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As for me I'm going to sayyyyy...........Yes! Yes! and yes! Man it's sooo arrogant to think we're alone in universe. There are millions and millions of planets out there. There are billion of galaxy in a obeservable universe. Who know one of these might have other species? Possibility are endless and chances of finding other life is soooo damn hard xD. And other thing
I think it'd be silly to believe that we're alone out there in the universe, but it also kinda depends on what we imagine alien life out there to be like! Are they really going to be humanoid in nature, or are they just going to be small bacteria that we classify as alien life?
Agreed completely. I would go less for 'humanoid' and more for 'sentient', but for many reasons which are demonstrated on Earth itself, I would be very surprised to find that the universe is less populated by microorganisms than large and complex species.
Additionally, that we are capable of communicating meaningfully with that life (or that it would even be ethical to do so, although I'd be very surprised if ethics reigned there) is a bit of an assumption among possibilities.
Finally, technological advantages are allowing us to focus on searches for more remote life-forms (i.e. not carbon-based, or requiring the support of the same elements carbon-based life does; one particular sci-fi trope is silicon-based life, even though it's not too probable), but it's also entirely possible we'll not recognise that life, or pick up on its traces too closely, due to conceptual issues. I would point to viruses as an example of something that people struggled with over categorising as life, although it's one that's in the popular conscious already as something that probably exists out there and some people are interested in whether viruses resemble the basis for primitive life forms (viruses are not a life form, although some would argue differently; they're organic matter that can self-replicate, but only with the support of things with actual metabolisms).
It's just a probability thing. The universe is vast and full of many different environments, some of which are relatively old and have had dramatic changes like Earth itself that allowed for explosion in life. Some places we find may even have previously supported life and no longer.
I'm really, really not knowledgeable about this- but in any discussion about the plausibility of alien life, people only seem to talk about one side of the equation, i.e. the sheer amount of galaxies and stars and solar systems and planets there are, and how much probabilistic resources that affords for origin and subsequent development of life. There's another side to the equation as well that's often ignored- the probability of the right physico-chemical conditions to conspire together to make life possible. I hear that list is nothing to scoff at either. Unless the universe is spatially infinite and therefore has infinite probabilistic resources, wouldn't it be a legitimate question to ask whether the non-infinite probabilistic resources afforded by the universe can accommodate the low probabilities required to spawn life? Again, I'm simply not knowledgeable enough to make this call, but I definitely think we need to talk more about both aspects of the probability equation and not just one side of it.
That said, as the earlier posters said, I find the life-intelligent life distinction significant and fascinating. Here's a discussion by evolutionary biologist-cum-philosopher of biology Francisco Ayala:
In the first three minutes, he's seen drawing a distinction between life itself and intelligent life. His views are that it's quite plausible that life as such could have arisen in multiple places in the universe, but intelligent life is an altogether different story. His basic argument is- given evolution, any species, not just intelligent or sentient ones, is vastly improbable (like any peculiar arrangement of sand molecules on the beach is improbable). His sentiments seem to echo Gould- if the evolutionary tape was rolled back, we'd have a completely different picture of biodiversity than we have today.
(Feel free to stop listening around minute 7, they start talking about metaphysics which is interesting but not relevant)
I have always believed that somewhere in the universe, there's a planet identical in some galaxy far, far away like ours. Now that's not to say it's exactly like Earth, but it would be I feel it'd be surprising if scientists came to an absolute conclusion that only Earth has life in the existence of the whole universe. The universe itself is pretty ∞ so the possibility does exist for sure, although probably not as local as some would think.
There's another side to the equation as well that's often ignored- the probability of the right physico-chemical conditions to conspire together to make life possible. I hear that list is nothing to scoff at either.
Yup! That's the other side of this discussion. But still like you said at your last sentence. Possibility are endless c: but (some) humans don't believe in anything until they see it with their own eyes xD. So, I dunno too but like I said I believe they exist.
About places that supported life or how life arisen in different place are such awesome topics to talk about so why don't you guys make a thread about them xD.
