Aliens

The chance of us existing was so incredibly low, it's entirely irrational to assume that aliens exist without any evidence.

Also , I got excited because I thought this was a thread about the Alien series of films and it was just this :(
 
The way I look at it is, that space is so fast beyond our understanding, that there is a very good chance that some form of life is out there.
 
I don't believe I've ever seen any real UFO's for myself- although my Mom claims she saw something veryyy weird in the sky on our way to Florida once. But her husband and I were asleep in the car, so we didn't see it. I myself looooooove to watch UFO and Alien documentaries. I've loved it ever since I was a little kid! Science just interests the Hell out of me. :D ... Whether or not I actually believe in them, though, is just... well, I'm in the gray about it. Obviously I wouldn't TRULY believe in them unless I really saw one for myself! But that doesn't mean I'm all "no, they don't exist." But... with all of the UFO stories and sightings and abduction stories... there must be SOMEONE who is telling the truth, right? Not ALL of them could be lying! It would be so incredible to see one for myself. ...So long as they're friendly. :P
 
Mathematics says there is a high likelihood that there is some form of life put there. It also says that the chances that there are advanced civilizations is low, but not abysmally low. Whether or not there are advanced civilizations or not does not matter- there is, almost without doubt, life besides what exists on this rock.
 
Okay, just a little bit of math here for you. Nothing complex, just basic multiplication and division.

Okay, so we have like 100 billion stars in a galaxy on average (the Milky Way is predicted to have between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, and some galaxies have less than this (and some have much more) so we'll be conservative and just for the sake of argument assume the average is just 100,000,000,000 stars).

Now, with our current technology we're pretty certain there are at least 50 billion galaxies out there, although estimates are that there are FAR more. Just for the sake of argument let's say there are only 50 billion galaxies (even though the real number is likely to be more than double this amount). Now, by multiplying these two numbers together (100 billion stars per galaxy where there are 50 billion galaxies), we get a total of 5 x 10^21 stars (or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, that's 5 sextillion stars).

Of course, not every star system has planets on it, however it's thought to be very common for stars to have planets in orbit around them. Let us assume that only... one in a million stars has a planetary system (that's being very conservative). And to keep things simple, let's assume that every one of these solar systems has only one planet, even though they're likely to have more. So divide the number of stars by the number of stars with a planet (1 in a million, so by a million) and we have 5 x 10^15 planets in the universe (or 5,000,000,000,000,000, that's 5 quadrillion planets).

Also not every planet is capable of supporting life, so let's say 1 in a million planets is capable of supporting life (so only one planet in every million is capable of supporting life, that's a low estimate). So all up we have 5 x 10^9 planets that can support life (or 5,000,000,000, that's 5 billion planets).

So get this - 5 billion planets in the universe are capable of supporting life according to this little math thingy. Let's remember that we've assumed a lower number of galaxies than there actually is, a lot lower number of planets than there is thought to be and a lower amount of planets capable of supporting life than there probably is. 5 billion planets is a much smaller estimate than probable, but even then - five billion planets! You can't look at that and say that there is NO life out there.

There's a few problems though. How common is life, exactly? The most accepted theory to the beginning of life was that it was an accident, that amino acids that had been moving around for a long, long period of time happened to collide in the right way and that started a chain reaction that gave birth to life. How likely would this be to happen? And then on top of this, we need to figure out if life would even evolve past bacteria and single-cell organisms. I don't know exactly, but I think it was like 2 and a half billion years for us to evolve from cells. Stars don't last forever and that 2 and a half billion years has taken up a lot of our sun's lifetime. What if life hadn't evolved far enough before its local star died? Also, what if life hadn't evolved on a particular planet enough to be considered intelligent or self aware?

Also, if there are intelligent aliens somewhere else in the universe, it's likely that they are far more advanced than we are. I mean, what are the chances that all advanced civilisations are progressing at the same rate we are and at the same time (in the same tens of thousands of years or whatever)? Our medical advancements have been amazing, what if these other life forms have found the secret to practically being immortal? The point I'm making is, if there is advanced life, why haven't we come in contact with them yet? Surely if they're that advanced they would have figured out a way to travel great distances in a short amount of time by now. Are they avoiding contact with us? Is it inevitable that intelligent life destroys itself before it is advanced enough to contact extra-terrestrial life?

Despite the points against there being intelligent life, I do believe there is intelligent life out there. Think of how big the universe is, how many stars, how many galaxies... it'd just be weird if we were the only race.

(Now I expect to get *shot* by Mizan or another science person if I got something wrong)
 
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Eddible said:
I believe that there are other lifeforms somewhere beyond our planet.
Probably just organisms and such.
Nothing "alien-like."
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Why couldn't an alien be an organism? After all, an organism is just an independently functioning life form. So your little green men or bug-eye'd greys would fall under organisms, as well as something completely unrecognisable.
 
Eliminator Jr. said:
Spoiler:
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You make many good scientific points. 5 billion planets able to support life. That only makes me believe in ETs even more.

Maybe the intelligent life forms doesn't know we exist. Maybe that's why we havent got contact with them.

But other points convince me against it. Our sun will probably die within 5 billion years. Our star is directly in the middle of the main sequence. It's an average star. Solar systems may have stronger stars or weaker stars.

And I've never heard about that theory of life in your post. But, that does convince me a bit against it.

