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Carl Sagan never said that. He was a big champion of the Drake Equation.
My bad. It's been 30 years ago. Memory ain't what it used to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Redshadowz
But in all seriousness, there is a difference between a possibility and a probability.
Absolutely! Agreed.
The problem is that the materialist reductionists (and I get the impression that's what you're espousing) insist on a level of proof for questions like these that they would apply to no other area of life.
For example: I have absolutely no proof that you are a human being. I can't prove it. I have ZERO conclusive evidence. But given the evidence that I do have and my knowledge of the way the world works, I am reasonably certain that you are, in fact, a human being. I'd even go so far as to say 99.9999% probability.
So the same goes for the question about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Given all that we know of how life developed on Earth, how life might develop elsewhere, the number of planets in the Goldilocks Zone ... I'm betting it's probable that life is out there somewhere. Maybe even life of a kind we have never seen.
Can I prove it? Nope. But neither can I prove you are a human being.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Redshadowz
Do you understand why I get so triggered?
No. But I find it hilarious that you seem to get so worked up about it. Rock on, dude!
Why would the universe being big prove that there is alien life?
I always laugh when the same atheists crying about people believing things without evidence, believe things without evidence and think people who don't are stupid.
Why would the universe being big prove that there is alien life?
- Statistics. The larger the universe, the greater liklihood of planets that would support organic life.
When you talk of "evidence" of alien life, you are talking about essentially contact with those forms of life. As stated earlier, the chance of encounters with any alien life is statistically zero. This is due to:
1. limited organic life spans
2. the vast distances of space
3. differences in time relativity due to speed
4. the inability of conventional propulsion to reach distant destinations
5. the size of planets (the greater the gravity, the less chance of achieving escape velocity)
There is no question that there is organic life "out there", but we will never encounter those life forms. Even "messages" transmitted from outerspace would only arrive at earth long after whatever civilization sent them has perished.
Also: Defining "Life" isn't as easy as you might think. On Earth, life is strictly carbon-based. Must it be everywhere? Nope. But defining exactly what we mean by "life" isn't quite that simple.
The unanswerable questions begin with the one posed for the opening lecturer Monday, Jan. 26: “What is Life?”
“It’s an impossible question and an implausible task,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory. “My goal is to remind people why the question is interesting.”
Consolmagno, whose ability to translate cutting-edge science to the general public earned him the Carl Sagan medal last year from the American Astronomical Society, said the answer has changed through history.
“At the time of Plato, it was that life is anything that moved.”
Another theory — the notion of some ineffable “life force” — persisted among scientists known as “vitalists” into the 20th century.
“The real mistake of the vitalists is that they wanted life to be an ingredient alongside carbon and water, as if the thing that makes life interesting is something you could lay on a scale or see under a microscope.
“Now we tend to go in the opposite direction and say life is mechanical,” Consolmagno said. “It’s this series of chemical reactions. In planetary exploration, we look for elements and molecules that are part of our particular recipe.
“The point is that there is something about life that gives us a value and an interest that has nothing to do with its mechanisms, nothing to do with its chemical reactions. Science can only study the mechanism,” he said.
And that mechanism might be vastly different elsewhere.
“I don’t think we’ll really know what life is until we find other examples of it elsewhere in the universe,” Consolmagno said.
Why would the universe being big prove that there is alien life?
Size is relative. The universe is presumably expanding into something. Into ... what? But at least in theory, "space" is not only infinitely large, it is infinitely small.
Imagine the entire cosmos expanding, then imagine that as the size of a marble. Now imagine the size of 10 trillion marbles. No imagine that 10 trillion times larger still. Your imagination can go into the infinite --- and we have no way to prove whether or not that is indeed the way reality is.
But the reverse is true as well. Imagine a quark. Now think of that quark as the size of the cosmos. Now imagine something relatively the size of an atom to that. Then again. Then again. "Small" also goes into the infinite. At least in terms of what we can conceive. Is that the way reality really is? We have no way to know at the moment.
But if it is true, who knows what life might exist not only "out there" but "in here?"
And who knows? Maybe life in "Inner Space" are a bunch of super heroes and villains with their own toy line?
Quote:
Originally Posted by hawkeye2009
There is no question that there is organic life "out there"
I think that might be overstating the facts. I do think life "out there" is very, very probable. But "no question???" No, I don't think we can say that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hawkeye2009
but we will never encounter those life forms. Even "messages" transmitted from outerspace would only arrive at earth long after whatever civilization sent them has perished.
Those are both assumptions. You might be right. But you might be wrong.
Our own physicists are already figuring out that there may be ways to travel beyond simply going from Point A to Point B really, really fast. And we only figured out human flight a little over a century ago. Imagine what another civilization might have achieved that is 10,000 years beyond our own technological advancement.
I'm not claiming there is any evidence for this. There isn't. At least none that I have ever seen. But it isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
I personally believe there are billions of human civilizations out there in the universe. We are all a result of the same Big Bang. It’s stupid to believe only this planet ended up with life.
Humanoid.
"Human" is our species. Unless you think humans left the Earth and went to other planets.. There aren't HUMAN civilizations out there. Humanoid, or human-like, yes, that i'll go with.
Imagine what another civilization might have achieved that is 10,000 years beyond our own technological advancement.
I'm not claiming there is any evidence for this. There isn't. At least none that I have ever seen. But it isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
I think that with enough time humans will eventually become a non-biological form. We are just a century since the first aircraft but already are developing mind-body interfaced prosthetics. A civilization 10,000 or 100,000,000 years older than ours may have become non-planetary, non-biological and impossible for us to even detect. If I could load my consciousness into my starship, the time in transit would not be material. Of course, I'll still depend on wild luck to actually arrive somewhere at the same time that an alien is there.
Thanks to new research using data from the Kepler space telescope, it’s estimated that there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy.
Based on those numbers I'd say the odds of there being intelligent life on other planets are slim to none . . . which makes the odds of me being the smartest person in the universe virtually guaranteed.
Why would the universe being big prove that there is alien life?
I always laugh when the same atheists crying about people believing things without evidence, believe things without evidence and think people who don't are stupid.
Mathematically, it seems implausible that among the Billions of galaxies, containing hundreds of billions of stars, and trillions of planets, only this one planet we call earth has life? Sounds like a mathematical impossibility.
Why would the universe being big prove that there is alien life?
I always laugh when the same atheists crying about people believing things without evidence, believe things without evidence and think people who don't are stupid.
The thing is, we have one definite example of life evolving on a planet, orbiting a star in the habitable zone. So we know empirically that it is possible.
Is your conviction that no intelligent extraterrestrial life exists religious in nature? I'm asking because of your earlier atheist comment.
No. I'm not religious, but atheists annoy me. I feel like atheists have this chip on their shoulder where they consciously or subconsciously want to disprove religion, and so they gravitate towards whatever position is the opposite of whatever religion would be.
Prior to this thread, I had spent a few days arguing with people in youtube comments about this video.
Half the comments are things like "This disproves the bible".
Mark S complained earlier about "modern materialistic arrogance". Well, I find no one more arrogant than these people who seem convinced that the science is on their side(it rarely is).
I'm really just a skeptic, and when someone claims to know something without evidence, or if what they are saying is provably untrue, I get triggered. Especially when these ideas seem to be the "mainstream narrative". I'm highly sensitive to the motives behind belief, and why certain ideas are being propagated by our institutions.
In my view, atheists aren't skeptics, they're just religion-haters. They don't care about the science. Whatever science they know is just what they need to justify their worldview.
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Rock on, dude!
