Extraterrestrial and Alien beings...your thoughts?

[MiniMerckx.22]

I saw Spielberg's new movie Disclosure Day. Beyond a short lived ... "Hmm, whadayaknow, they are real"...I don't see how it would greatly change my life or anyone else's if we had definitive proof. You still have to get up tomorrow morning, brush your teeth and go to work or school and cook dinner when you get home. They'd be much more advanced than us but if I was a kid my mom would still insist I do my homework. Your mortgage company still want that payment and all your aches and pains will still hurt. I think if they wanted us for slaves or pets we'd all be slaves or pets by now. I just can't concern myself with it.

[mr. beaumont]

Do i think we're alone in the entire universe? No way.

Do i think anybody has visited us? Not likely. My take is if any other planet had the tech to reach us, they'd also know we have absolutely nothing to offer them.

[Strat-itis]

I think Aliens are possible, but I think reaching us is impossible. You just have to know what a light year is. Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. It would take about 70,000 years to get there at Voyager speeds. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years in diameter. As an object speeds up towards meaningful proportions of the speed of light, its local time does go down. Light doesn't experience time. But this is more impossible stuff, having spacecraft reach these speeds. Sheer distance makes interstellar communication or travel impossible even approaching light speed.

But if you're just talking about the existence of life outside our solar system, of course it's possible. If you look at how life formed, there's no specific genesis where life miraculously initiates. Chemical processes just naturally further themselves at any level of complexity which is wild. The most basic form of life could be RNA which is just chemicals that remember its own makeup and reproduce, no agency involved.

[AllanAllen]

I think extraterrestrial life will be suddenly and under-whelmingly proven by the existence of microbes on Mars or ice from an asteroid. It will simultaneously be one of the greatest scientific discoveries and also completely inconsequential.

[wolflen]

ET was overkill..and a bit of a kids movie.

If another life form is interested in our Blue Dot..they would most likely be able to travel
by there highly developed intelligence and not a vehicle -at least not any kind we know of-that could
travel at "ThoughtSpeed" and not by "time/distance"

Our baby step to the Moon shows us..space travel is not for kids..The venture to Mars is going to show our human limits up close.

We are here..only to wonder WHY?..For some of us..that is more than enough.

[Mick-7]

A favorite quote on the subject: "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." - Bill Watterson

[BWV]

Will likely never be able to travel outside the solar system, but a gravitational solar lens could be built within a century or two and would be the next best thing - could resolve surface details in exoplanets out to around 100LY, just need to build (and power) a very big telescope at about 500-800AU - a hell of a long way out, voyager is around 150AU, but nothing compared to a light year (~60k AU). If there are high tech aliens within 100 LY they would have built one and can see our cities.

A Solar Gravitational Lens Will be Humanity's Most Powerful Telescope. What are its Best Targets? - Universe Today

[Stringswinger]

Perhaps we are the alien beings, brought here by superior beings who wanted to get rid of us?

[Sigmund451]

We dont need to go to another planet. We will just screw that one up too.

[DawgBone]

Demons.

[RLetson]

Somewhere/somewhen in a universe containing an estimated 100 billion galaxies (ours has about 400 billion stars), it seems not-improbably that "life" (whatever that means) has emerged. But it's also likely that we will never know, for reasons too numerous to list here.

As for visitation by star-travelling creatures--see above. Not that it's not fun to speculate about the what-ifs.

[BWV]

Somewhere/somewhen in a universe containing an estimated 100 billion galaxies (ours has about 400 billion stars), it seems not-improbably that "life" (whatever that means) has emerged. But it's also likely that we will never know, for reasons too numerous to list here.

As for visitation by star-travelling creatures--see above. Not that it's not fun to speculate about the what-ifs.

Over the next decade or so, the techniques and tools to analyze exoplanets will get good enough to find chemical signatures of life in atmospheres, it likely wont be overwhelmingly conclusive as inorganic explanations cannot be ruled out, but we could become statistically confident if we see enough

[Woody Sound]

Do i think we're alone in the entire universe? No way.

