If you don't believe in Aliens you are CRAZY!

So here is post from Bloomberg I enjoyed reading:

“Where is everybody?” Enrico Fermi famously asked 63 years ago. His question was cosmic: Our modest little eight-planet solar system is part of the Milky Way, which has at least 100 billion stars. The Milky Way, in turn, is one galaxy among 100 billion or more. The math suggests we should have seen signs of other civilizations by now.
What’s more, according to a study published this week, billions of those planets are potentially amenable to life as we know it. The nearest one could be just 12 light-years away.
So it’s tempting to reframe Fermi’s question slightly. Isn’t it possible, as we learn more about the cosmos, that Trekkies, alien abductees and UFO conspiracy theorists were right all along? Which is to say, it is more rational to believe in alien life than it is to not believe in it.

Link: www.bloomberg.com/news

The universe is beyond VAST.

There's room enough for HUNDREDS of BILLIONS of galaxy spanning space faring technologically advanced civilizations in the universe to exist, while at the same time still having enough room and space such that no other civilization ever runs into another, or ever even detects the existence of another.

The Universe is that big.

That's galaxy spanning, space faring, technologically advanced civilizations too.

Now, here we are, not even a speck of a speck of dust on a single planet.

Certainly there's Aliens ... somewhere in the universe.
Still, Aliens that can't be observed, detected, or interacted with are essentially worthless.

Thus, the only aliens that matter are those that we could detect, observe and potentially even interact with.
Thus far, we've none.

So what's your opinion on the subject? What ur thread title says?

reply to post by Emerys


Unique events happen every single second even in a universe this large..me typing to you on this computer on this thread is one of them. Lets hope abiogenesis wasnt a unique event.

Tucket
So what's your opinion on the subject? What ur thread title says?

My opinion on the subject is that I agree with most of it. That everyday science is proving that statistically we are probably not alone. To me, that's a lot more comforting than thinking we are alone. But at the same time, if satellites start finding no signs of life within light years of traveling, well, maybe there is a God after all..

reply to post by Emerys


If a planet is to be graced by the warmth of life, it just needs the right elements, a lot of time, and hospitable conditions. Life is incredibly resilient, so it'll find ways to thrive in hostile environments.

reply to post by AliceBleachWhite


I understand the "vastness" of the Universe, and all the probabilities contained there in.

I wonder if you grasp the ubiquity of life.

Just within 50 ly of Sol there are in excess of 10 space-faring species, many of which have and continue to, interact with the Earth. The evidence is all around, if you but look.

A good case for this evidence is the Zeta Reticuli system...

well, yes on both counts.......

I just try to remember the "statement" before Star Wars began; " A long time ago in a Galaxy far far away.." That's just it, this universe is so old and vast that entire Galactic civilizations may have come and gone.

reply to post by Spader


Exactly, and if mankind can stop all of this BS and strive together to search the stars for the ruins of other beings of another time. We have no clue where WE are in the general spectrum of time, the numbers could be past our level of thought.....or imagination......so, yes on both counts...

reply to post by teslahowitzer


Oh yes I believe in Aliens so I guess I am not crazy... Thank Goodness for that one

And yes this planet is years is not weeks away from a natural disaster, scientist know this for fact. We are over due big time. So we (planet Earth) needs to stop the BS and start searching for a way to get our people onto another habitable planet.

One more thing, I say I believe there is life out there but in no way do I believe there is more humans out in space unless of course that is where all of our ancient civilizations ran off too. Anyhow life would be so different from us. Their planet may not have had the natural disasters like our planet has had. That has set us back thousands of years.

Stari

reply to post by Stari


Imagine for a moment no wars or mega conflicts in the past 200 years, none, where would mankind be traveling to today?? All of the great minds, striving and moving the human element across our solar system, no doubt. Al, Nick, Edison, Ford, Rocker, and others with common goals and results... But were stuck with these morons. Man and Woman would be looking to cruze the milky way in one generation....

Emerys

Tucket
So what's your opinion on the subject? What ur thread title says?

My opinion on the subject is that I agree with most of it. That everyday science is proving that statistically we are probably not alone. To me, that's a lot more comforting than thinking we are alone. But at the same time, if satellites start finding no signs of life within light years of traveling, well, maybe there is a God after all..

Why does one have to negate the other?

Finding aliens does nothing to confirm nor deny the presence of a deity.

By the way, we've only begun to search. It will take time and money but we will find them. Probably within my lifetime (and yours if you are under 50).

My field of study is astronomy, astrobiology, etc so I plan to devote my life to finding 'em.


The real life star trek is underway. We just need to build bigger telescopes before even thinking about building star ships.

tanka418
reply to post by AliceBleachWhite

 

I understand the "vastness" of the Universe, and all the probabilities contained there in.

I wonder if you grasp the ubiquity of life.

Just within 50 ly of Sol there are in excess of 10 space-faring species, many of which have and continue to, interact with the Earth. The evidence is all around, if you but look.

