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Do you think there's intelligent life on other planets?

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1039557/Caught-camera-Mysterious-speeding-object-leaves-UFO-experts-puzzled.html

Do you think there's intelligent life on other planets?


Do you think they've already paid us a visit?

There's millions of planets out there so can't see why not ..
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Comments

  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Yes I think there's life out there.

    No, I don't think they've paid us a visit. The next closest star to us is Alpha Centuri, over 4 light years away. Now, even if it has planets which harbour life and have evolved to have sentient beings which have mastered space travel which already sounds fairly unlikely, they'd need a machine to travel close to the speed of light to reach us in say 5 years. What's the odds of them even landing us? From Alpha Centuri we'd look like a tiny dot, they're more likely to try to land on something like Jupiter.

    The only way extra-terrestrial life is going to reach us is if they can travel through something like a worm hole which at the moment is very highly theoretical stuff.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Yeah, hopefully, because of all the music we've sent out, they'll think thats how we communicate, and just sing at us when they come :)
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Intelligent life? Possibly not. Life, like moss and lichen? Probably.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Do you think there is intelligent life on ours?

    *cringes at hackneyed point*
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Teagan wrote: »
    Intelligent life? Possibly not. Life, like moss and lichen? Probably.
    Why?
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Yerascrote wrote: »
    Yes I think there's life out there.

    No, I don't think they've paid us a visit. The next closest star to us is Alpha Centuri, over 4 light years away. Now, even if it has planets which harbour life and have evolved to have sentient beings which have mastered space travel which already sounds fairly unlikely, they'd need a machine to travel close to the speed of light to reach us in say 5 years. What's the odds of them even landing us? From Alpha Centuri we'd look like a tiny dot, they're more likely to try to land on something like Jupiter.

    The only way extra-terrestrial life is going to reach us is if they can travel through something like a worm hole which at the moment is very highly theoretical stuff.

    Its not the speed that is the killer, its the accelleration. I did a mini project and worked out the best way to do it would be to constantly accellerate (at 9.8ms^2 - simulate earth gravity), then rotate and constantly decelerate (at 9.8ms^2...).

    Rest assured even small trips would take an extremely long time. Not to mention actually working out the fuel / rations / propulsion system, this is just theoretically what humans can stand up to.

    Unless we borrow inertial dampeners from star trek..

    According to my calculations, with unlimited fuel and rations, to move at a rate through 'traditional' space (no wormholes) at a speed tolerable by humans, it would take 61,222,732 years to travel 4 light years... edit, I think that's wrong...
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Ofcourse there is, the universe is infinite after all. If we will be able to communicate/travel such long distances before we become extinct is another matter.
  • Indrid ColdIndrid Cold Posts: 16,688 Skive's The Limit
    Yerascrote wrote: »
    Yes I think there's life out there.

    No, I don't think they've paid us a visit. The next closest star to us is Alpha Centuri, over 4 light years away. Now, even if it has planets which harbour life and have evolved to have sentient beings which have mastered space travel which already sounds fairly unlikely, they'd need a machine to travel close to the speed of light to reach us in say 5 years. What's the odds of them even landing us? From Alpha Centuri we'd look like a tiny dot, they're more likely to try to land on something like Jupiter.

    The only way extra-terrestrial life is going to reach us is if they can travel through something like a worm hole which at the moment is very highly theoretical stuff.
    Yep.

    Jonny: The universe is infinite? Whoever said that either lied or didn't know anything. The universe isn't infinite, but it's big enough that the thought of Earth being the only planet with intelligent life is idiotic.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Yep.

    Jonny: The universe is infinite? Whoever said that either lied or didn't know anything. The universe isn't infinite, but it's big enough that the thought of Earth being the only planet with intelligent life is idiotic.

    How do you know that? If its not infinite, what is outside it? Nonexistance? I don't think there is hard science either way
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    ShyBoy wrote: »
    How do you know that? If its not infinite, what is outside it? Nonexistance? I don't think there is hard science either way

    Indeed. Both views are pretty incomprehendable
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    If you look at the pictures i recently posted in anything goes
    you'll realise we are nothing ...not even dust in this big thing called the universe.
    We knoe nothing about it realy ...nothing.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    ShyBoy wrote: »
    How do you know that? If its not infinite, what is outside it? Nonexistance? I don't think there is hard science either way

    No, the universe is finite (albiet expanding). That's a fact. The universe isn't the same thing as "everything in existance." It refers to the current observable bit, with a single set of physics.

    Is there life on other planets? Almost certainly. There are too many planets with too many possibilities to come to any other conclusion. Even if only one planet in every galaxy were to support life, that would still be a total of 200bn planets. But Carl Sagan apparently estimated that in our galaxy, there are around 1m planets that are theoretically capable of supporting life.