Do i think anybody has visited us? Not likely. My take is if any other planet had the tech to reach us, they'd also know we have absolutely nothing to offer them.

Maybe some relatively scarce minerals?

[339 in june]

Sure aliens exist !
Allan Holdsworth was one of them.

[Woody Sound]

I definitely believe there is something "more advanced" out there among us, whether a higher power, Godly, otherworldly, or a combination of some/all of them.

[Mick-7]

Perhaps we are the alien beings, brought here by superior beings who wanted to get rid of us?

There was an Outer Limits (60's American TV series) episode in which the extraterrestrials deported their convicts to Earth - a cruel and unusual punishment if you ask me. The funny thing was that the producers used potato bugs as the aliens.

[Stevebol]

Perhaps we are the alien beings, brought here by superior beings who wanted to get rid of us?

Defective. Like Australians. It was a prison colony.

That makes total sense. We were banished to a planet with limited fresh water.

[darkwaters]

Take some key organic compounds; place them on every conceivable rock, both large and small, everywhere in the universe; hope that a few of the rocks have stable environments for a few billion years and that these particular rocks have for the most part, conditions that will support some kind of life; make yourself a cup of tea, sit back and wait. Voila!

I suspect that life is relatively common in the universe.

I also suspect that I wouldn’t want to meet some of it in a dark alley……..

[Bob_Ross]

I don't see how it would greatly change my life or anyone else's if we had definitive proof.

The argument I always hear is that confirmation of life elsewhere -- especially "intelligent life", and especially "intelligent life" that may have somehow been responsible for our life on this planet -- would throw the world's organized religions into a tizzy, because it would disprove all of their Origin Stories and call into question the whole Made In God's Image thing.

But as I see it, the majority of folks who subscribe to organized religion's Origin Stories and the whole Made In God's Image thing aren't willing to make the intellectual investment into concluding how the confirmation of life elsewhere threatens their own spiritual logic. It's not as simple as "Oh, aliens exist? Therefore god doesn't." And people who are diehard adherents to dogma rarely think things through beyond the most simple (simplistic?) explanations...practically by definition.

So yeah, I think a small portion of Earth's population would find the confirmation of life elsewhere a complete gamechanger, and the vast portion would be like "Huh...well, gotta go mow the lawn."

[emanresu]

Didn't read any of the posts yet to avoid getting biased and argumentative in this silly topic.

Currently my opinion is that if there ARE aliens and life - that would be no surprise whatsoever.
If it turns out that there are none, a rock solid proof of that - no alien life at all, that would be a grand surprise for me.

The reasoning is simple - we are here, hence life is totally possible. If there are more, that just makes sense.
There is absolutely no way to prove that there is no other life in universe whatsoever. So, who comes up with a rock solid proof that there ain't any, should get some kind of prize.

[Christian Miller]

I was fascinated by UFO's when I was a kid, not as an adult. Spielberg clearly is and he's got some good movies out of it! Maybe I'll see the new one.

UFO's are a sort of modern quasi-technological folklore, so the phenomenon is really interesting from that point of view. I don't think it has much to do with actual possible alien life, for various reasons.

As for the existence of intelligent life in the universe... it's really something that I have no opinion on. Not enough data.

In an infinite universe (which many believe it to be) intelligent life will arise an infinite number of times. The question is more - will we see them, let alone meet them?

The finite odds are important. If other life is forever causally disconnected behind the cosmic horizon - so say the odds are less than 1 in a trillion trillion, it is no different to being alone.

It does seem that complex life on Earth hinges on a number of unlikely events in the planet's past - the creation of a large satellite that stabilises the planet's rotation, plate tectonics driving the carbon cycle, the presence of a magnetic field, the ozone layer, etc - and some of these features are unique to Earth along with its more obvious traits such as it's Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere and liquid water oceans. And it is not the case that the Earth was always habitable for complex life. OTOH it will not always be true - it's though that in a billion years + our planet will start to resemble Venus due to the sun's gradual warming (long before we get to the Red Giant phase). AFAIK I'm not sure we can rule out the same fate befell Venus in the distant past.

