But what are those odds exactly?
does 1 out of 10 suns hold a planet with life?
1 out of 1,000,000?
1 out of 10^100?
Thats why the search for life on mars is so essential.
If life independantly evolved on mars, then we can expect the universe to be filled to the brim with life. We can begin to speculate that life is not an oddity, or some fluke, but a natural and common progression across the universe.
>>
The above statistical method of wishing senient life into existance is completely baseless. Yet the results are so deliciously fecund, that all the BEM hopefuls (i.e., most astronomers) seize it with gusto--and carefully never subject it to any intellectual examination.
The only way to estimate the extent of life elsewhere is to describe how life arose on Earth, and see what the necessary series of events were that gave rise to "life." Then find planets that offer a similar route.
One note: Let's agree not to confuse the term "life" when we mean microbial "life," (to maximize its presence in the universe) and animal life, when we mean sentient (or at least precursors to sentient) life. The former is everywhere, the latter probably extremely rare.
When that sensible method is followed, the entire Drake equation goes out the window--as being not applicable to the question. And when we do examine the tortuous path of the development of animal life on Earth--how it required an anerobic beginning, switching over to oxygen based, the necessary types of other planets required for Earth to sustain this development, the necessity of an unusually large moon (to stabilize the seasons), etc., etc.--we see that the "statistics"of these new requierments make the likelihood of animal life on other planets vanishingly small--no matter how many billions of planets circle billions of suns.
So sorry!
]]>We exist. Therefore, other species, not of our planet, also exist. Probably, there are also space-borne entities. After all... I seem to remember HUBBLE discovering organic matter in a nebula.
Am I insane?
Being insane does not negate reality, only the perception of it.
I want to believe.
SRAM
]]>[http://physicsweb.org/article/world/14/1/7/1]http://physicsweb.org/article/world/14/1/7/1
[http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish … _vega.html]http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish … _vega.html
51 Pegasi b, Tau Bootes system, 70 Virginis b, "hot-jupiter" in Delphinus, Bellerophon, Rho Coronae Borealis b, Goldilocks, iota Horologii b, PSR 1257 pulsar planet, Epsilon Eridani planet, 55 Cancri b & c planets, Gliese gas planet, child of aldebaran, Upsilon Andromedae b.
[http://www.astro.psu.edu./users/jian/projects.htm#project10]http://www.astro.psu.edu./users/jian/projects.htm#project10
[http://skyandtelescope.com/news/current … _538_1.asp]http://skyandtelescope.com/news/current … _538_1.asp
[http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/SEMR96X … dex_0.html]http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/SEMR96X … dex_0.html
"Extrasolar" planets are familiar, but this one's orbit is promising. Its wide path hints that its star, 55 Cancri, might also harbor a Goldilocks planet: one whose size, temperature and composition are all just right for life. Current science spots only planets so massive they tug stars into a telltale "wobble." "You could put an Earth around 55 Cancri and we wouldn't know it was there," says Geoff Marcy, a planet hunter at UC, Berkeley.
?Adam Rogers, "Planets for the Finding," Newsweek, June 24, 2002
[http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/default.ht … efault.htm]http://www.glyphweb.com/esky....tm?http
]]>Someone here mentioned that we're intelligent life - and the we should think rationally because of that.
I'm afraid thats not really true, though, is it? I mean, we aren't intelligent life. We're /emotional/ life.
]]>Once every rock and stream and tree needed its own ghost or god or spirit to animate it, then we decided that was silly but that a big sky god was needed to keep the sun going round the earth, then we found out that the earth went round the sun quite happily by itself so we needed a god to have created life, then we found out that life evolved quite happily by itself, so we were reduced to needing a god to light the blue touch paper of the big bang. We're risen apes, not fallen angels. Get over it.
Science gradually enables us to discover that we're not special in any way. There is no supernatural animation needed to create life or consciousness or anything like that and the soul simply doesn't exist. Christians are atheists about the 499 other major gods out there, just take that extra logical step boys. You believe that Zeus lives on top of Mount Olympus? Neither do I, although the greek myths were a whole lot more fun.
The question of life in the universe is the topic here and perhaps should be split into two.
