have they found anything?

I'm very suspicious of statements such as the cosmos is teeming with intelligent life of some kind. That to me describes a cosmos that's designed to produce intelligence wherever conditions suit. In other words, god did it. That is the argument put forth by physicist Paul Davies in his book_The Goldilocks Enigma.
In other words the universe has been designed life friendly. All the evidence we have so far discounts that theory. The universe looks just like it should been born in a chaotic Big Bang.

It seems as if we are the result of an accident of no consequence in the scheme of things.
 
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amb said:
I'm very suspicious of statements such as the cosmos is teeming with intelligent life of some kind. That to me describes a cosmos that's designed to produce intelligence wherever conditions suit. In other words, god did it.
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I would reject anyone's claims that the universe is teeming with life also. (The first point I made in this thread, though, is that words like "rare" and "common" or "teeming" are very relatively, and I'd prefer that people define what they mean anyway.)

However, I don't think it automatically points to "goddidit". In fact, I think the lesson we've learned in the past that there is nothing special about humans or their place in the universe at least points to the default position that since there are so many stars, and there's nothing magical about us, then the same materials and physical laws that resulted in life on Earth probably has resulted in life elsewhere.

And I'm not just making this up. The "goddidit" approach once led to the hypotheses that the Earth was the center of the universe, that Europe was the the center of the Earth (culturally, etc.), that the age and size of the universe was in proportion to human existence, and so on.

It did not lead to speculation of ET intelligence. That came out of the realization that there's nothing special about humans or the Earth's place in the galaxy, or our galaxy in the universe. The laws of nature (physics, chemistry, and biology) certainly don't operate in a different way elsewhere.

I think your associating SETI with theism is wrong.

In other words the universe has been designed life friendly. All the evidence we have so far discounts that theory. The universe looks just like it should been born in a chaotic Big Bang.

It seems as if we are the result of an accident of no consequence in the scheme of things.
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Yes. And I also think it's absurd to suggest that such an "accident" (see above about my problem with that word) only happened once in the galaxy is preposterous.

To me, that line of thinking implies that we are special (as in the result of a Creator or designer)--that we are unique. There is no evidence to support that conclusion.

It seems like your approach now is that either there is a lot of life (or "complex" life) in the galaxy, and that implies a deity, or we are unique. I think that's flawed reasoning. For us to be unique would be the more exceptional theory (one that seems to require a deity).
 
Crowlogic said:
In spite of being an avid follower of most things science I have over time developed the position that whether intelligent life exist elsewhere in the Galaxy...So what!

Why so what? There's no denying that it would be exciting, monumental and benificial to our species if there is technology sharing. However even if we were to meet 1000 or 10,000 civilizations of intelligent beings the ultimate answers to existence such as where did the universe come, where is it going and where do we go after death woud remain unanswered and un answerable. I sincerely believe that those answers are as elusive to any other mortal sentient beings as the are to us.
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Well. . . you admit the benefits and advances in knowledge would be "monumental".

The fact that you can still dream up supernatural silliness does nothing to decrease the value of such knowledge.

When you ask "where do we go after death?" what exactly do you mean by "we"? The stuff that we know comprises a person ceases to exist after death. It's sort of like asking, "Where does your lap go when you stand up?" Without a body, "we" have no language, no memory, no sensory inputs, no motor outputs, no gender, no name, no spatial location, etc. So if you can't say what the "we" is that you're talking about, the question is meaningless.

Sort of like, "What color is height?"

The fact that no one will ever be able to answer that question does nothing to detract from advances in knowledge that science leads to.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Well. . . you admit the benefits and advances in knowledge would be "monumental".

The fact that you can still dream up supernatural silliness does nothing to decrease the value of such knowledge.

When you ask "where do we go after death?" what exactly do you mean by "we"? The stuff that we know comprises a person ceases to exist after death. It's sort of like asking, "Where does your lap go when you stand up?" Without a body, "we" have no language, no memory, no sensory inputs, no motor outputs, no gender, no name, no spatial location, etc. So if you can't say what the "we" is that you're talking about, the question is meaningless.

Sort of like, "What color is height?"

