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alien life possibility is pathetic

makaya325 said:
Aliens, assuming they exist, had more then enough time to evolve and develop technology, but it seems that earth is all alone in the galaxy. What a waste of space
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makaya325,

We've had enough time to evolve and develop technology, and yet we haven't gotten any further than the moon and our technology has just barely made it out of our solar system. Why do you think aliens would have to be so much further along in their evolution, technological development and intelligence? That's ridiculous.

You're also assuming evolution has a goal or finished product - i.e. intelligence - which is also very wrong.

So, is your view:

a) It is impossible for any life, whatsoever, to exist apart from life on Earth;

b) It is impossible for complex life (anything above bacteria or microbes) to exist apart from the complex life on Earth;

c) It is impossible for highly intelligent life to exist apart from the one species of life on Earth?

It seems the goal-posts keep moving, because your arguments are making little sense based on the OP.
 
makaya325 said:
Aliens, assuming they exist, had more then enough time to evolve and develop technology, but it seems that earth is all alone in the galaxy. What a waste of space
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Unless instead of being unique, we're just old. We've about 13.7 billion years available total, with some of that being pre stellar and some of the stellar period being before sufficient supernovae made the heavier elements for terrestrial planets to form. Our evolution dates back almost 4 billion years, and possibly longer and we've only been able to broadcast out to the galaxy for about 70 years. I think that it's entirely possible that we could be among the first technological species in the galaxy. My hope for the long term future is for planets around red dwarves where life could potentially have a trillion years to evolve before the conditions become unsuitable for water based life, unlike the scant 6 billion or so Earth has.
 
Yeah, I call troll.

The only reason I stuck around so long, was to make points and give education to those that might actually be interested on the topic.

I welcome an honest discussion on the issue, but trolls bore me.
 
There may be a very simple reason why we haven't seen them...

Douglas Adams said:
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
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I typed the following up before, but for some reason it didn't post. I'll try to recreate my train of thought.

I can think of several reasons why an intelligent society might not cross interstellar space.

1) Perhaps they are aquatic creatures, or some sort of creature that never developed the physical capability to manipulate tools. This would not prevent them from developing communication, art, philosophy, etc.

2) Perhaps they evolved on a planet similar to Venus. Not in terms of temperature, but in terms of cloud cover. With no knowledge of the existence of stars, why build spaceships?

3) One of the biggest reasons we explore our boundaries is because we have imagination and curiousity. Suppose a species doesn't have curiousity? In fact, it's a trait that could be said to be a detriment to evolution. It's the curious one who gets too close to the cliff edge, who eats the poison berries, etc. Without curiousity, they may simply not have a desire to go into space.


I think the only reason you have trouble seeing why there might not be life out there is just a lack of imagination.
 
makaya325 said:
Aliens, assuming they exist, had more then enough time to evolve and develop technology, but it seems that earth is all alone in the galaxy. What a waste of space
Click to expand...
Why do you assume they've had any more time than we have, or any more ability than we have? After all, if they were as little as a hundred and one years behind us in civilization they would not even know how to fly in their own airspace, much less send spacecraft to remote corners of the universe! The existence of intelligent life on earth is irrefutable proof that intelligent life can exist in the universe without the ability to navigate to other galaxies.
 
Bruto, for the scientists who say there are 1000's of civilizations in the galaxy, we should have seen them. I also dont buy ufo's, because if they were aliens, their ships would be traveling SLIGHTLY faster than ours, they would light years faster!
 
Godless, yes, a galaxy is combination of stars, dust and clouds. The universe holds these galaxies, all 100 empty billion of them
 
makaya325 said:
Bruto, for the scientists who say there are 1000's of civilizations in the galaxy, we should have seen them. I also dont buy ufo's, because if they were aliens, their ships would be traveling SLIGHTLY faster than ours, they would light years faster!
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Why should we have seen them? We cannot see into the depths of distant galaxies, so how would we see planets and their inhabitants if they were there? What possible reason have you to assume that they would be any more accessible to us than any other detail of distant galaxies? I repeat: the history of mankind is proof positive that life can exist, and evolve to a high level of intelligence and civilization, without learning to travel or communicate beyond its home planet. A hundred and fifty years ago, a blink of the historical eye, the civilization that produced Shakespeare and Mozart, Aristotle and Rembrandt, lacked the capacity to fly above its own ground. The telegraph was the apex of communication technology. Whether or not there are other beings out there I do not know, but there could be a million civilizations like ours and it would be the norm, not the exception, for them never to find each other.
 
makaya325 said:
Bruto, for the scientists who say there are 1000's of civilizations in the galaxy
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Who says that? Certainly no one in this thread.

makaya325 said:
we should have seen them.
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Why? What's to see? Imagine you were 200 light years from earth. What would you see that would suggest that there's life here?

How about if you were 100,000 light years away from earth?

makaya325 said:
Godless, yes, a galaxy is combination of stars, dust and clouds. The universe holds these galaxies, all 100 empty billion of them.
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OK, so are you saying life elsewhere in the universe is impossible, or life elsewhere in our galaxy is impossible?
 