I'm really, really not knowledgeable about this- but in any discussion about the plausibility of alien life, people only seem to talk about one side of the equation, i.e. the sheer amount of galaxies and stars and solar systems and planets there are, and how much probabilistic resources that affords for origin and subsequent development of life. There's another side to the equation as well that's often ignored- the probability of the right physico-chemical conditions to conspire together to make life possible. I hear that list is nothing to scoff at either. Unless the universe is spatially infinite and therefore has infinite probabilistic resources, wouldn't it be a legitimate question to ask whether the non-infinite probabilistic resources afforded by the universe can accommodate the low probabilities required to spawn life? Again, I'm simply not knowledgeable enough to make this call, but I definitely think we need to talk more about both aspects of the probability equation and not just one side of it.
That said, as the earlier posters said, I find the life-intelligent life distinction significant and fascinating. Here's a discussion by evolutionary biologist-cum-philosopher of biology Francisco Ayala:
In the first three minutes, he's seen drawing a distinction between life itself and intelligent life. His views are that it's quite plausible that life as such could have arisen in multiple places in the universe, but intelligent life is an altogether different story. His basic argument is- given evolution, any species, not just intelligent or sentient ones, is vastly improbable (like any peculiar arrangement of sand molecules on the beach is improbable). His sentiments seem to echo Gould- if the evolutionary tape was rolled back, we'd have a completely different picture of biodiversity than we have today.
(Feel free to stop listening around minute 7, they start talking about metaphysics which is interesting but not relevant)
I'm going to talk a little about 'the probability of the right physico-chemical conditions to conspire together to make life possible'.
In the universe that we can actually detect right now and measure these things, this is indeed what we first look for. It's partly why I mentioned that there are probably planets where life once did exist but now no longer can be supported, or planets which are undergoing changes that will one day support life; if you look at the changes Earth underwent to support different types of life over its evolutionary and ecological cycles, it's pretty hectic.
But it also strongly depends on your definition of 'life', because, although while in the other thread about this I dismissed that we should be looking for, example, silicon-based life, the probabilities dramatically change depending on what satisfies you as 'life'. The elements needed to support carbon-based life are really abundant in the universe, and complex organic compounds that could form as starters for life (including the same old nucleobases seen in DNA, although I'd treat that research with a little bit of caution until it's replicated in case of contamination somehow) have been detected outside Earth already.
Remember we have no working model for the origin of life and our current best theory for inorganic elements -> organic elements is that the atmosphere produced a bunch of organic polymers which all in a melting pot self-replicated and evolved. That theory rests on theories about the atmospheric state of Earth at the point cyanobacteria started developing, in which case we wouldn't be looking for planets like our own necessarily. That widens the search considerably.
We really don't know what environments can support life, but theoretically most of the nearby planets (and some other bodies) can. So, we can probably extrapolate a bit from there about the probability other life is in the universe.
Sentient? Who knows. At that point, you really are reaching into the realm of unmeasured stuff, especially extrasolar stuff, which is pretty niche, but really does bring you to the point of 'trillions and trillions of possible permutations' (even though they're not all random at all and have a lot to do with their star system, etc. so there will be distributions that are more likely to be biotic and so on) and we know nothing about the probability of the resources there supporting life (or how much life -- simple life is much less demanding and is likelier to participate positively in its habitat's atmospheric cycle). I have to emphasise just how much shit is in the 5% of the universe that is not dark matter, though.
Sentient life is less likely to be discovered than simple microorganisms especially when you consider how an equivalent of abundant sentient life is much likelier to be contributing in terms of entropy
Simply put, the universe is incredibly vast and the materials required to produce the kind of life we are familiar with are actually extremely common. Then you need to add on to that the fact there's no guarantee that the carbon-based structures we're familiar with on the Earth are not necessarily the only way for something to fulfill the requirements to be alive. Given all that, I find it really hard to believe that there's no other life anywhere in the universe.
