Indeed. We're really living on a small crumb of material left over from the creation of the Sun. Even the Sun is fairly insignificant when you look at how many are in our galaxy, and at the current estimations of how many galaxies there are. Its a good indication of how insignificant some of our daily concerns are in the grand scheme of things!Originally posted by Jesus Angeles:
It is huge out there. Our life (earth, etc.) formation is just a very small part of the entirety.
Absolutely. If just 1% of stars had planets, and 1% of them were in the "water zone" (an orbit allowing liquid water) and just 1% of those had stable enough orbits for a nice atmosphere to form and just 1% of those developed some form of simple life (similar to bacteria etc) then there would still be a huge number of planets out there with life.It should not be impossible for other life to exist out there.
On the other hand, I doubt that there will be a Star Trek type situation out there. Even though life is probably quite common, intelligent life will be a lot rarer. Intelligence is still likely, and there will be a lot of it out there, but the implication of all those "1%"s above is that the planets with intelligence on will be very spread out. Given the huge size of the universe, I suspect that we'll never actually meet any extra-terrestrial intelligent species.(Just like star trek.....)
There will be glitches in my transition from being a saloon bar sage to a world statesman. - Tony Banks
My blood is tested +ve for Java.
Originally posted by Dave Lenton:
Given the huge size of the universe, I suspect that we'll never actually meet any extra-terrestrial intelligent species.
42
We may also have problems recognising the intelligence if it is more advanced then us. In the same way that a dog may not appreciate the intelligence of a human, a human may struggle to understand the intelligence of a super-clever alien.Originally posted by Jeroen T Wenting:
But even if it were to be a carbon based ecology, we may not recognise it as being alive, let alone intelligent.
There will be glitches in my transition from being a saloon bar sage to a world statesman. - Tony Banks
Mark Fletcher - http://www.markfletcher.org/blog
I had some Java certs, but they're too old now...