It's almost certain that there's lots of life out there. There's a lot of stars in a lot of galaxies, there's planets and accretion disks everywhere we look, carbon and water are common as, well, dirt. Life on earth, our only current example, began around 3.5 billion years ago, that is just as soon as it possibly could. We've had multicelled life for around 500 million years, again just as soon as there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere to allow it. We find life everywhere on earth, places we'd never have dreamed of thirty years ago. The huge biomasses of primitive life in the rocks, teeming communities living around sea bed smokers utterly cut off from the sun. We'll find life anywhere there's a rocky planet, a relatively stable orbit and liquid water.
There's life on Europa because that's got all three.
Intelligent life is a different matter. There was complex multi cell life here for 500 million years without any sign of higher intelligence before we evolved. More than that we as homo sapiens only developed the ability to think intelligently e.g. scientifically a few hundred years ago for the most part. It's easy to imagine an earth with no mankind (a comet strike here, a basalt melt there). Easy to imagine us still living in caves. If we'd let religion rule our thinking we'd still be riding around in ox carts burning people. Evolution isn't a ladder of progress, we weren't inevitable.
Let's all download the seti@home programme and help though. We're not going to discover the answer to this question by sitting around discussing it. That's why the greeks didn't build any starships. Our signals are travelling out there, maybe someone's already picked them up and is on their way. We have the technology to start sending out interstellar probes. We have the ability to get to Europa, burrow under the ice and take a look. Let's do it while we still can.
The truth won't be found in the bible, it's a mistranslated story book about things which never happened. Everything it says about cosmology, biology etc is simply wrong. You can pretend it's all a metaphor (what's a day etc) but you won't learn anything.
No? Tell me this. God decides to kill everyone on earth for being naughty. Every man, woman and little baby except for Noah's family. Yes he does. He makes it rain for forty days and nights. Earth is covered in water. Even the top of Everest. That means, as Everest is 29,000 feet high that it rains about 725 feet every 24 hours during that period. That means 30 feet an hour. That means six inches of rain every minute. For forty days and nights. Meanwhile Noah is popping all over earth discovering Australia and picking up Koalas and Kangeroos and Jaguars from latin america and half a million kinds of beetle and whatabout all the fresh water fish..it's just nonsense isn't it?
If we're going to call ourselves intelligent life we have to think intelligently. That means rationally. That means according to the evidence. That means we stop talking about the bible, or the koran, or whatever, and get on with exploring the universe properly.
Life is so simple to the uber-sceptic with an 'open mind'.
There is no black and white, you see. I was watching a television program, it doesn't matter which one (especially as I can't remember anyway), but I recall it was a science fiction.
And there was this alien in it; some superbeing type thingy. It wasn't a particuarly great story, but there was this one line that made sense to me, in a way:
"Those humans. They put so much faith in gravity."
And it struck me that there was just an immense amount of irony in that statement. After all, it could actually be mere probability that things tend to 'fall' more quickly when near objects of larger mass. What if, one day, something /didn't/ fall?
Well, actually, I remember reading an Isaac Asimov essay on that very subject. I'm afraid I don't remember the exact essay (although I have a sneaking suspicion it was one from the /Gold/ compilation), but he made that very same point: what if gravity is mere probability? What if it all is?
And therefore, isn't our belief in gravity and the universe of physics that we're building to describe the universe around us merely, in itself, a form of faith? Are we not trusting that the universe, in fact, has some form of order? And therefore, if we accept that it has some form of fundamental underlying order, then is it not equally possible that that order is a created and constructed one, and not a random one.
And really, you have to admit its kinda unlikely that ALL THIS just happened to come about.
Fallen angels? Um. No, that would be Lucifer.
Anyway. Apes? Really? Speak for yourself, if thats the case. And show me some proof. Frankly, 'we're genetically similar and there is a possible genetic link in a long line of supposition based psuedo-science' just does not cut it when a perfectly viable other option exists: everything was created, and things change /because they had to be adaptable/. I'm sorry, but humans descended from apes is ridiculous, no matter how much a geezer with a beard proclaims it to be so. Darwin was insane with grief from his wifes death (originally being a Christian), and blamed God for her sad demise, setting out to 'disprove his existance'. Now that in itself proves the man was not sane or rational; if he blamed God, then why disprove God's existance? That would prove himself wrong, and God right. Makes no sense to me, really, but I'm getting off subject.
