02GF74
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| posted on 20/8/12 at 05:51 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by MikeFellows
im sure other life must exist. the shear number of stars in the observable universe makes me believe that its impossible life doesnt exist elsewhere.
......
i hear what you are saying but that is not the conclusion i can come to.
Let's say you bought a ford capri and found a pair of ladies undies under the back seat. There were tens of thousands of capris made, how many
of them would have ladies underwear in them? it is impossible to say as you have insufficeient data i.e. you have one sample. It does not follow
that if 100 million billion capris were made then there would be another or more that had pants in the back. The one you purchased may be unique for
all time.
If you examined 1,000 capris and found pants, then using probablity, you could say there were other capris with pants and how often you would come
across one due to the larger sample.
Using probabiblity can make preditctions if you can model the item - say it is a dice. Using physics, you can accept that the dice will land on one
side, and all things being equal, the chance is 1/6 for any one side. I don't see how you can say the same about life. Given the age of the
earth, how come we haven't discovered life that is not related to what is living now (ignoring bacteria and virus). surely given that much
time, you would think differet types of living creatures that are unrelated to what we have now would have appeared? maybe they have but could not
compete and left no trace.
we have theories of how life started - the primodrial soup - but nobody has created life yet alone proteins in a lab - there is so much we don't
know.
as said, quoting n billion suns with x billion planets is just that - it is no guarantee of life.
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Mr Whippy
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 11:33 AM |
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to me the most disturbing thing so far is just how quiet it is out there, nothing seems to be going on out in space, no signals, alien tv or
communications zip, SETI has been going for ages now and it's not getting anywhere, this seems very odd
Considering our earth beams out heaps of tell table radio noise, why so far apart from the stray WOW signal it's deathly silent in space, surely
we'd pick up something by now?? I'm all for building a huge radio array on the far side of the moon and just seeing if anything shows up.
Finding life is one thing but really only finding an advanced race is of interest, then we'll know where we stand. It's a shame science
seems to shy away from SETI like research yet if they did find another advanced race it would be the biggest discovery in human history
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mookaloid
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 01:19 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by 02GF74
quote:
Originally posted by MikeFellows
im sure other life must exist. the shear number of stars in the observable universe makes me believe that its impossible life doesnt exist elsewhere.
......
i hear what you are saying but that is not the conclusion i can come to.
Let's say you bought a ford capri and found a pair of ladies undies under the back seat. There were tens of thousands of capris made, how many
of them would have ladies underwear in them? it is impossible to say as you have insufficeient data i.e. you have one sample. It does not follow
that if 100 million billion capris were made then there would be another or more that had pants in the back. The one you purchased may be unique for
all time.
If you examined 1,000 capris and found pants, then using probablity, you could say there were other capris with pants and how often you would come
across one due to the larger sample.
Using probabiblity can make preditctions if you can model the item - say it is a dice. Using physics, you can accept that the dice will land on one
side, and all things being equal, the chance is 1/6 for any one side. I don't see how you can say the same about life. Given the age of the
earth, how come we haven't discovered life that is not related to what is living now (ignoring bacteria and virus). surely given that much
time, you would think differet types of living creatures that are unrelated to what we have now would have appeared? maybe they have but could not
compete and left no trace.
we have theories of how life started - the primodrial soup - but nobody has created life yet alone proteins in a lab - there is so much we don't
know.
as said, quoting n billion suns with x billion planets is just that - it is no guarantee of life.
I'm with Mike on this.
I mean space is big - really BIG - HUGE in fact. I refuse to believe that anything like our evolution would only happen once. It happened at least
once so it could happen again.
The other thing is time - It may have already happened millions of years ago and the lifeforms are now extinct. it may be some time before on some
blue green planet far far away something crawls out of some soupy substance and thinks to itself 'Oh this is new - I wonder where am I? What am
I? etc.etc. - I wonder if I am alone in the universe?' In our meagre understanding of time - which is even harder to get your head round than
space - it is even harder to believe not only that there must be life out there somewhere but there must be life out there sometime .........
