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Other 'alive' worlds other than earth

 
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It is huge out there. Our life (earth, etc.) formation is just a very small part of the entirety.

Biggest thing out there

It should not be impossible for other life to exist out there.

(Just like star trek.....)
 
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Originally posted by Jesus Angeles:
It is huge out there. Our life (earth, etc.) formation is just a very small part of the entirety.

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!

It should not be impossible for other life to exist out there.

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.

And that's just if we're looking at life similar to that on Earth. I suspect that life is a lot more common then we may think.

(Just like star trek.....)

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.
 
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Are they exploring possibilities of out-sourcing some of their job?
 
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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.



True. We have been emitting radio signals for 50 years. And the radio signals transmitted so far, are powerful enough to travel for only 50 years. The problem is, this will cover only fraction of milky way area,let alone andromeda(nearest galaxy).

About existance of life, scientists are alreday finding life on earth in extremely improbable places, like in deep sea near Indonesia where the water temprature is more than 80 degree Celcius, highly contaminated toxic water and water pressure "enough to reduce human body to pulp.
Other places they found life was deep inside caves where no sunlight ever passes and no water is available. That life is not necessarily intelligent with its own defence system .

The question is, if life can exist and even flourish in unlikely circumstances here, why not on the other planets ?

The fundamental belief, that life can exist in a very narrow range of situations, is proving wrong.
 
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And remember that we may not even recognise it as life when and if we meet it.
We're completely geared towards carbonbased life in a water/oxygen biosphere, but there are other possibillities.
A silicon based lifeform is for example certainly possible, and lifeforms using other means of combustion than burning carbon and oxygen can certainly not be excluded.

But even if it were to be a carbon based ecology, we may not recognise it as being alive, let alone intelligent.
 
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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.

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.

Besides, interesting though it may be to find alien life, I'm not sure that contact would be that beneficial for us. The history of biology shows that when you introduce a new species into an environment, it often either dies out or kills off a previous resident of the environment. Contact with an alien species could upset either our or their environment and end rather disastrously for them or us. Do we want to take the risk that they'll come off better?

This effect could happen quicker if the alien is intelligent. We like to think of humans as being a fairly decent species, and yet just about every time a strong human culture has encountered a weaker one for the first time, the weaker one ends up being severely damaged. The European settlement of the Americas were good examples of this.

Apes, dolphins and whales are other examples. Compared to most other species on the planet they are pretty intelligent, and yet we come along and casually set about eradicating them. This instinct to crush weaker cultures and species may be a uniquely human characteristic, but I wouldn't mind betting it isn't.
[ August 01, 2006: Message edited by: Dave Lenton ]
 
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Alasdair Reynolds puts forward a good theory in his Sci-Fi novels, on why we havent came across intelligent life yet, despite the probability that there should be a great abundance of it.

The Inhibitors
 
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