Now, the complexity of this life is debatable and I think that the existence of various lifeforms gets less and less likely the more complex we assume them to be. I fully expect that the majority of life in the universe is going to microscopic or simple organisms. Despite this though, I think it's unlikely that we are the only complex, sentient society out there.
I don't expect us to be visited by aliens any time soon though. Even ignoring the fact that there's no guarantee there's any civilizations at all, even if there are others like us out there they could be no more advanced than us or even less so. Not to mention that the same vastness that practically guarantees other life in my eyes also makes it extremely hard for that life to ever meet.
But it also strongly depends on your definition of 'life', because, although while in the other thread about this I dismissed that we should be looking for, example, silicon-based life, the probabilities dramatically change depending on what satisfies you as 'life'. The elements needed to support carbon-based life are really abundant in the universe, and complex organic compounds that could form as starters for life (including the same old nucleobases seen in DNA, although I'd treat that research with a little bit of caution until it's replicated in case of contamination somehow) have been detected outside Earth already.
Remember we have no working model for the origin of life and our current best theory for inorganic elements -> organic elements is that the atmosphere produced a bunch of organic polymers which all in a melting pot self-replicated and evolved. That theory rests on theories about the atmospheric state of Earth at the point cyanobacteria started developing, in which case we wouldn't be looking for planets like our own necessarily. That widens the search considerably.
We really don't know what environments can support life, but theoretically most of the nearby planets (and some other bodies) can. So, we can probably extrapolate a bit from there about the probability other life is in the universe.
1. The prebiotic geochemistry which provides the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for the origin of life,
2. The specific historical events that would deterministically produce the first life.
As I admitted upfront, I'm not knowledgeable about 1 (although the two are intertwined questions). As for 2, here's Addy Pross in his book What is Life: How Chemistry Became Biology:
Spoiler:
There is a second problem, no less fundamental, with the presumption of particular prebiotic conditions. Even if prebiotic conditions could be specified with some precision, it has been frequently assumed that the knowledge of such conditions would enable us to specify not only what reactions could have taken place, but also what reactions could not have taken place. That presumption has in fact been used to argue against one of the main origin of life scenarios—the existence of an RNA-world as a transitional period on the way to simplest cellular life. Since long chain RNA molecules are formed from their component building blocks—RNA nucleotides—the RNA-world scenario crucially depends on the appearance on the prebiotic earth of those nucleotides. The argument offered was essentially the following: if, despite several decades of effort, gifted chemists were unable to synthesize RNA the knotty origin of life problem nucleotides under presumed prebiotic conditions, then it can be safely concluded that such nucleotides could not have spontaneously appeared on the earth.
Here the flawed logic is easily exposed. We simply cannot rule out the possibility of prebiotic RNA nucleotides emerging spontaneously because, as the old saying goes: absence of evidence does not constitute evidence for absence. How many decades of effort by gifted chemists are required before the conclusion is justified? Two, three, maybe five? And how gifted do the chemists have to be? As discussed above in some detail, it is simply unreasonable to conclude that prebiotic conditions at every location on the early earth would have precluded the emergence of nucleotides when the available materials and reaction conditions at any of the possible locations remains unknown.
I mean I understand the logic here- when you don't have a theory, that 'widens the search' as you put it. But- and this is a specific example of the trend I alluded to in my earlier post- often in popular discussions on the topic, ignorance is interpreted as favorably contributing to the probabilities of life's emergence. In reality, the fact that we don't know that much about life's initial conditions may either expand or restricts the options. I wouldn't pin this tendency on you, of course, seeing your post was eminently reasonable and nuanced.
Sentient? Who knows. At that point, you really are reaching into the realm of unmeasured stuff, especially extrasolar stuff, which is pretty niche, but really does bring you to the point of 'trillions and trillions of possible permutations' (even though they're not all random at all and have a lot to do with their star system, etc. so there will be distributions that are more likely to be biotic and so on) and we know nothing about the probability of the resources there supporting life (or how much life -- simple life is much less demanding and is likelier to participate positively in its habitat's atmospheric cycle). I have to emphasise just how much **** is in the 5% of the universe that is not dark matter, though.