"That thing you're thinking - it wont be that."
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02GF74
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 01:46 PM |
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^^^^ that is an example of faith - you believe in something to be true, becasue you want it to be true yet have no evidence of it.
maybe there is life eslewhere, maybe there isn't - stating the number of planets similar to earth that can support life is not evidence.
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mookaloid
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 02:09 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by 02GF74
^^^^ that is an example of faith - you believe in something to be true, becasue you want it to be true yet have no evidence of it.
maybe there is life eslewhere, maybe there isn't - stating the number of planets similar to earth that can support life is not evidence.
The evidence that it is possible is our very existence.
Whether you think it is likely or not is up to you. I think it is unlikely not only that we are the only examples of life in the universe but also
that it is unlikely that it has never happened before or that it is unlikely that it will never happen again.
I can think of many things that I know to be true - but I can't see them.
Anyway the day the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives I'll make sure that my mate Ford (Prefect) is in the vicinity - oh and I'll just go and
make sure I know where I can put my hands on a towel.....
"That thing you're thinking - it wont be that."
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Mr Whippy
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 02:42 PM |
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the interesting thing about life is just how quickly it started, almost as soon as it could exist on the earth it appeared. It seems to suggest that
life is easy to get going and hard to stop when it does.
There may be no proof yet and some may call it just fail but you can use some common sense to gauge how likely it is to happen elsewhere.
However that is totally separate to the speculation that alien flying saucers are in our sky's! Look on you tube and you can’t help be
disappointed at the masses of lame ‘Best UFO Ever!!!’ videos. How many billions of camera phones are there now? How could a UFO not be filmed?!
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Irony
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 02:59 PM |
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I believe there is life out there somewhere. The universe is rather large and we a very very very small part of it. Those lame drawings in school
text books with all the planets lined up confuse people. Our solar system is simply enormous! I cannot believe something so tiny as the human race
is unique in the universe.
Amazing star scale video
[Edited on 21/8/12 by Irony]
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whitestu
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 03:06 PM |
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quote:
Anyway the day the Vogon Constructor Fleet arrives I'll make sure that my mate Ford (Prefect) is in the vicinity - oh and I'll just go and
make sure I know where I can put my hands on a towel.....
To paraphrase the guide again, if the universe has an infiite number of planets, and we know not all have life, then the average population of the
planets in the universe is zero (i.e any finite number divided by infinity).
On that basis none of us exist!
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woodster
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 03:07 PM |
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as prof Brian Cox has said the puzzling question is with the universe being so huge and so old why have we never been visited by aliens?
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Irony
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 03:28 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by woodster
as prof Brian Cox has said the puzzling question is with the universe being so huge and so old why have we never been visited by aliens?
Prime Directive: Rule of First Contact from Star Trek says something like:
"no civilisation should be contacted before a certain technological advancements are achieved (i.e warp capability) to prevent the said
civilisation from having its natural course of evolution disrupted"
Brian Cox obviously is not a Trek fan.
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russbost
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 04:07 PM |
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There are three different things here
1. Have I seen a UFO, yes, twice actually, do I think they were alien spacecraft, resounding NO. Of course there are loads of UFO sightings, planes,
ballons, weather ballons, chinese lanterns, even skydivers etc, if you see things at or from strange angles, if they reflect light, if it's at
night & they have lights on they can appear really weird. I'm a pilot (PPL) & things can look even more odd when you're in the
air, things usually become apparent after a while as to what they actually are, but on at least 2 occasions from the ground I've never been able
to work out what things were, one looked vaguely like a flying dustbin & the other was a strange light (I would suspect that one one was probably
sunlight reflecting off something)
2. Is there life on other planets, well, given the sheer no. of galaxies (100's of billions), almost all of which will have at least one planet
with the vague possibility that it could support at least basic life like microbes, viruses etc. I think almost certainly yes. Even if the chances of
life occuring once in a million years on the number of known planets was tiny, we have a lot of millions of years for it to have happened in, plus
there are almost certainly many billions of planets we have no knowledge of their existance as yet. We have life in freezing cold places, almost
completely dry places & places where the heat & chemical content/pressure of the water would kill us in seconds (undersea hydrothermal vents
in case you were wondering) so I think the chances of there being NO life ANYWHERE in the universe is highly unlikely - it doesn't even have to
be carbon based, which opens up even more possibilities.