Out of 5 billion planets able to support life, I know that there will probably many that support even the most basic forms of life.
 
there are likley to be other organisms in other planets, there is no way Earth is the only planet to hold life. If there is a 1 in 100000 chance to have life in a planet well this is the UNIVERSE! it is much bigger then 100000 or 1000000, there is deffinantley LIFE in other planets
 
Musician of Literature said:
I do think there is life on other planets. I have seen and read a lot of evidence in the past couple days.
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Care to share? That is if you read online, and not some books. Although it would be interesting to know the titles of those books too. I'm asking because I immersed myself in UFO literature when I was a kid already. Thats because I had seen a UFO and my dad had seen one prior to me and often told me about it. Anyway, having seen a UFO doesnt mean that its flown by aliens. I think thats a conclusion that too many, too quickly jump to. Its pretty evident by now that quite a few (secret) military branches have developed and worked on these. And believe it or not, even Nazi Germany was building flying saucers. Anyhow, all this doesnt exclude that there are, indeed alien life forms, on other planets.
 
Funny how whenever someone hears the word "UFO" they automatically jump to the conclusion that it's an alien race. Yes, I believe there is another life form out there. There is really no evidence to suggest otherwise, and the universe is far too wide for there not to be.

I'm sure there's another species of 'alien' on another planet somewhere, maybe in another galaxy just laughing at us because we just learnt how to make a 3DS. They're probably billions of years further in technology, but that's just me thinking.
 
Guillermo said:
Funny how whenever someone hears the word "UFO" they automatically jump to the conclusion that it's an alien race. Yes, I believe there is another life form out there. There is really no evidence to suggest otherwise, and the universe is far too wide for there not to be.

I'm sure there's another species of 'alien' on another planet somewhere, maybe in another galaxy just laughing at us because we just learnt how to make a 3DS. They're probably billions of years further in technology, but that's just me thinking.
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Laughing at us without communicating with us.... ? :P I can't imagine why any civilization wouldn't want to establish contact asap.. don't they want they want a piece of earth smexiness ;);)
 
There's no doubt in my mind aliens exist. The universe is vast; we can't comprehend how vast despite being able to measure it to the nearest centimeter. It would be narrow-minded to think there isn't another planet where there are the right conditions for life to survive. I'm not talking about civilisations; I'm on about bacteria. Small, unevolved organisms.

To think there's extra-terrestrials out there who visit us in space ships and don't make any contact with us is a whole 'nother ball game; one that strikes me as ludicrous. Although it would be pretty fun to monitor us and abduct an individual or two every so often. It'd be like a real life game of the Sims.
 
How could you not think that life exists outside of Earth? O_O; I mean, the universe is so vast... =/

But on the aliens, my mom and her grandmother claimed to have seen a UFO land in the forest behind her home when she was a child. Now, I'm not sure about the details on that one but she said that it was flying-saucer like and had multi-colored lights.

And there are so many sightings, stories, and claims of seeing strange objects in the sky/water (of course they may just be from the government...) and being abducted, ALL of these people can't be lying, can they? I wouldn't think that every story was made up, there's just so many of them...

But then again I think that I've been watching too many specials on UFO's on the History Channel lately... There was a really good one about how ancient civilizations were visited by aliens but I dunno... Do these organisms really have the technology to travel to Earth? ... This stuff gets me so confused with religion... @_@
 
shinx95 said:
How could you not think that life exists outside of Earth? O_O; I mean, the universe is so vast... =/
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Why is this considered sufficient evidence? The unlikely nature of the emergence of life is so great (it is even more unlikely than putting all the components of a computer into a boy, shaking it and opening the box to find a functioning computer) that it is equally plausible to assume that the vastness of the universe is only just sufficient to provide the possibility for our own existence.
 
the chances of aliens not being out there are very small there are billions of galaxy's billions of stars in that galaxy and also planets orbiting the stars in that , so there must be loads of planets like earth possible of having advanced life forms.
 
I'm a fervent believer in extraterrestrial life. It just seems too implausible not to be true.
 
Åzurε said:
If you show me a planet suitable for life that's not ours I'll consider it. Until then I think not.
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Åzurε said:
If you show me another universe that's not ours I'll consider it. Until then, I think not. ;)
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I think these are very arrogant statements.

Eliminator Jr. gave some very nice numbers, and actually, Eliminator, what you were doing is an incomplete non-formulaic form of the famous (or infamous) Drake Equation.

Once again I'll paraphrase a quote I heard once by Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer and scientist (any astronomer or physicist is sure to have heard of the Clarke Orbit). But anyway, here it is (again, I'm paraphrasing, so it may be a little different from the actual quote):

In front of every person living today stands thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, it is estimated that one hundred billion people have walked this planet. Now that's an interested number, because one hundred billion is about the number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and of course every star is in reality a sun, with planets likely revolving around it. So what that means is that there is enough room just in our galaxy for everyone who is living, and everyone who has ever lived, to have their own world.
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I, personally, believe there must be life out there somewhere. I think it's statistically ignorant to think there couldn't be. Now, I do not believe that aliens have visited us (to me that's just silly), but is there life somewhere out there in the universe (or multiverse, if you believe in M-theory or the subsequent String theory)? I would say, without a doubt.
 
There are probably intelligent life forms out there in the universe. I don't believe that earth would be the only place that have life forms on it. I have not had any encounters with aliens in my life and I hope I won't ever, but it would be interesting.

If you want some good alien movies rent "Fire in the Sky" and "The fourth kind" as they are both decent movies.
 
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