So we have a cosmologically narrow window in time, as well as a vast universe. Possibly things like the prevalence of massive cosmic boomy things like Gamma Ray Bursts earlier on in the history of the universe might constrain life to this later and calmer era. We might be among the first. But who knows, honestly?

So the question is just how unlikely is life? Detection is hard, as it turns out. We couldn't detect ourselves from more than a few light years away IIRC. If the odds of a technological civilisation emerging are remote enough that we only have on average one per galaxy - say one in a trillion - might it be possible that we'd never make contact?

Even if the odds are one in a billion - 500 civilisations in our own galaxy might not be possible to spot? Especially if they have a finite lifespan. The galaxy is kind of big.

But we don't know the odds. More research needed. Must a planet look just like Earth to harbour intelligent life? Must it look like Earth at all for that matter? Maybe we are hopelessly prejudiced towards are own viewpoint of what life is, because of the circumstances of our evolution.

And there's all the various Fermi paradox solutions, from serious through to daft.

So plenty of room for science fiction stories, but I can't imagine a more frustrating branch of science than exobiology and SETI! Glad people are doing it though.

[emanresu]

Well, they are constantly rubbing away the magic of how life works. Such a crazy job.
But eventually they could reach to the simplest possible arrangment of atoms that would have the... needed requirements to be life-like.
The trouble is that those first ones are long gone. Or maybe treated as an error in some measuring tools even?
Point is, now all life here is so complex that we are unable to even find the simplicity there anymore.
The new form often eats up the old one or makes them uncomfortable to go on. Complex won over and over. The clues how it started are just gone.

edit: oh, i forgot about the thing. Since we have no clue how it started, there is no valid formula how to predict the chances of it happening. The most important variable is missing, the most impactful.

[Christian Miller]

The argument I always hear is that confirmation of life elsewhere -- especially "intelligent life", and especially "intelligent life" that may have somehow been responsible for our life on this planet -- would throw the world's organized religions into a tizzy, because it would disprove all of their Origin Stories and call into question the whole Made In God's Image thing.

But as I see it, the majority of folks who subscribe to organized religion's Origin Stories and the whole Made In God's Image thing aren't willing to make the intellectual investment into concluding how the confirmation of life elsewhere threatens their own spiritual logic. It's not as simple as "Oh, aliens exist? Therefore god doesn't." And people who are diehard adherents to dogma rarely think things through beyond the most simple (simplistic?) explanations...practically by definition.

True.

I think this also misunderstands religion, I know there's a lot of fundamentalists out there, but there's plenty of observant religious people who don't believe in the literal truth of their faith's creation myths and so on. (There's a book sitting on my shelf called 'the Lost Art of Scripture' that I must read at some point.) OTOH even though most scientists identify as non-believers, there is still a significant percentage of religious scientists out there (I'm not talking about creationists etc). The existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life could probably be absorbed into the world religions. They are flexible and have survived a great deal of change over their histories.

Have you read James Blish's A Case in Conscience? I remember that exploring some of these ideas in quite a fun way. Sort of daft, but clever, if that makes any sense. There's a small sub genre of "Jesuits in Space" science fiction. Makes for rich story telling.

So yeah, I think a small portion of Earth's population would find the confirmation of life elsewhere a complete gamechanger, and the vast portion would be like "Huh...well, gotta go mow the lawn."

Especially if communication with them was slow and difficult, as seems likely. In fact detection itself could be hard to confirm and remain inconclusive for decades. We've seen that with bio-signatures on Mars - there's been a few possibles. Did Viking detect Martian life in the 70s? Some scientists point out that we may have been too quick to rule it out at the time. But we don't know.

Life goes on.

[palindrome]

I think extraterrestrial life will be suddenly and under-whelmingly proven by the existence of microbes on Mars or ice from an asteroid. It will simultaneously be one of the greatest scientific discoveries and also completely inconsequential.

This would likely just shift the focus of likelihood discussions to the likelihood of cross-contamination, requiring new unlikely mathematical models, etc. ;-)

[Litterick]

Since we know of only one planet that supports life, how can we say anything about the possibility of life on other planets?