Sentient life is less likely to be discovered than simple microorganisms especially when you consider how an equivalent of abundant sentient life is much likelier to be contributing in terms of entropy
I mean there are very many ways you can approach this question based on your attendant philosophy of sentience. In the video I cited, Dr. Ayala makes a conceptual argument against the emergence of sentience elsewhere in the universe. His argument assumes sentient species is no more 'special' than just another regular old species. Since evolution has no directionality, and the tape of evolution played once more would probably result in a drastically different biodiversity, the probability of having the same species emerge in two independent evolutionary histories is negligible. On this logic, it's virtually impossible for sentience to emerge anywhere else in the course of evolutionary history.
On the other hand, another way of interpreting sentience is not as 'just another species', but a frontier of complexity. Sentient species differ from their non-sentient counterparts chiefly in the fact that they have more organized complexity. If that's true, then the emergence of sentience is qualitatively (definitely not quantitatively) the same as the emergence of, say, multicellularity. Since evolution usually progresses towards more complex (=stable) forms of life, there's a biological necessity to the emergence of sentience.
Of course, just because there's a conceptual tendency for sentient life to emerge elsewhere doesn't mean it has happened, or would happen in the future. The attendant probabilities may be too complex and precarious to allow it to happen. Who knows.
Or maybe sentience involves supra-biological Cartesian dualism
I subscribe to the idea that we are not the only humans in the universe. There has to be another planet somewhere, with tons of carbon, with an atmosphere, at just the right distance away from the star it revolves around, and that has water. Imagine that meeting. Oh man.
Well, we don't know.
However, it depends, what do you mean saying aliens?
I believe that there is life somewhere else,
But when I say life I mean maybe something like bacteria, microbe or micro-organism.
Of course the space is REALLY vast and big, so we don't know.
of course alien exist or we can say humans in other planets.
Here we can know that really does other rgalaxy exists, cause while creation of our galaxy we human took birth, then of course there is other human beings in other planets.
I'm a firm believer that if other life exists in our massive universe, there's also chance that there's at least one other intelligent race out there in the cosmos. Probably many. Space could be as busy as they portray it to be in Star Trek; or any other sci-fi show about the universe, filled to the brim with as many intelligent races as there are hospitable star systems to be home to them.
There are so many possibilities. Alien life could be as simple as microbial lifeforms, plants and animals, or even intelligent lifeforms. Arguably any verified find of microbes in space is probably alien life. While finding a new bacterium species or twenty isn't super exciting, it does qualify and fit the criteria of life.
We're literally aliens ourselves, so I believe in aliens. We just don't consider ourselves aliens because we aren't "alien" to ourselves. I believe in life existing somewhere else, but it doesn't necessarily have to be intelligent life.
When people think "aliens" they often think of humanoid species, like the ones in OP's image, but they could take any shape. Heck, on Earth we have species other than human that have relatively high intelligence. Maybe a planet exists out there where no human-level intelligence is present, but typical animal-level intelligence is; creatures still based more on instinct than something like free will.
I think it would be possible that a planet could exist somewhere in the universe that mirrors what life was like millions of years ago on Earth, but evolution didn't occur as it did on Earth, and "humans" therefore never came to be on that planet.
I would argue that even if communication is impossible or the life discovered is just bacteria, it will have a profound effect on humanity in some way just through the discovery. In that sense it's impossible for it not to be relevant.
I would argue that even if communication is impossible or the life discovered is just bacteria, it will have a profound effect on humanity in some way just through the discovery. In that sense it's impossible for it not to be relevant.
Probability. Or to be exact: everybody can say that something like aliens could potentially exist, but that doesn't make it absolut. It's kind of like the whole debate on whether there's a god, or not. There's no evidence, so people just believe whatever they want. So, considering how everybody seems to agree that aliens might exist, I'll just take the opposite position, because I can.
Now, if real proof was to be found of actual intelligent alien live, I'll gladly change my mind. Afterall, real proof tends to be decisive.