A good case for this evidence is the Zeta Reticuli system...

You can't categorize life and intelligent life together and put it into your equation of life outside of our solar system. Intelligent life is an extremely rare occurrence, while basic life is everywhere. Our galaxy is likely teeming with that basic life. Few however will have intelligent life. Look at the 4+ billion year history of Earth and the billions of life forms that have lived here. Only one has been intelligent. Only one has had a desire to pursue interests beyond it's own survival. It seems to go against "natures" plan or blueprint to evolve an intelligent species. That species will ultimately dominate the planet it evolves on. It will destroy other life forms, as we have. We're a fluke and freaks with an agenda other than the purpose of what has lived on this planet for billions of years. With that said, when speaking in terms of the possibility of billions of other Earth-like planets, intelligent life elsewhere is a probability. But intelligent life should not be categorized as "ubiquitous".

Other than unsubstantiated claims and fantastical stories, I'd like to see this evidence that shows the 10+ space faring species. I'm sure the scientific community would as well.

Ectoplasm8

You can't categorize life and intelligent life together and put it into your equation of life outside of our solar system. Intelligent life is an extremely rare occurrence, while basic life is everywhere. Our galaxy is likely teeming with that basic life. Few however will have intelligent life. Look at the 4+ billion year history of Earth and the billions of life forms that have lived here. Only one has been intelligent. Only one has had a desire to pursue interests beyond it's own survival. It seems to go against "natures" plan or blueprint to evolve an intelligent species. That species will ultimately dominate the planet it evolves on. It will destroy other life forms, as we have. We're a fluke and freaks with an agenda other than the purpose of what has lived on this planet for billions of years. With that said, when speaking in terms of the possibility of billions of other Earth-like planets, intelligent life elsewhere is a probability. But intelligent life should not be categorized as "ubiquitous".

Other than unsubstantiated claims and fantastical stories, I'd like to see this evidence that shows the 10+ space faring species. I'm sure the scientific community would as well.

This is a wonderfully excellent point made.

Out of 4 Billion years as a planet

with about 3.49 Billion Years of Life,

the Big 5 Major Extinction Events, especially the Permian - Triassic Extinction Event that wiped out 96% of all life on the planet,

over the estimated 8.7 Billion species still around today which only represent 0.1% of the totality of species that have ever existed as it's estimated 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct,

only ONE species out of ALL of THIS managed to develop intelligence such as we have and survive to present day. (Disclaimer note: Neanderthal, Denisovan, and other hominds don't count since we've no evidence for their survival).


Such perspective would indicate odds of Intelligent, Tool Using (any technology from stones all the way up to computers and beyond) Life to be a rare thing.

That's pretty amazing, and could very well stand as argument against such happening to any degree of frequency in the Universe at large, regardless of how vast it is.

It doesn't rule out the possibility of Intelligent Technologically sophisticated life "Somewhere" in the Universe, but, as I said previously, Aliens we can't observe, much less interact with even from a xeno-archeology perspective, are worthless.
No aliens to see, and no aliens to poke at or talk to equates to no aliens, regardless anyone's unsubstantiated convictions of faith that "they" are already here.

Statistically it seems almost impossible that we are alone. Even if Sol was only one in a billion that had a habitable star system, that still means that there's at least 100 civilizations in the milky way alone.

And there are tens of thousands of galaxies.

But meeting them is another question. Everyone automatically assumes that the aliens are far superior to us and can travel between the stars, but no one ever thinks of the civilizations that are Inferior to us.

Imagine how many alien cultures are out there that still haven't reached their equivalent of the computer age, the industrial age, or even the bronze age. There could be hundreds of species out there still living in mud huts and learning how to domesticate animals.

And lets not forget we tend to think of only the sentient species. Thousands of planets out there could be covered in vast jungles and oceans filled with wildlife.

I believe in Aliens, But I don't believe that we'll meet most of them.

Ectoplasm8

tanka418
reply to post by AliceBleachWhite

 

I understand the "vastness" of the Universe, and all the probabilities contained there in.

I wonder if you grasp the ubiquity of life.

Just within 50 ly of Sol there are in excess of 10 space-faring species, many of which have and continue to, interact with the Earth. The evidence is all around, if you but look.

A good case for this evidence is the Zeta Reticuli system...

You can't categorize life and intelligent life together and put it into your equation of life outside of our solar system. Intelligent life is an extremely rare occurrence, while basic life is everywhere. Our galaxy is likely teeming with that basic life. Few however will have intelligent life. Look at the 4+ billion year history of Earth and the billions of life forms that have lived here. Only one has been intelligent. Only one has had a desire to pursue interests beyond it's own survival. It seems to go against "natures" plan or blueprint to evolve an intelligent species. That species will ultimately dominate the planet it evolves on. It will destroy other life forms, as we have. We're a fluke and freaks with an agenda other than the purpose of what has lived on this planet for billions of years. With that said, when speaking in terms of the possibility of billions of other Earth-like planets, intelligent life elsewhere is a probability. But intelligent life should not be categorized as "ubiquitous".

