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alien life possibility is pathetic

Hi

In My Spare Time said:
Not to derail the derail too far, but come summer this phrase represents a very pleasant experience.

And just a guess, but I bet the Safe Zone he referred to is the range from the star where water can be a liquid, but I could be wrong.
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And, to quote a bright red lobster physician of my association, "it has to be water, why?"

Water is cool because it floats when it's frozen and melts a bit when it's compacted. The real important part is that it remains a liquid, even at the extremes of our planet's surface.

I wonder if I could figure out a star-planet system that would allow for... I dunno... liquid methane on the planet that would be liquid from the poles to the equator....
 
Gagglegnash said:
Hi



And, to quote a bright red lobster physician of my association, "it has to be water, why?"

Water is cool because it floats when it's frozen and melts a bit when it's compacted. The real important part is that it remains a liquid, even at the extremes of our planet's surface.

I wonder if I could figure out a star-planet system that would allow for... I dunno... liquid methane on the planet that would be liquid from the poles to the equator....
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I wonder how close Titan comes to this situation. Of course it doesn't have to be water, but water's the easiest solvent based on its abundance. And since the OP is seeming awfully closed minded about this whole thing, I suspect that non water based life did not enter into the thinking.
 
Some Bacteria seem to have a way with dealing with hostile environments
here on this Earth, Deep under the ice, in sulpher vents, in all sorts of hostile to life places.

Ya water is cool in all three states. Gas, liquid and solid.
 
I am quite open to the great possibility of other life forms out there in the far stretches of the universe. I am also open to the great possibility that they could very well be debating right this moment about the possibility of other life forms way over here.
 
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In My Spare Time said:
Not necessary for life to develop, though Jupiter does certainly make extinctions more rare
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Not necessarily, there's also a good argument to be made that Jupiter is responsible for the existence of the asteroid belt. A system without a Jupiter may get more comet impacts on inner planets, but could quite possibly have less impacts overall.

Gagglegnash said:
large jupiter to protect it from meteorites and asteroids

I'll give you this one. I can't think of any advanced organism that could develop under the condition of periodically and frequently being blown back to the single-cell stage.
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Well, firstly this thread seems to be about the possibility of alien life, not necessarily advanced life. Secondly, there have been several major impacts since complex life developed. As far as we know, no impact has ever managed to eliminate multi-cellular life, or even significantly affect the level of complexity of life. More impacts would certainly affect the direction of evolution by adding a major random input, but there seems no reason to assume that it would hold back the development of complex life, and certainly wouldn't prevent life forming in the first place.

To put some numbers to this - major extinction events have occured an average of about one every 100 million years. Even the largest one only killed 70% of land species (although a lot more marine ones), and that's just counting animals and plants, not microbial life. In addition, a very important point to note is that only one mass extinction is actually associated with a known impact.

So what are we left with? In the last 4 billion years, we know of exactly one impact that had a significant effect on life, and that didn't come close to knocking it back to the singular cell level. It should be noted, however, that we don't really know much about extinctions more than 5-600 million years ago. Even assuming that every major extinction we know of was the result of an impact, you could still increase the number of impacts 100 times and still have plenty of time to evolve intelligent life from a reasonably bright ape in between. I would say that even assuming Jupiter does protect us from some impacts (see my reply to In My Spare Time above), a lack of Jupiter would not prevent the evolution of intelligent life, let alone complex life, and certainly wouldn't prevent life occuring in the first place.
 
makaya325 said:
Its the fact that since scientists have lost their sense of logic to debunk any possibility of et life, they just sit their looking for imaginary earth-like planets, which will nevet be found.
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Again, you should probably look up the word "fact."
 
makaya325 said:
You need the right sun, the right planet size, the right galaxy, the right moon, etc and the list goes on and on from there. Why do many of you fall for the et life credibility?
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You are what Carl Sagan would have called an Earth Chauvinist. I suggest you read 'Chauvinism', a chapter in his book 'The Cosmic Connection'. Remember, the way we look today is a product of our ancestors struggling to survive against the enviroment of Earth. The enviroment was not made for us. Instead, we were made by the enviroment. For example, many people are Oxygen Chauvinists, forgetting that life arose on Earth in spite of this toxic gas called Oxygen. Our ancestors had to struggle to adapt to it. People often marvel at our atmosphere, blocking out UV rays, which are fatal to us. They forget, of course, that UV rays are dangerous to us because we arose on a planet without them.

Saying that this is the 'right sun' for life doesn't make much sense. It took almost four billion years to get to Intelligent life, and about three billion to get to simple organisms. In a billion years, life will not be able to survive. Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a good deal, considering the smallest event could have pushed forward the development of Intelligent Life another billion years. Consider a K class star, which lives for trillions of years and imagine the chances for life on one of the planets orbiting that star.