The fact that no one will ever be able to answer that question does nothing to detract from advances in knowledge that science leads to.
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Supernatural silliness? "We" as in human beings in general. Not to be confused with human beings on this forum BTW. Don't confuse me with being in the supernatural camp either. I'm not but I am aware of the core quesitons that drive so much of human thought and action. Us meeting them, wow lots of neat show and tell but core questions unanswerable, so what else is new? See?

We don't need intelligent life from out there, we are the intelligent life from out there. Sooner or later we'll become our own aliens.
 
I don't agree. The limit light speed places on us is impossible to overcome. Even a voyage to our nearest neighbor Alpha Centaurus would take hundreds of years at even a quarter the speed of light. If a colony of earthlings is ever sent to another star system, their descendants if they ever wished to return to Earth would more than likely find a long dead planet. The speed of light and our puny lifetimes places impossible limits on our exploration of the cosmos to overcome.
 
Crowlogic said:
Supernatural silliness?
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Yes, as in the question you asked, "Where do we go after death?"

"We" as in human beings in general.
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Human beings have DNA (and gender, etc.). Since you're talking about after death, you're talking about something else. It's up to you to say what that something else is.

ETA: Unless you want a trite answer to your question, like "in the ground" or "burned up and pulverized then placed in an urn on a shelf" or some such.

I can give you a list of characteristics that that something else does not have (thing wholly dependent on various aspects of the body). See above.

Don't confuse me with being in the supernatural camp either. I'm not but I am aware of the core quesitons that drive so much of human thought and action.
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How can you construe the question "Where do we go after death?" not to be a supernatural question?

Us meeting them, wow lots of neat show and tell but core questions unanswerable, so what else is new? See?
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Yeah--"core" questions like, "What color is height?" I do see.

We don't need intelligent life from out there, we are the intelligent life from out there.
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No, we certainly don't need intelligent life from out there. (However, we are not "from out there"--that is, we are terrestrial, not extra-terrestrial.)

I have a driving curiosity, and I do want to know as much as we can know about the universe. I'd say that's a want rather than a need.

Sooner or later we'll become our own aliens.
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What does that mean? We're going to spread out across the cosmos and then forget that we did and descendants of humans will encounter each other as strangers? (Or maybe you're using the term "alien" to mean "savior" or some such?)
 
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amb said:
I don't agree. The limit light speed places on us is impossible to overcome. Even a voyage to our nearest neighbor Alpha Centaurus would take hundreds of years at even a quarter the speed of light. If a colony of earthlings is ever sent to another star system, their descendants if they ever wished to return to Earth would more than likely find a long dead planet. The speed of light and our puny lifetimes places impossible limits on our exploration of the cosmos to overcome.
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I agree that the vast stretches of space make interstellar travel either a pipedream or a one-way proposition. However, we can still explore much of the cosmos with telemetry (telescopes of various types) and probes.

I also don't see that even if other intelligent life forms were relatively commonplace in our galaxy there would ever be any galactic civilization. Even communication at light speed over vast distances isn't feasible.
 
The speed of light limitation also limits the speed of our communication. Imagine that we discover intelligent life in a solar system 10 light-years away. It would take 10 years for each message to reach its destination.
 
I can imagine that there may be techniques that can be used to travel/communicate vast distances in reasonable time without breaking the light speed limit (wormholes, etc), but we certainly don't know of any methods with our current understanding of physics.

There's a book by Michio Kaku called, I think, Physics of the Impossible in which (according to reviews I've read) he breaks various science-fiction concepts down into three categories: Stuff that is theoretically completely possible but we don't have the technology yet, stuff that is impossible as far as we know but new science may make it possible, and stuff that is absolutely, completely and utterly impossible.

I haven't been able to find a copy of the book in the local bookstores, but I'm pretty sure he puts travel between stars in reasonable time in the second category.
 
Wormholes are just that, a hole a worm has chewed it's way through. Fiction at it's best.
It would need a black hole, now everyone knows what happens if anything approaches a black hole. You come out of it looking like a spaghetti if you're lucky.
The dream of reaching the speed of light is just that. An impossible dream. There's not enough energy in the whole universe to propel a ship to the SOL.
Not to mention that anything that reaches that impossible dream would become infinite.
 
amb said:
Wormholes are just that, a hole a worm has chewed it's [sic] way through. Fiction at it's [sic] best.
It would need a black hole, now everyone knows what happens if anything approaches a black hole. You come out of it looking like a spaghetti if you're lucky.
The dream of reaching the speed of light is just that. An impossible dream. There's not enough energy in the whole universe to propel a ship to the SOL.
Not to mention that anything that reaches that impossible dream would become infinite.
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Yet you don't mind the fact that the argument based on the Fermi Paradox rests on the assumption of technology that doesn't exist today.