    Is there intelligent life on other planets? Depends on your definition of intelligent. But intelligence as we know it first requires the evolution of a nervous system, which has never occured more than once on this planet (whereas something like the eye or the wing has evolved seperately in many different forms). Every creature we identify as intelligent relies upon a single worm-like creature evolving a central nervous system in the first place. And since that is the basis for consciousness, and what we would describe as intelligence, it makes it extremely unlikely to have happened anywhere else. But the sheer scale of the universe means you can't rule it out, or at least rule out an equivalent or similar process happening elsewhere that leads to a rise in conscious beings. But I think that the general consensus in biology is that something like consciousness is a ridiculously rare and probably one-off occurance. But ruling out intelligent life on that basis would say more about our narrow view of intelligence than anything else. It's a really difficult question, because the probability is so tiny, and yet the scale of the universe means that you can reasonably afford to bet on such tiny odds.

    Has it ever visited us? Has it fuck. It hasn't even sent us a signal, and by the time we got any signal, the entire civilisation that sent it would've probably been destroyed anyway. If we're still getting light from extinct stars, I think it's safe to assume that any signal sent by aliens would reach us after that species has become extinct or evolved into something else.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Is there intelligent life out there? Probably. Have they visited us? Doubtful. Earth is such an insignificant planet it doesn't even register on the vast scale of things.
    Look at the star map mr roll provided on Anthing Goes. When compared to other things in th night sky, it's unlikely Earth has been noticed.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I'd say it's a pretty good chance that there's other intelligent life out there and that there's also a reasonable chance that such a species have developed a far greater space technology, making them able to travel distances unconceivable to us.

    However, I think it's much less likely that they have visited us, because of the vast distances in the universe. Even if another species has the ability to visit nearby stars and solar systems, it is not so likely that there's intelligent life on stars adjacent to the sun. The only thing I can think of enabling matter to travel lightyears in no time is a wormhole, but the existence of wormhole hasn't really been proven yet. Scientists "only" have strong indications from watching beams of light being affected by an abundant source of gravity, but no one has really seen black holes. (Following the theory of two black holes being interconnected and thus constituting a wormhole tunnel between the two endpoints.)

    Also, if and against the odds they have actually paid our solar system/earth a visit I can't see why they'd be interested in a species so much more inferior in terms of technological capability. Unless we're talking about a warfaring species going for conquest, but in that case that would probably have happened already if they visited.

    As a digression researchers are trying to get to identify alien species through the SETI project relying on radio technology. Daunting and exciting task indeed, but it's really plaing against the odds too. (Not saying that they should stop doing it, merely stating the difficulties)
    They can't direct their arrays of large dishes to every corner of the space at the same time, meaning the potential of missing communication from the direction they're not listening to at some point. Also they have to assume that an alien species has invented some radio technology and that they're trying to use this for interspecies communication and that they're using the same frequencies. They have to distinguish "authentic" signals from natural background noise, both from ourselves and from space. And at last, but not least, if they really make sure they have received true radio signals they will have to interpret it, extrapolate structure, language and so on to make something out of it. Tough task.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    It is difficult enough finding intelligent life on this planet, let alone on others.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Why?

    What IWS says :
    Is there intelligent life on other planets? Depends on your definition of intelligent. But intelligence as we know it first requires the evolution of a nervous system, which has never occured more than once on this planet (whereas something like the eye or the wing has evolved seperately in many different forms). Every creature we identify as intelligent relies upon a single worm-like creature evolving a central nervous system in the first place. And since that is the basis for consciousness, and what we would describe as intelligence, it makes it extremely unlikely to have happened anywhere else. But the sheer scale of the universe means you can't rule it out, or at least rule out an equivalent or similar process happening elsewhere that leads to a rise in conscious beings. But I think that the general consensus in biology is that something like consciousness is a ridiculously rare and probably one-off occurance. But ruling out intelligent life on that basis would say more about our narrow view of intelligence than anything else. It's a really difficult question, because the probability is so tiny, and yet the scale of the universe means that you can reasonably afford to bet on such tiny odds.

    Earth has extraordinary conditions. Even a planet that is 'similar', will still be markedly different and have a different development history ... and the chances that life evolved from nothing to what mankind is today is, as I say, possible - but unlikely. Even today, scientists are unable to recreate that initial spark of life in the lab, even though they have reproduced the same characteristics of carbon, heat, water etc of the primordial soup from which life on Earth began. Earth is truly a miracle.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    It's probable - given the amount of planets capable of holding life and the length of time since the Big Bang it seems highly unlikely life has evolved elsewhere.

