, it doesn't matter.
It's all a superstate condition until observation is made, and we've yet made any confirming observation.

I believe that the discovery of extremophiles and now meteoric evidence points to some much to the contrary.

We have found evidence of water on Mars, Mercury, Venus, and several of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

I believe that life is abundant throughout the universe. Intelligent life (not sure humans qualify, by the way!) may be rare. But, with billions of stars in our galaxy, and billions of galaxy, I am quite confident that there are many, many forms of intelligent life in the universe.

We are not so special.

reply to post by Druscilla


All statistics aside the whether there is or isn't; agreed is completely a moot point. Sure some people claim to have seen them for themselves...

I had a very lucid dream once that these fish headed looking biped aliens were digging around in my head with some instruments, they were doing a crap job of it and woke me up in the process, they were talking in a high pitched wave tone arguing with each other but not shrill enough to be annoying, a wormhole opened up at my window and in came this tall alien that looked brown with eyes one the sides of it's head like a hammer head shark obviously older and wearing simple robes, gave them a very low non threatening tone and pointed at the window, the fish headed ones turned for a last look at me...pressed some button a tiny hole opened up and their top halves at the head started stretching into the tiny hole then their feet lastly disappearing into it as well like being sucked through a tiny straw.The old one looked closer with some kindness and empathy to this brain pain these intern like fish guys had caused me, and seemed to apologize with no sound then also disappeared through the straw like worm hole.

Mind you I was sitting up in my bed with my eyes wide open; seeing everything and experiencing everything as if it was as real as sitting here typing this, I could see colors clearly enough to reproduce the whole scene, I could hear not only them but the low hum of the city, I could feel the spot they screwed up on in my head that woke me as well as the texture of crust as I pulled it out of one eye while they argued with each other, I can;t smell very well anyway so nothing to report there...I didn't go back to sleep, I got up and went about my day a bit earlier than normal.

Could I take that as a real occurrence? Yes. Was it? very highly unlikely so no. Either way I'd still have to go about my daily business...so would it matter if real or not? Not in the slightest, the only thing that has changed? I have a very odd memory, that I now conveyed for the for time ever...no proof of any sort, I do get a weird scab on my head from time to time where the pain came from in this experience...but I might just need to change conditioners.

I guess what I am saying, it doesn't matter in my day to day...just like the house I owned in my dream a week ago doesn't either. Now if these fish dudes were in here screwing around with my head every week instead of that one odd time that would be something to be concerned about...maybe.

If life is as exceedingly rare as is argued here and some believe then we absolutely must stop polluting our environment and emitting greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. By doing these things we commit our planet to a grand and dangerous experiment. They've calculated that the number of extinctions has increased by at least a hundred-fold because of human influence. And because of AGW this will be made far worse. It's ludicrous to continue this gamble.

Read about it here as an introduction:
en.wikipedia.org - Holocene extinction...

Here's an example of a news site covering this topic:
www.dailymail.co.uk - On the brink: Sixth mass extinction 'that will eradicate 75% of life on Earth is drawing closer'...

The irony is that some people say we need to discover ET to respect and understand life on earth and ourselves. However, if we discover no life elsewhere, it has virtually the same effect.

It reminds me of something I've read before. If we discovered life elsewhere, it would be amazing. Conversely, if we failed to discover life elsewhere, it would be amazing.

reply to post by jonnywhite


Well, that's a prime example indicating the scarcity of extraterrestrial life. In the few hundred years that we've industrialized this planet, we've done nothing to colonize outer space, quite content consuming as many resources as we can.

If we went from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in 66 years, why haven't we gone farther? Perhaps greed is a universal constraint, and the hypothetical ETs have all followed the same path that we are, doomed to eke out our entire existence on a solitary planet in a single solar system.

Dbl post. B:

I always find it ironic when some scientist claims something can, or can not have "life".

They should clarify their statement. They are assuming the ONLY form of life could be carbon-based life as we know it to exist on earth.

Not to mention, the entire range of space we have supposedly "searched" is equal to maybe .00000000000001% of the known universe.

