Do you reckon there is life out there?

[CharlieB]

Any fule noe that we don't exist and the total population of the entire universe is zero anyway:

We assume there are an infinite number of worlds. We also assume there are only a finite number of inhabited worlds.

Thus "any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."

*The Hitch-hiker's guide to the Galaxy

 

[Davidc]

Ah - good to see another quote from HHGTTG.

40 more to go?

 

[jimboalee]

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...

You are not familiar with Roddenbury's timeline. Its similar to the theory of 'directed panspermia'. Re, Francis Crick.

 

[byegad]

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

Excellent!

 

[Fnaar]

I've often wondered about the guy who lives next door... (see pic)

 

[Over The Hill]

We are the result of a vast number of events that are likely to have happend by pure chance.

Can we really estimate from the one result of the roll of the dice we know of (us), how many sides are on the dice (die if you want to be pedantic) or how many times it is rolled. or indeed how many dice are out there being rolled?
I cannot see how we could ever make any decent calculation as to the probability of the same number coming up again.

 

[Arch]

I like that Anomalocaris size comparison pic. Not so much for the wierd prawn, but for the slightly camp stance of the comparative human...

Life elsewhere? Got to be, and who knows how 'weird' it might be. We don't know everything about this planet yet, and we're still being surprised with new discoveries.

 

[twentysix by twentyfive]

Well I do think there will be intelligent life out there somewhere, unlike down here (present company excepted of course).

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Ah - good to see another quote from HHGTTG.

40 more to go?

Never mind HHGTTG, how about Monty Python:


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQu_RRLbVDA

 

[661-Pete]

How about this for a different Python take on it?

 

[surfdude]

2 aliens flying past the earth . 1 says to the other shell we stop to see if there is life down on that planet . no point says the other its got to much water and oxygen to support life .

 

[Granville Kuosonsavath]

There's no "reckon" about it, there definitely IS life out there, it has made contact.
Scientists in the 70's reasoned that if life was to make any sort of contact, the nature of the communication would be completey agnostic with respect to form of language or even number theory.
One of the things ET life would have in common with us is experience of the element hydrogen, which resonates at 1420MHz. So if any signal were to come, they would send it at this frequency. Sure enough a signal did come.
http://en.wikipedia....iki/Wow!_signal

 

[Foghat]

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.

It takes just one look at a photograph like that shown below, and some thought about the small proportion of our field of view it represents and about what constitutes just one galaxy, to realise that a universe-wide incidence of 1 for populated carbon-based life-accommodating planets like ours would be far more bizarrely unlikely than an incidence of many. Especially given the ease with which such life finds itself able to rampage across virtually all types of environment on ours.

,

 

[marinyork]

If we are children of the bubble there's very probably life out there.

 

[iAmiAdam]

To think that we're alone in the vast universe is naive.