Apes are... apes. Humans and apes are different in a multitude of ways (although mostly not biological). Each simian species has some human-like traits, but none have anywhere near all - and I ask you, if apes became men, why are there still apes?
Why didn't the others change? And don't give me that 'not enough protein' baloney. You can get protein from ant-meat, which many simian species eat. So. Tell my that is?
Moving on.
The killing thing, huh. Well. If you think about it, and everyone is going to be living... well, forever... eternal life means that, remember... then surely 'death' is only relative, anyway? Especially when you knew you'd kill them, because you knew they'd act incorrectly and enrage you in the first place because you knew... you see the problem with trying to figure that out rationally when eternal life is brought into it?
And consider this.
You want to get across the idea that you killed everyone on the planet, and it was terrible, and only a few people survived, and make it credible over several hundred years /at the least/, despite the fact that /you know/ that social and technological change are eventually going to be rife?
Thats a helluva task. So a flood is a good way to describe it; floods are terrifying to farming cultures, which the majority of the cultures in existence were then. And, as scientists have noted, there are many, many flood 'myths'. Now, I imagine most aren't myths (as myths rarely aren't based in fact), but the fact is that there ice covered this Earth under two hundred thousand years ago. And humanity existed under two hundred thousand years ago. And where the heck did that ship that fits the exact parameters of the ark appear from on Mount Ararat in Turkey? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Now, consider: how would a desert culture from the 2nd or 3rd century understand /ice/ covering the /world/? Water is a stretch, for starters. But /ice/?! So, a flood, then: the world was flooded, and all the little animals were saved by Noah. Well, no, maybe not. Maybe the thing was altered for easier consumption. Maybe the damned animals were preserved in embryionic form, because God gave Noah the knowledge to be a geneticist. Who knows other than God, and Noah's family, and a coupla doves, anyway?
My point is that you shouldn't rubbish /my/ beliefs any more than /I/ should rubbish yours. And believe me, I could in a picosecond.
Also, life existed right from the moment the planet was formed (see the BBC News archives for a 3.9 billion year old crystal that was found /with/ bacteria preserved inside, roughly July last year time).
I don't dispute the possibilities of how life and the universe was created.
But I /do/ rather dislike people who proclaim their own beliefs as cast-iron fact when no such fact exists.
And I know to what you refer when you say exploring the universe properly:
a. If you dont understand it, and cant see it, it doesnt exist.
Well, I'm sorry, but I follow
1. If it could exist, or it might exist, then it probably exists unless
a) there is something else that might exist that negates the possibility that the other thing might exist
And that, my friend, is the universe in a nutshell.
]]>I don't know how many times people at space.com have told me, "but we can't do that," or "that's a fantasy" when i have suggested something that scares them.
Hey, I've got the same sort of flack here on these very forums. I guess we have something in common.
]]>all this shows how many people only seem to apply parsimony selectively, when it suits their (usually) pessimistic views
or maybe i'm just cynical
Oh, I completely agree. I don't know how many times people at space.com have told me, "but we can't do that," or "that's a fantasy" when i have suggested something that scares them.
People are afraid of learning something new, that would change the world. They've fallen into a certain world view, and they have certain wants and needs, and they don't move beyond those wants and needs.
]]>Just recall all those people who not very long ago thought that stars having planets was a rare occurence in the universe. A lot of people are eating their words as we speak.
I have never understood how one could believe this. All bodies in the universe are essentially made up of the same matter clumping together by gravity. As it is a general observation in nature that smaller and simpler things are more common than large and complicated ones, it goes without saying there ought to be far more planets than suns, far more smaller stars than bigger stars (which is empirically proven) and so forth.
Hence stars without any planets ought to have been considered the exception, not the other way around (especially when one considers how stars are form in the first place).
You see, I've had that thought as well. :;):
]]>I've thought about that as well, Echus_Chasma.
Great minds think alike.
]]>I've thought about that as well, Echus_Chasma.
]]>