"Will We Discover a Real-World Pandora?" The Law of Probabilities Points to 'Yes'

www.dailygalaxy.com...

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Quote from source:
What will alien life look like if we find it? Will we be meeting life-forms incredibly similar to ourselves? Or will they be the aggressive aliens of sci-fi films? How do you break news of alien discoveries to the world without creating wide-spread pandemonium? These are just some of the questions that are being discussed by several of the world's leading authorities at a conference on Extraterrestrial Life starting this week at The Royal Society in London. The meeting is not intended to give any conclusion on whether other life exists but give a snapshot of where we are in our quest to find it -- and speculate on the impacts of such a discovery on human society.

Several of the world's leading authities will be discussing the question: Professor Simon Conway Morris FRS a British paleontologist at Cambridge University will predict what extra-terrestrial life might be like and preparing for the worst, Professor Albert A Harrison on what the reality of human responses to extra-terrestrial intelligence might be, and Nobel prize winner Christian de Duve on life as a cosmic imperative.

A line-up of world-leading astronomers, biologists and astrophysicists including SETI founder Dr Frank Drake, principal investigator for the British Beagle 2 Mars lander project Professor Colin Pillinger and Director of the BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science Professor Paul Davies, will be discussing man’s search for extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society.

"There is no firm evidence that life exists elsewhere, but there is a very firm probability (for it)," said Baruch Blumberg, an astrobiologist at the Fox Chance Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

I think that this would be unreal. Although it is very probable that a moon on a gas giant could inhabit life of some sort.

Could you imagine all those people with "Avatar blues"? They would go crazy if they knew it was actually possible.

Any thoughts?

Pred...



[edit on 26-1-2010 by predator0187]

I am sorry, but i am just so sick of hearing about this. we have a beautiful planet of our own. One just has to take a look at threads like this.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by calstorm


Hey, don't shoot the messenger buddy.


I never once said that Earth is not beautiful, that has nothing to do with this, I was just simply relaying a news story about the possibility of finding a Pandora like planet.

I thought this was a good thing not something negative.

Pred...

We will, and we will discover that the galaxy has more life in it than we thought. Disclosure's coming.

From the article linked in the OP:

Simon Conway Morris offered a contrasting view. "My own opinion is that the origin of life is a complete fluke," he said. "I fear that we are completely alone... there's nothing (out) there at all, not a thing."

I've always assumed life elsewhere is likely, but I've also always assumed we'd find some signs of intelligent ET life by now, so the longer it takes us to find anything the more I start to wonder if this guy could be right. Or another possibility is that life is common, but it's intelligent life that's uncommon, since after all, look at how few intelligent species have inhabited the Earth over billions of years, we are certainly fairly unique as an intelligent species on this planet.

It would be interesting to listen in on the wide range of ideas that will be presented at that conference on Extraterrestrial Life.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


I agree to a point, but I think life is out there.

Just because we haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We have so much more to accomplish that we may not even be on or close to the same level as other intelligent life. We could be trying to pick up the wrong signals. With all the technology that we have done in the past 50 years imagine what is to come in the next 50.

They could be transmitting via lasers or something that we could not even fathom at this point. To send out a signal is one thing but where to send it is another. We would have to pick a space and continuously transmit. Or we could put little burst out in different directions, this makes more sense as you could send it to many different places rather than in a certain direction.

If we received a signal like this we would only receive it once. We have had transmissions that resemble this like the WOW signal. If intelligent life were to transmit a signal letting other beings know of their existence we would receive it only once. This to many people would not be enough "proof."

And, whose to say that we would even slightly understand this signal in the first place?

To me the idea of having no other intelligent beings even in our galaxy is narcissistic. We are not alone and we are not a fluke.

We happened to evolve on Earth, in the "suburbs" or the Milky Way, were lots of other stars are located.

Even if you took the lowest possible odds of intelligent life forming on other planets the odds are still high that it is out there.

Also remember that is to say the only "life" we know about is Carbon based. Silicon could be another possibility to lead to life.

We are looking for what we know, and what we know is nothing.



Pred...

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
From the article linked in the OP:

Simon Conway Morris offered a contrasting view. "My own opinion is that the origin of life is a complete fluke," he said. "I fear that we are completely alone... there's nothing (out) there at all, not a thing."

I've always assumed life elsewhere is likely, but I've also always assumed we'd find some signs of intelligent ET life by now, so the longer it takes us to find anything the more I start to wonder if this guy could be right. Or another possibility is that life is common, but it's intelligent life that's uncommon, since after all, look at how few intelligent species have inhabited the Earth over billions of years, we are certainly fairly unique as an intelligent species on this planet.

It would be interesting to listen in on the wide range of ideas that will be presented at that conference on Extraterrestrial Life.

Well, you also have to consider that us searching for life elsewhere is like a bacteria screaming as loudly as possible in the middle of the Sahara desert. Sure there's probably life out there but would they really hear the bacteria?

Originally posted by calstorm
I am sorry, but i am just so sick of hearing about this. we have a beautiful planet of our own. One just has to take a look at threads like this.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

but we dont have blue smurfycats =0 or dragons!

Will we discover a real world Pandora in OUR LIFETIME? The law of probabilities points to "No".

Just sayin'

Hmmm.

I think we already have a Pandora - and we're killing it.

Probably, we should learn how to take care of what we've got before racing off to bugger up some other innocent place. Dontcha think?

All pandora did was show what an isolated tribe is like. That is their lifestyle. Sure they aren't blue and dont fly on dragons, but the people that pandora are real, and they can be found in the jungles of south america and around new zealand.

As shown in the movie, our advanced race has not only ruined our chance of a pandora-like lifestyle, but we're ruining it for the people who dont even know that the bright stuff in the sky is electricity, and that their tribe is only a fraction of the 7 billion people that inhabit the planet, and who have never seen a white man's face before.

I thought avatar sucked, as a side note.

Yes,chances are we will never be told about it,earth will just carry on as grey and boring as usual.Avatar will look dated in a few years and something else will make it look like a high school project.