3. Is there intelligent life - ahh! now, this is somewhat more tricky, for a start, how intelligent, a cockroach isn't very bright, but
it's rather more compex than a simple bacteria or a single cell creature. Are we talking sheep intelligent, cat/dog/chimp/dolphin intelligent or
are we talking human intelligent? Either way, I think chances of finding anything even as smart as a cockroach are an awful lot smaller than finding
some form of micro biological life such as suggested in 2. Apparently, from recent findings, for us to have got where we are from chimp intelligence
has required an extremely unlikely brain mutation to happen not once, but twice since our ancestors became a separate species from the chimp, so
chances of us being as bright as we are are ridiculously small in the first place! (Looking around Basildon on a Saturday afternoon I suspect some of
the population has missed at least one of those mutations!!! )
Finally even if we take the argument from 3. & say, ah, yes, but with so many planets in so many galaxies there must be intelligent life
somewhere, well ok, lets say there is, but even if it's fairly close, say 100 thousand light years, & even if this life were way more
intelligent than us way, way back in time, then unless they've found a way of exploiting worm holes in space (believed to exist, but requiring
more energy to open one than everything we've generated as a human race so far!) or some method of travelling A LOT faster than light (still
believed impossible by current thinking, tho' they did think they'd found some neutrinos travelling fractionally faster than light last
year, but turned out to be experimental error!) then they're still on their way & will be for an awful lot more than our lifetimes.
If they had started their own SETI programme 99,000 years ago we'd still be waiting for the first signal to get here & presumably the guys
that sent it would be long dead, & it would take a similar time to send a signal back even if we could translate what they'd sent & send
a reply.
All in all I think the main reason why we're highly unlikely to see an alien any time shortly is simply because space is kinda large!
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MRLuke
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 05:31 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by 02GF74
quote:
Originally posted by bi22le
Defiantly other life forms out there. Pretty much scientifically proven.
nonsense. there is no proof, saying there are billions of galaxies with millions of stars that may have planets of similar distance as earth is to
our sun is not proof - it is simply stating there are planets they are like earth and could support life.
life is only found on one place so there insufficient data to use probalilties to extrapolate that lfe exists elsewhere. what happened on earth to
give rise to life may be a unique and unrepeatable event like the big band.
The problem is there is precious little about Earth that is actually unique. The top 5 most prevalent elements within the human body are the top 5
most prevalent elements throughout the universe and in pretty much the same mix.
We share 98% of our dna with a worm, we are only 2% different. How much time and energy would you expend to investigate a worm? If there is life out
there that is even 2% different to us it would come here and be so far ahead that we would be worms to them.
Ultimately the most inexplicable ufo sightings are likely to be American or Russian as the source for the OP article stated when interviewed  .
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02GF74
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 06:05 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by Irony
I believe there is life out there somewhere. The universe is rather large and we a very very very small part of it.
we don't need to look that far out, there are two places in our own solar system: Jupiter’s moon Europa and Mars that could support life as know
on earth - without googling, i don't know how much time these 2 places have had for life to start up but AFAIK both draw a blank.
[Edited on 21/8/12 by 02GF74]
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JoelP
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 08:32 PM |
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Good timing this thread, i saw one just yesterday!
Ive never been good with birds - it was little, speckly and brown.