    Whether they've visited - who knows? Our current understanding of physics would say not as it would take too long, but a) our current understanding may be wrong b) if they are aliens they may be much more long lived and a journey of a few dozen years, may be the equivalent of a few weeks for them.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Theres got to be something out there. The universe is so vast, we can't be alone. But who's to say that if there is intelligent life out there, it's got to stage where it can travel light years to Earth. The first thing we'll probably come into contact with, if we do, is probably a probe like the ones we've sent into space. However with us, even Voyager 1 hasn't gone that far in the big scheme of things.
    Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth, traveling away from both the Earth and the Sun at a relatively faster speed than any other probe. As of May 9, 2008, Voyager 1 is over 15.89 terameters (15.89×1012 meters, or 15.89×109 km, 106.26 AU, 14.72 light-hours, or 9.87 billion miles) from the Sun. At this distance, signals from Voyager 1 take more than fourteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Voyager 1 has achieved solar escape velocity, meaning that its trajectory will not return it to the solar system.

    It'll still take an infinite amount of time to reach any stars that could possibily harbour life. And unless any alien beings have a technology far in advance of our own it's unlikely we'll be hearing from them anytime soon.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    ShyBoy wrote: »
    How do you know that? If its not infinite, what is outside it? Nonexistance? I don't think there is hard science either way

    But it's proven that universe is expanding (red shift).

    Expand to where? if it was infinite?

    /e: Yes, there is very probably life on other planets and why not intelligent life, with culture, civilization etc., probably countless and that's not even a bold statement. There are somewhat 10^22 stars in milky way, that's a 1 with 22 zeros behind it. Let's just assume there are about 5 planets in each galaxy. Alone with the calculus of probability there must be a LOT which can harbor life.

    Just watch this. It's not 100% accurate, but you get the idea.
    http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=BGxRWCmwSDE&feature=related
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    StrubbleS wrote: »
    But it's proven that universe is expanding (red shift).

    Expand to where? if it was infinite?

    Ah well fair enough :p but then again an infinite object can still expand into a higher order of infinity, if that makes sense. Like if you say there are infinite positive integers, there are also infinite positive and negative integers, but the second is a higher 'order' of infinity. So as you grow to increase rational numbers etc. the order of infinity increases. Not really sure if that's applicable though.

    The last I heard the universe was like a football, whereby you would travel to the end of one plane and then enter another until after travelling for some amout of time you would end up where you started. But I think hawkings said there were infinite planes so.. *shrug* I am not up to date with my physics :p

    Ooh, interview with oxford astrophysicist: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMR53T1VED_people_0_iv.html
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    ShyBoy wrote: »
    Ah well fair enough :p but then again an infinite object can still expand into a higher order of infinity, if that makes sense.

    No, that makes absolutely no sense at all tbh. :p
    ShyBoy wrote: »
    The last I heard the universe was like a football, whereby you would travel to the end of one plane and then enter another until after travelling for some amout of time you would end up where you started. But I think hawkings said there were infinite planes so.. *shrug* I am not up to date with my physics :p

    Think about it this way, when humans first came about we thought of planet earth as flat, but we have found out that it's round and if you start from one spot and keep walking straight you'll end up at that spot. The universe is same only there are extra dimensions involved, we can't see a 4th dimension because we are bound to our 3d world but we know it's there. The universe is finite, and if you did start travelling straight you would end up back where you started.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Yes, even if they did come to Earth, what are we likely to do? Panic, and attack.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    My argument is, why would they come? Unless they were in a similar position to, desperately trying to answer the question to life the universe and everything, why would they bother?

    The Earth is such an insignificant speck in an impossibly vast universe. Like a bottled message floating in an ocean, easy to miss, difficult to find.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    And then if they did notice our existence, why would they want to make contact with a world as shockingly backwards as ours? I know I wouldn't...
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Aladdin wrote: »
    And then if they did notice our existence, why would they want to make contact with a world as shockingly backwards as ours? I know I wouldn't...

    To invade and farm us for our livers? Pickled human brain could be a delicay on Proxima IV for all we know....
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Whowhere wrote: »
    My argument is, why would they come? Unless they were in a similar position to, desperately trying to answer the question to life the universe and everything, why would they bother?

    The Earth is such an insignificant speck in an impossibly vast universe. Like a bottled message floating in an ocean, easy to miss, difficult to find.

    Same reason we've got people on the Falklands...
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    To invade and farm us for our livers? Pickled human brain could be a delicay on Proxima IV for all we know....
    Oh well yes, I can see wanting to come if we have something of use to them. But an advanced and benign race simply seeking to meet new civilisations to expand and extend our knowledge a la Star Trek would only need to observe life on Earth for a very brief period to realise that on the whole we're still a bunch of ignorant, greedy and hate-filled backward violent fools who should be best avoided.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    +1

    Which leads me to the point to say that there's more itelligent life out there, even if it doesn't want to come to Earth ;)
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    If you look at planet earth, there are 10's of millions of species but only one, humans, have actually managed to question the existence of our universe. There could be loads of life out there, whether they have the capability of space travel is another matter.
  • Indrid ColdIndrid Cold Posts: 16,688 Skive's The Limit
    But intelligence as we know it
    Important part emphasised.

    What you're saying sounds like that "Planet X has no air and water, so there couldn't be life on it" close-mindedness...
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