In fact, it not only assumes technology that is beyond us is possible, it says that if it's possible, then the presence of alien ET intelligent civilizations guarantee that it would be done (and that it would have been done millions of years ago).
 
We are still evolving into who knows what. Who's to say if we survive the next 2-3 million years what our bodies may be like, or even look like. We could well evolve into the very thought we seem to be shackled with, namely the gods themselves. We could theoretically exist without a body. But the laws of physics seem to fixed. Einstein taught us that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Even if in the distant future that law can be broken, A round trip to the edge of the galaxy would still take thousands of years.
Fermi's Paradox deals with millions of years. If life originated on a first generation star system's planet, say 4 billion years after the B/B, they would in fact be more than 9 billion years ahead of us. [If they survived.] Who was it that said. ''Such a species would be indistinguishable to a god.'' Or they would appear magical to us.
 
amb said:
We are still evolving into who knows what. Who's to say if we survive the next 2-3 million years what our bodies may be like, or even look like. We could well evolve into the very thought we seem to be shackled with, namely the gods themselves. We could theoretically exist without a body.
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What? You don't seem to understand the very basic workings of evolution. And how do you think we could theoretically exist without bodies? What is the "we" to which you refer if it is something other than our bodies (and all the emergent properties thereof)?

Fermi's Paradox deals with millions of years. If life originated on a first generation star system's planet, say 4 billion years after the B/B, they would in fact be more than 9 billion years ahead of us. [If they survived.] Who was it that said. ''Such a species would be indistinguishable to a god.'' Or they would appear magical to us.
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I think you're referring to Arthur C. Clarke's statement that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I personally don't accept that. (If, for example, I saw someone from an advanced civilization do something like levitate or dematerialize, I would not for even an instant think it was the result of magic.)

As for Fermi's Paradox, I've shown already that the absence of probes from other civilizations in no way proves that other civilizations do not exist. By that standard, we ourselves would no exist since we have not sent out self-replicating probes that are now ubiquitous throughout the galaxy. Yet we exist.
 
amb said:
Wormholes are just that, a hole a worm has chewed it's way through. Fiction at it's best.
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No, they're actually very well-described in the literature, it's just that we haven't found any yet, and we don't actually know whether they exist or not. They're in the same state that black holes were in the 1950s - theoretically predicted, but never actually observed.
 
At the minute wormholes are science fiction. Black holes are different. Some astrobiologist claim there's one in the center of each galaxy. At least one is suspected to exist in the center of ours.
This is an extract of Paul Davies book, Are We Alone. I quote: Carl Sagan has written; ''The available evidence strongly suggests that the origin of life should occur given the initial conditions and a billion years of evolutionary time. The origin of life on suitable planets seems built into the chemistry of the universe.'' This is a common view among scientists concerned with Seti. End quote. In short what is implied is that given the right conditions like the right temperature, the right soup of chemicals, a stable energy source, ect, ect. Life will develop. I agree with all that. What I'm disputing is intelligence. That is an entirely different kettle of fish. Looking at the only example we have, intelligence seems to have occurred entirely by accident.
 
Right. That was after we looked for evidence of black holes and found it. Before that, they were purely theoretical.
 
amb said:
Black holes are different. Some astrobiologist claim there's one in the center of each galaxy.
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I think you mean astrophysicists.

amb said:
I agree with all that. What I'm disputing is intelligence. That is an entirely different kettle of fish. Looking at the only example we have, intelligence seems to have occurred entirely by accident.
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Again, if intelligence occurred by accident, then everything that happens happens by accident. You seem to have this false dichotomy in mind where things are either done by a God/Creator/Intelligent Designer/Fine Tuner or they happen by accident.

If that's true, the workings of chemistry is just as much an "accident" as the workings of evolution by natural selection.
 
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