Beware! Bourettes is binfectious.
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JoelP
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 08:36 PM |
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On a more serious note, if we are alone in the universe, then the chance of our happening was something in the order of one in a billion billion
billion. Thats quite an unlikely event to have happened, but it did. So i think it more likely that the event wasnt actually that unlikely, and infact
we are not unique.
Beware! Bourettes is binfectious.
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woodster
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 08:37 PM |
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Maybe life was found On mars a few years ago .....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2191650/Curiosity-Did-NASA-discover-life-Mars--36-years-ago.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
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Ninehigh
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 08:37 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by Mr Whippy
to me the most disturbing thing so far is just how quiet it is out there, nothing seems to be going on out in space, no signals, alien tv or
communications zip, SETI has been going for ages now and it's not getting anywhere, this seems very odd
Considering our earth beams out heaps of tell table radio noise, why so far apart from the stray WOW signal it's deathly silent in space, surely
we'd pick up something by now?? I'm all for building a huge radio array on the far side of the moon and just seeing if anything shows up.
Provided they're sending something out we can pick up...
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hillbillyracer
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 09:57 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by 02GF74
quote:
Originally posted by MikeFellows
im sure other life must exist. the shear number of stars in the observable universe makes me believe that its impossible life doesnt exist elsewhere.
......
i hear what you are saying but that is not the conclusion i can come to.
Let's say you bought a ford capri and found a pair of ladies undies under the back seat. There were tens of thousands of capris made, how many
of them would have ladies underwear in them? it is impossible to say as you have insufficeient data i.e. you have one sample. It does not follow
that if 100 million billion capris were made then there would be another or more that had pants in the back. The one you purchased may be unique for
all time.
If you examined 1,000 capris and found pants, then using probablity, you could say there were other capris with pants and how often you would come
across one due to the larger sample.
Using probabiblity can make preditctions if you can model the item - say it is a dice. Using physics, you can accept that the dice will land on one
side, and all things being equal, the chance is 1/6 for any one side. I don't see how you can say the same about life. Given the age of the
earth, how come we haven't discovered life that is not related to what is living now (ignoring bacteria and virus). surely given that much
time, you would think differet types of living creatures that are unrelated to what we have now would have appeared? maybe they have but could not
compete and left no trace.
we have theories of how life started - the primodrial soup - but nobody has created life yet alone proteins in a lab - there is so much we don't
know.
as said, quoting n billion suns with x billion planets is just that - it is no guarantee of life.
I have a Ford Capri, there is no underwear beneath the rear seat. This does not prove or disprove the existence of alien life.
However, given the racy thing a Capri was in its day it has a higher probability than average that such circumstances could arise, though they would
likely have been there since the early 1980s & therefore may have potential for a life form of their own by now.
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Mr Whippy
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 10:47 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by Ninehigh
quote:
Originally posted by Mr Whippy
to me the most disturbing thing so far is just how quiet it is out there, nothing seems to be going on out in space, no signals, alien tv or
communications zip, SETI has been going for ages now and it's not getting anywhere, this seems very odd
Considering our earth beams out heaps of tell table radio noise, why so far apart from the stray WOW signal it's deathly silent in space, surely
we'd pick up something by now?? I'm all for building a huge radio array on the far side of the moon and just seeing if anything shows up.
Provided they're sending something out we can pick up...
that's very true but radio is just so good, very simple and efficient who wouldn't want to use it? we ourselves seem to be using it ever
more rather than turning to something else. There may be some fab new tech that will replace it some day but it seems to have a very long useful life
for communication, we may just not have the sensitivity required to pick it up yet but I think it's well worth a damn good search, not so much
as a intentional signal to us which is very unlikely but just normal chatter around a planet like ours.
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Ninehigh
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| posted on 21/8/12 at 11:44 PM |
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Well it's an alien planet so who's to say they don't see in radio waves and communicate globally in some other way we can't
detect (maybe the range isn't there) or aren't looking for.