There are creatures under the sea that cluster around vents in the ocean floor, providing heat. They need no sunlight. If every creature on land died, they would never notice, and most likely survive until the end of the Earth.
 
makaya325 said:
I am fully aware of everyone on the forum believing ufo's are simply man made and made up, But im talking about et life. Isnt it so ignorant and wooish to suggest that we arent the only life in the universe? Come on, does anyone see the incredibly complex events on earth that made it even POSSIBLE for the simplest of life to form? How can anyone believe it is even possible for 100's of unique events to happen just right on other planets. You need the right sun, the right planet size, the right galaxy, the right moon, etc and the list goes on and on from there. Why do many of you fall for the et life credibility?
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are the conditions that made life possible on earth, the only conditions that enables life?
 
makaya325 said:
Please listen: The fact that life on earth was a freaking miracle proves that, despite many galaxies, alien life in no shape or form could ever exist. I would wager that 90% of members on jref would agree.
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Ehr, how do you come to the conclusion that life on Earth was a freaking miracle? From our observations on Earth, it seems that live can exist in an extremely wide range of habitats:

- Deep-freeze Arctics.
- Hot oil deposits deep into the ground.
- Thin and cold air, on high mountains.
- Completely dry deserts.
- In the deepest ocean trenches.
- Around hot springs deep in the ocean.

Some of these places are literally teeming with life.

So, planets with conditions just remotely like those of Earth are possible homes to life-forms.

A couple of decades ago, we know of exactly one planet system around a star, namely our own. It was speculated that planet systems might be rare.

Then we started to find exo-planets. We have now detected hundreds of them. http://exoplanet.eu/

It follows from the method of discovering exo-planets that we can only observe them around stars relatively close to us. So the currently 335 known planet systems tell us that in our galaxy alone, there should be billions of them.

So even if we assume that abiogenesis is a very rare occurrence, even on a planet with favorable conditions, it is very likely to have happened elsewhere.

Hans
 
Double post sorry internet funny today.
 
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Undesired Walrus said:
I must be a terrible nerd and remind everyone he never actually said this..
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You would be correct. But I still do like to say it.
He did say Billions a Bunch of times. Like the stars in the universe.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
As Sagan would put it...
 
So, just to recap, because Makaya holds a certain opinion (based apparently on just about zero knowledge of anything) everyone else should hold exactly the same opinion?
And also, because he holds a certain opinion, "90%" of scientists and forum members must hold this same view (even though this has already been effortlessly demonstrated to be flat out wrong)?
Is he, like, 12?

I like the way his claims are backed up by the compelling and detailed logical argument that "Look they're facts just accept it! Accept it!"
 
I would say it is woo-ish in the extreme to suppose that out of all the hundreds of billions of star systems in the universe, only here on earth were any conditions formed which could produce life of some sort and that out of the billions of places in the universe where conditions that could produce life surely developed, only here did life develop.
 
Makaya is a troll.
He/she/it is prodding people in at least 3 bigfoot threads and now he's started this one.
You'll never get more than "Yes, but..." answers of 1 or 2 sentences max from him/her/it.
 
makaya325 said:
Godless, our sun-like stars make up only 5% of the stars in our galaxy. Most of those stars are in deadly areas, and so on.

Most Mainstream scientists laugh at the idea of et life. Just ask peter ward and donald browlee
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Makaya, are you sure you are not just claiming there are no extraterrestrial civilizations? Even Peter Ward acknowledges microbial life may be fairly common. Some of your objections (large moon, nearby gas giant) only imply that it would be more unlikely that land-based multicellular life would evolve.

The Rare Earth equation suffers from the same problem as the Drake equation: too many of the variables are unkown, therefore the equations aren't very useful (yet) in arriving at estimates.

I'm inclined to think worlds with technological civilizations are vanishingly rare, but I would be reluctant to claim we're the only one in 100 billion galaxies. Sadly, in 5 million years (barring some method of FTL travel), although we may have spread from one end of our galaxy to the other, I don't think we will have encountered an alien civilization. On the bright side, that 5 million years is sufficient evolutionary time for us spawn many alien civilizations, provided we don't suffer extinction in the cradle before we can get out there.
 
Makaya, you seem to be making the assumption that life = human life, maybe with a bumpy nose or forehead as on Star Trek. "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." The areas you call deadly might be paradise to another type of life while our planet would be their worst nightmare. Just think about the variety of life on our one planet, over 1.5 million named species. Humans, octopii, spiders, giraffes, fleas, whales and emus may all be as close as brothers when compared to some alien species.
I'd like to recommend that you read the science fiction book Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward. It's about intelligent life evolving on a neutron star. I know it's just fiction but when you start thinking about possibilities and the sheer size of the universe then I think you might change your mind. It's also an excellent story by the way.
 
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