Do you reckon there is life out there?

[Fnaar]

Given the sheer scale of the universe, number of stars, planetary systems etc, there must be, but I'll be happy if they look like Robbie the Robot or Gort

 

[byegad]

The size of the Universe is staggering. We are discovering that most stars appear to have planets. Some of those planets are in the Goldilocks zone where water is liquid. Even if life of any sort is a billion to one shot and intelligent life another billion to one shot (Personally I suspect that in the Goldilocks zone it is more likely than not that life starts.), that still leaves us with millions of planets with intelligent life. The problem is that intelligent life will still be a hell of a long way away, so communication by radio is impractical taking centuries for a reply and we don't yet know how long intelligent life persists after evolving so there may be no one to speak to at the moment, or lots of people we can't speak to due to distance.

Any way the likelihood is that we are not alone.

 

[jimboalee]

Of course.

There was life out there before there was life here.

 

[numbnuts]

God would not put all his eggs in one basket

 

[mark barker]

Absolutely, and maybe a lot closer than we think. I'm always staggered by the arrogance of "experts" who claim planets (or even the moon) could sustain life because theres not water or too much radiation or another dumb reason. The assumption that a life form would have to exist with our rules and limitations is beyond belief!

 

[Hover Fly]

Since mankind first started telling stories the "aliens" have been just out of reach. Not on top of the mountain? Must be on an island in the sea. Not there? perhaps the islands in the north where its too cold for us. Nope? Perhaps they're on the Moon, Venus, Mars...
Supposing there is a planet in just the right orbit. It would have to have just the right chemicals in the water and the right atmosphere for life to start, that life has to survive for long enough to start evolving first to multi-cell organisms, then skeletons, eyes, a brain, limbs and so on, while all this is going on one big volcano could send it back to the start again. Eventually something as intelligent as man comes up, and remember Homo species only started in one smallish area of Earth, the South American primates could have evolved into something similar but haven't (yet).
Then supposing they, unlike dolphins, have the use of hands and can manipulate materials to make tools, what if they are running round on eight legs and find wheeled transport slow and useless? Perhaps the environmentalists got the upper hand at what would have been the start of their industrial revolution and banned coal burning? Perhaps they think the expansion of gases is an amusing toy but are so peaceful they don't have wars and develop rockets and wireless waves?
There might well be life out there, but I doubt if we will ever meet up with "Star Trek" type creatures that are almost human but just a bit strange.

 

[mark barker]

It would have to have just the right chemicals in the water and the right atmosphere for life to start

Thats the attitude I was talking about! The assumption that life on another planet would require the same basic make up as life here.

 

[Norm]

Absolutely, and maybe a lot closer than we think. I'm always staggered by the arrogance of "experts" who claim planets (or even the moon) could sustain life because theres not water or too much radiation or another dumb reason. The assumption that a life form would have to exist with our rules and limitations is beyond belief!

I completely agree with this one. Whilst I haven't studied the theories extensively, there seems to be a universal expectation that life will be carbon-based and require oxygen, hydrogen etc.

Firstly, I have never seen any justification for this and secondly, the earth was created out of the same stuff that makes everything we know. There is nothing different about it, it's all "startdust" and no reason to think that whatever ingredients were required to produce life would not be available on countless other planets.

We could have "life" on this planet that exists in such a different plane (electrical-type energy, maybe the earth itself is alive, the weather systems are not random events but they are its way of breathing) that we don't even know it is here.

Such thinking, however fanciful, is dismissed because, IMO, it couldn't be detected due to the limitations of current technology. And, because it is "outside our ken", anyone who considers it is equally dismissed.

 

[Davidc]

I think it likely from what I've read that simple life is common, complex life less so at the level of very small probabilities and intelligent life, in the sense we attach to that, even rarer. Intelligent life may even be self destructive.

Even if there are only parts of the universe where the laws of physics manifest suitably for life to function I think that still applies.

As "Space is big. Really big."* and "you just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is".* That means those very small numbers are being multiplied by mindbogglingly large numbers. As a result I'd rate the probability of the beings in the OP existing as close to 1. They'd be very different though, in form, biochemistry, and biology. Evolution will have taken as many different courses as there are places hosting life, with many different random events causing it to take those different directions.

I don't want to meet any. They may be more advanced than us, and I think of the Incas, the native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, and others.

*Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, Chapter 8, second paragraph.

 

[CopperBrompton]

The problem is that intelligent life will still be a hell of a long way away, so communication by radio is impractical taking centuries for a reply

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with Vodafone customer 'service' is already used to this.

 

[swee'pea99]

Apparently, on latest estimates there are a hundred billion galaxies. Give or take. The estimate of the number of stars in just one of them - our very own Milky Way - was recently revised upwards from one hundred billion to two hundred billion. What's an extra hundred billion stars among friends, eh? 

 

[magnatom]

Are we making the assumption that there is intelligent life here on earth....?

 

[asterix]

No of course not, no-one would be that stupid!

 

[MacB]

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with Vodafone customer 'service' is already used to this.

very good, could throw in any call centre

I find the 'Rare Earth' idea quite narrow, as Mark Barker and Norm have mentioned, and even presumptious. We've already found life on our own planet in conditions that had been previously declared as impossible for life.

 

[661-Pete]

There might well be life out there, but I doubt if we will ever meet up with "Star Trek" type creatures that are almost human but just a bit strange.

SF 'aliens' 'too human'? You bet! Vulcans! Klingons!!? Get real! Even the Kzinti look far too humanoid (well - mammalian at any rate) to be believable. Might as well stick with Ed Wood and his Plan 9 from Outer Space beings. Possibly HG Wells got closer to realism with his Martians.

If you want to consider how weird, living forms might be, look no further than our own Earth. Consider Anomalocaris, for instance. How weird do you want weird? And this was something that actually used to hang around on our planet...