Also bear in mind our earliest radio transmissions are what, 70 years old? That's not very far in galactic terms, I mean if someone else is
picking this up they might well be thinking we're fighting the Germans atm
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Simon
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| posted on 22/8/12 at 01:57 AM |
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quote:
Originally posted by 02GF74
nonsense. there is no proof, saying there are billions of galaxies with millions of stars that may have planets of similar distance as earth is to
our sun is not proof - it is simply stating there are planets they are like earth and could support life.
life is only found on one place so there insufficient data to use probalilties to extrapolate that lfe exists elsewhere. what happened on earth to
give rise to life may be a unique and unrepeatable event like the big band.
If there is one planet that has/had/shall have life (ie this one), and yes I avoided the "intelligent" bit deliberately, then
mathmatically it (and us) can't exist. After all, 1/infinity = 0. Based on fact, we know one planet has life and the planet hunters have checked
possibly 20,0000 stars in our galaxy, so on that basis of 1/20,000 gives us over a million stars with planets supporting sentient beings at the
moment and ignoring all those that may have risen and fallen
Universe is approx 13,750,000,000 years old (unless your a fan of many on the gods alledgedly on this planet, where it can be anything from 10 -
20,000 years old).
In that 13,750,000,000 years I suspect many civilisations have risen and fallen - in fact, given the age of the universe and the number of stars
(200,000,000,000 ish) in each of the infinite number of galaxies, I'd say the chances of something similar to Star Wars actually happening quite
good.
Re the SETI thing, do you think the aliens have switched to digital yet. Maybe that's why we can't hear anything. Also, our nearest star
is 4 light years away, do you honestly think that a radio signal sent (ie Hitlers little speech) was broadcast with much more power than a couple of
thousand watts, and imagine what chance a 1000 watt bulb would look like from 4 ly away.
Just because we can't do interstellar speeds doesn't mean another spacefaring civilisation can't. Even if FTL is actually impossible
(which I don't by the way), there's always the generational spaceship as an alternative, whereby a species might take thousands of years
to make a journey.
For what it's worth, I think a visit from outer space is unlikely, just hope they're more vulcaneqsue than borq though , but I think a god
far more preposterous.
ATB
Simon
[Edited on 22/8/12 by Simon]
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Ninehigh
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| posted on 22/8/12 at 03:30 AM |
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I came home drunk one night and really fancied a bacon butty. The next morning I found an unidentified fried object
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02GF74
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| posted on 22/8/12 at 07:54 AM |
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quote:
Originally posted by Simon
In that 13,750,000,000 years I suspect many civilisations have risen and fallen - in fact, given the age of the universe and the number of stars
(200,000,000,000 ish) in each of the infinite number of galaxies, I'd say the chances of something similar to Star Wars actually happening quite
good.
I accept the estimates for the number of planets that are earthlike but the other side of the coin is the sequence of events that are required to
start life that seems to be ignored.
We do not know what they are else life would have been created in the laboratory. Something happened on earth 3.8 billion years ago that may have
been a result of rare events occuring in a specific number within a given time - the probablilty of it being inifinitely infinitisimal but it
happened. As we don't know what these events are, it may be that they can never ever happen again thus making like on earth unique for all
time.
An analogy is the monekys with typwriters that will eventually product the complete works of Shakespeare - on paper if can happen but in reality?
(even with a finite number of monkeys e.g. the number of planets that could support like it may take longer than the entrie lifetime of the universe
multipled by iteslf a billion times = never).
quote:
"The appearance of such a molecule, given the way chemistry
functions, is incredibly improbable. It would be a once-in-a-universe long shot," said Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University.
"To adopt this view, you have to believe we were incredibly lucky."
<--- linky
also worth a read
(btw it's all fascinating stuff!!)
[Edited on 22/8/12 by 02GF74]
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