Certaintly complex life must be incredibly rare, if not non-existent, in our galaxy. Scientists would agree
 
Which scientists? Why "must"?

And can we correctly gather that you have changed your claim from "there is no extraterrestrial life anywhere in the universe" to "complex life is extremely rare in our galaxy"? Because those are two very different claims. The latter one actually makes a lot of sense, but we don't have nearly enough data to confirm or falsify it.
 
At least makaya325 is making some progress, albeit very slowly.

He/she has at least acknowledged that there may be some complex life elsewhere in our galaxy (and, therefore, universe). That's a long way from no chance of any life, whatsoever, anywhere in the universe.

makaya325,

Your remaining arguments are all centred around a belief that alien life must be highly technologically advanced compared to humans. Why is that?

Can you, at least, agree to the following:

"It is possible that some complex life has evolved in other parts of our universe, although, it is likely very rare compared to the number of solar systems that exist"?
 
makaya325 said:
Certaintly complex life must be incredibly rare, if not non-existent, in our galaxy. Scientists would agree
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Define "complex life". A flea? A grasshopper? A bird? A fish?

Where do you want to draw the line?

And, surely you can give sources for your assertion that scientists would agree with your views?

But then, giving sources for your bold statements obviously was never something you would do.

Edit: And i have to agree with the others here about you moving the goalposts. Your OP referring to the possibility of any life, and your later posts "only" about the possibility of complex life pretty well shows that you run out of arguments pretty quickly.
 
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makaya325 said:
Bruto, for the scientists who say there are 1000's of civilizations in the galaxy, we should have seen them. I also dont buy ufo's, because if they were aliens, their ships would be traveling SLIGHTLY faster than ours, they would light years faster!
Click to expand...

What a load of crapola. You obviously have no idea of what we "see" if we look into space. Except for very close object, we see effectively nothing at all. What we see is that something is there. Taking some measurements, we can get a very slight clue of the overall amount of certain elements. In no case we can see what exactly it is there. Let alone to see little green man hopping around.

Have you noticed that most imagery you see from objects in space aren't even literal photos, but invisible light (to humans) and other radiation measured, simply transformed into visible images, because we humans have a hard time to see x-ray's directly, for example?

And further, did you notice that even with Hubble, we don't see more than some coloured pixels? We just can not get a detailed photograph of something out there, yet. The only way to know for sure would be to get there and look directly. Oh, and the thing about light years and what implications that has as to the "actuality" of these images has been explained many times to you by now.

Finally, what makes you think that any aliens must be able to travel faster than we do? Seems to me you watched way too much Star-Trek and such stuff. Don't confuse movies with reality, please.
 
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Correa Neto said:
Nope, the time scale is perfect. I`ll try to be more clear now.
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Maybe I didn't say it quite right.

If life popped up more than once (which I agree is quite likely), the new forms would not compete well against the existing forms and would not long survive. What would wipe out these new forms would be microbes, not dinos. A new lineage of life wouldn't last long enough to evolve into something a dinosaur would bother with.

I'm assuming these simplest forms of life (perhaps a self-replicating molecule surrounded by a membrane) can't survive against more advanced microbes. The only reason the first lineage did so well is that there was nothing already there to eat it up or out-compete it for resources.

Your basic stripped down replicating molecule in a membrane doesn't stand a chance against a bacterium souped up with such high-performance gear as ribosomes.

ETA: Linguistically, I don't much care for the term giga annum since it mixes Greek and Latin. Gya (giga years ago) at least avoids that issue.
 
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makaya325 said:
Aliens, assuming they exist, had more then [sic] enough time to evolve and develop technology, but it seems that earth is all alone in the galaxy.
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Says who?

What if there's another planet that followed (just by chance) exactly the same time line as the Earth, but they're on the opposite side of the galaxy from us? They could have exactly our level of technology right now, and there'd be no way whatsoever for either of us to know about the other.

The fact that they haven't been here yet doesn't prove they don't exist.

What if civilizations never last long enough to get more than say 100 years further along technologically than we are now? (That is, none ever lasts long enough to come close to such sci-fi ideas as FTL travel.)

What if that sort of technology is possible, but only at a greater economic cost than any civilization is ever willing to invest? (Really--if the choice is eat or develop FTL travel, only one of those options is adaptive.)

The point is, we just don't know. The absence of evidence in this case is not the evidence of absence.

Same with SETI. All it tells us is that it's reasonable to conclude (provisionally) that no radio-transmitting intelligent race other than us exists within something like 30 lightyears of us within the last 30 years (more or less).

The portion of the galaxy we have searched is infinitesimally small (in space and time). Your conclusion goes so far beyond it as to be absurd. It would be like seeing no birdbath in my neighbor's backyard somehow proves that there are no birdbaths in any backyards except the one in mine (even though I know there are billions of backyards that I can't see into).
 
makaya325 said:
Certaintly complex life must be incredibly rare, if not non-existent, in our galaxy. Scientists would agree
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Now you're just repeating your same baseless and incorrect assertion.

Have you got anything to back it up?

ETA: At least over on this thread, the person arguing largely the same position you are is making a good faith effort at supporting his contention.
 
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