Other than unsubstantiated claims and fantastical stories, I'd like to see this evidence that shows the 10+ space faring species. I'm sure the scientific community would as well.

Only one has been intelligent?

How could you say that? It's ridiculous. Animals all shows intelligence and intelligence is related to circumstance and the environment. So birds might show a higher spatial awareness and intelligence than us, heck even flying insects probably do! Are humans really that intelligent? Please think about this question for a while, examine our behaviors.

Intelligence is robust and has been on this planet for 100's of millions of years already. It hasn't died out even though there have been major changes in the types of predominant species and climate and atmospheric chemistry.

I agree though that it did seem to take a long time for intelligence animals to launch off this planet. HOWEVER, once launched off the planet, what's to stop an intelligent race spreading through the galaxy?

Put it this way, once the mammals (dolphins and whales) managed to figure out a way to live in the ocean or rivers all their lives, they spread through the entire world. So why would an intelligent civilization not keep spreading either?

As they spread, they evolve, branch off and divide, conquer and split. They don't stay static, and they don't have any real boundaries in space.

So it only takes one space faring species to launch to seed many cilivisations that spread out and split over time. But space faring species could be in the thousands or millions, so the odds are really good to me that intelligent life has spread through the entire galaxy already. Why don't we see them? That's another question....

We also don't need to confine ourselves to the idea of civilisation. We can simply think of intelligent species adapted to roam space, just like the example of our whale above. They don't necessarily need to be super smart or organised, just to have evolved the right attributes to spread across space with relative ease. The same thing likely happens with bacteria and simple microbes too of course.

There's a fair amount of evidence that intelligence evolves in different forms.

Kind of like the eye.

The eye has evolved several independently different times through evolutionary history on Earth and there are many types of eyes. ie: your eyes are different from the compound eye of a fly as they are from birds, as they are from sharks and so on.

It's starting to look like intelligence could be the same. It could be evolutionary pressures lead to something like intelligence developing eventually as a matter of time.

Within our own planet there are several types of intelligent animals with complex language, social structure, etc.

The fact that they don't wield iPhones doesn't mean that cetaceans aren't intelligent.

Then there are things like ants who seem to have distributed intelligence. While no individual ant is intelligent the colony exhibits signs of intelligence.

We have to be very careful in defining intelligence. Human chauvinism often can blind us to other non-technical intelligence on our planet.

That said, the most detectable intelligences will have to use technology in some way.

However absence of finding technological intelligence does not mean we are the only intelligence in the Galaxy much less universe.

It will just mean we'll have to look a lot harder to rule it out entirely.

Perhaps the greatest argument against intelligence being the exception to the rule is the fact that we are here discussing it.

The galaxy is far older than our solar system so there's been plenty of time for other planets to cook up intelligence elsewhere.

Evolution is not something where all worlds started at the same time. We're on the young side of things when it comes to planetary systems so the fact that it took 4.5 billion years to produce us is somewhat less relevant in the context of a Galaxy that's 12 billion years old with plenty of 6,7,8, and 9 billion year old star systems.

Head start anyone?

As for the Fermi Paradox it falls down when you take human chauvinism out of the picture.

Why don't we see aliens all around us conquering the Galaxy? Because there are probably plenty of uninhabited worlds for each one that is inhabited. There's no need to go stirin' up the locals when there are perhaps hundreds of other planets with no one on them within reach of such a spacefaring civilization.

Not to mention not all creatures on Earth are the expansive/social type. It could be that type of mindset is rare in the Galaxy.

ManInAsia
Why don't we see them? That's another question....

And the answer is, we probably have.

If you dont actively look you might not ever know just how teaming our world is with life, and by extension the galazy. Look at a single bush, say 2ft tall and about the same round, now with a magnifying glass or even just your own eyes go over every inch of it and count up the life you can see... trust me, you'll end up well into the many tens and hundreds, and still you'd have missed a big number.

Heck the human body inside and out is a veritable universe of life with billions of bacteria doing their thing, both the good and bad and you will never see them (for the most part).

We can see huge swaths of the universe, but its like looking for bacteria on your body with a magnifying glass, its just not gonna net results and as for more focused searching, its akin to planting your face on a desk and looking for life and maybe getting lucky and having an ant wander into vision at some point, the area we can see in the required detail at the moment is absolutely miniscule and pointless.

That being said, we should keep looking... that ant might wander by eventually.

Personally id say, if you dont believe in aliens your crazy, but if you do believe in aliens theres a good chance something you believe in that is to do with them does in fact mean you are crazy (as is evident by a good number of posts by posters in this forum on a regular basis, im sure we all know em :p ).

reply to post by ManInAsia


Well Said.

And dont forget Monkeys and dogs were in space before Humans...so how intelligent are they? .