Humans are so presumptuous.

reply to post by DerekJR321

It's just a theory. Besides, it would be stupid and presumptuous to think that there MUST be life elsewhere. We have to also consider that there might not be or that it might be extremely rare. I think Einstein said ""If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" But with all of the Einstein quotes on the internet, probably half of them or more are not original.

However, I'd like to clarify something. Instead of saying that this is a waste of space, I'd rather say it's a waste of dwarf planets, planets, rogue planets, moons, asteroids, comets and gas clouds. And the lord only knows how many other things are being wasted. It's a very high number.

If each grain of sand on earth were a star, you'd need over 28,000 earths to match the number of grains of sand to the number of stars in the observable universe. And this is just our best estimate. Estimates, I think, are usually conservative. The number could be higher.

And what if we're wrong about dark matter/energy? They substract this from what they measure to estimate the number of stars. If this somehow is wrong there could be many more stars. I don't, however, think this is likely. But I did read recently about something relating to this. The clincher is that it was not a big number. It was only a small fraction. Dark matter still dominates.

You can read about it here:
www.spacedaily.com - Astronomers report dark matter 'halos' may contain stars, disprove other theories...

.........
"The dark matter halo is not totally dark," Wright said. "A tiny fraction, one-tenth of a percent, of the stars in the central galaxy has been spread out into the halo, and this can produce the fluctuations that we see."
.........

If there're more red dwarf stars this could also change hte estimated number.

reply to post by Spider879

Ah, a glass is half-empty ufologist, lol. I would tend to think that with the multitude of stars in our galaxy alone there may be life on other planets let alone the universe. Just a side note: Don't you think that if an alien race were out there wouldn't they be saying the exact same thing (that life doesn't exist elsewhere) if they were at our technological level?

Originally posted by DerekJR321
I always find it ironic when some scientist claims something can, or can not have "life".

They should clarify their statement. They are assuming the ONLY form of life could be carbon-based life as we know it to exist on earth.

Not to mention, the entire range of space we have supposedly "searched" is equal to maybe .00000000000001% of the known universe.

Humans are so presumptuous.

You misinterpret and visit your own presumptions upon the subject.

There is no argument in the scientific community pushing an idea that carbon life, or any sort of specific life is or is not extent in the universe at large.
If anything, there's been sundry speculation based from a purely chemical, and even physical standpoint in proposing all sorts of different kinds of life.
For instance, we've stored data magnetically on tape and floppy disk. What's to say with the astounding complexity and strength of electromagnetic fields around stars, and gas giants that there isn't a self organizing, self sustaining replicable life form made out of magnetic fields?
I think Cyanide and Arsenic have even been proposed as chemical bases for a DNA-like based organism that's less exotic than self organizing magnetic fields.

In the search for life elsewhere in our neighboring observable space, we go with what we know.
We know for a fact that life thrives in conditions such as ours.
Thus, we think it's a fairly good bet that should we confirm on locating a planet harboring similar conditions, we will also thus find life.

There is no bias on what kinds of life could be possible.
There is, however, some bias in what sorts of life we're looking for, especially in consideration we might not even recognize any other sort of life as being life if we bumped into it.
We therefore look for something we can at least identify as understandable.

reply to post by Druscilla


You bring up another limiting factor: compatibility. Say, for example, a cyanide based life form were to meander into our isolated corner of the multiverse, and attempt contact? Such contact would be deadly, and there's no doubt their intent would be considered hostile, with us humans retaliating.

Not very feasible, but something to consider.

reply to post by Druscilla


Silica has been proposed too, but for such a life form to exist the conditions would be so unlike anything here on Earth, it's almost impossible to imagine.

I enjoy reading scientific theories, and enjoy reading our efforts to discover life, or areas where life has the potential to exist, but I do not enjoy when People try to make bold claims about something we know so very little about.

Even looking out at the Billions of trillions of stars and rocky bodies out there in space, if Earth has life 1 in 1 billion trillion is still better odds there is life out there, than there is not.

I'm open to both possibilities, even if the idea life here on this planet is the sole place where life just happened. It's extremely sad to think of this in some ways, and brilliant in itself as well.

We just don't know, we are incapable of knowing at this time. As you said it Druscilla, so what? I can call apples oranges, say that jupiter's core is made of a fine port, doesn't make it true.