Aliens, Exist or Dont

[StupidAndy]

with the extensive discovery of exoplanets and discoveries near earth making other celestial bodies in the Kerbol Solar System, do you think aliens exist

before you say no, listen to the evidence

the milky way has over 200,000,000,000 stars

each of those stars might have one or two planets around them, maybe more

those planets probably have moons

and that's only our own galaxy, there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, each with one or two planets, each with a chance of having a moon, the probability of us being alone in the universe is about 1 in 1x100¹⁰⁰ at my rough estimate that took me longer to write then think

the evidence against

practically nothing

Edited March 17, 2017 by StupidAndy

[Spaceception]

There's life out there, IMO we're going to find it before 2025 with advanced telescopes like the James Webb, and E-ELT

[Gaarst]

Aliens don't exist until proven otherwise. That's how science works.

Edit: I personally think it is possible they exist, but opinion != fact

Edited March 16, 2017 by Gaarst

[Just Jim]

I'm hoping we get to either Europa or Enceladus in my lifetime, and even if they just find bacteria, I'll be overjoyed, because it would mean the odds of life outside the solar system just shot up dramatically. And finding something alive on Titan.... wild as it seems.... that would just be the icing on the cake.  

 

Edited March 16, 2017 by Just Jim

[munlander1]

Well, the problem with this poll is that it is a yes/no question. Like gaarst said, they don't exist until we find evidence. Do I personally think they exist? Yes, I know this is not the best evidence but we came from somewhere. So to say out of the hole universe, life formed once? It is statistically improbable that that would happen. I think that the question would yield more no's from people that think there is alien life out there then more yes's.

@StupidAndy I think better questions would be "do you think there is alien life" and "do you think there is not alien life".

[StupidAndy]

EDITING THE OP

and now its done

[munlander1]

I won't say YES! before there is evidence. I will say most likely, but not full on yes. That's a very good category for me.

[razark]

1 hour ago, StupidAndy said:

before you say no, listen to the evidence

Strictly speaking, that's not evidence.

 

1 hour ago, Gaarst said:

Aliens don't exist until proven otherwise. That's how science works.

No, they either exist or they don't.  Our knowing about them has no bearing on their state.  Without evidence, there's no reason to believe in them, however.

 

Personally, I find it highly likely that there is other life out there, and I hope that some evidence will appear in my lifetime.

[StupidAndy]

I used the wrong word

more like, mathematical probability

sorry

[munlander1]

3 minutes ago, StupidAndy said:

I used the wrong word

more like, mathematical probability

sorry

Come on! Get it right! 

[adsii1970]

From a common sense standpoint - yes.

But I do not believe they are all going to be carbon-based. I believe we will find silica based life forms, even if they are only some sort of bacterium or virus...

1 hour ago, Just Jim said:

I'm hoping we get to either Europa or Enceladus in my lifetime, and even if they just find bacteria, I'll be overjoyed, because it would mean the odds of life outside the solar system just shot up dramatically. And finding something alive on Titan.... wild as it seems.... that would just be the icing on the cake.  

 

They will find it on Europa, to be sure... I also believe we are only a decade away from finding fossils of primitive organisms on Mars.

[razark]

52 minutes ago, StupidAndy said:

more like, mathematical probability

The problem is that you're playing probability with very large numbers and assigning probabilities that you cannot possibly know.  (I am, too, when I say that I think it is highly likely.  That's why I try to express it as my opinion.)

For example, you say "the probability of us being alone in the universe is about 1 in 1x100¹⁰⁰" based on the number of planets/moons in existence.  The counter to that is that we only have evidence of life existing in 1 in 100¹⁰⁰ of those cases.  Therefore, life is extremely rare.

But then again, of all the solar systems we've examined in sufficient detail, 100% of them had life forms.  Obviously, life is all but inevitable.

Or: Of all the planet or moon surfaces we've visited, half of them had life.  Therefore, it's an even bet whether life will exist somewhere.

The problem with playing the probabilities is that we have an extremely limited sample set, and very little knowledge of what forms life could take.  Nor do we actually have any way to actually predict how probable it is for life to occur.  All we can say for certain is that it happened at least once.  But we don't know how many times it has actually happened, and how many possible ways there are that it could happen, or what could prevent it from happening, etc.

 

Instead of looking at the probabilities, I'd look at how quickly life arose after the earth formed.  If it happened extremely quickly, that's an indication that the jump from chemistry to biology was a rather easy one to make, and therefore likely to occur again under similar circumstances.  If it took a long time, you have the indication that it's either a complex process, or requires very rare events, and is therefore less likely to be repeated, even under favorable conditions.  Another question is how common are the chemicals necessary for life (as we know it).  If we find these chemicals to be in abundance, again, the more likely it is they will come together in the right way.  Reliance on rarer elements again means that there is less chance for life (awki) to form.

My understanding is that life appeared rather quickly from rather common elements.  We've found certain more complex chemical building blocks in meteorites, as well.  That all leads me to believe that life is probably pretty common as well.  Add to that the possibility that "life" also includes forms we haven't even contemplated yet, and the likelihood that there's some[thing|one] else out there climbs even higher.

Edited March 17, 2017 by razark

[pxi]

I think it's highly likely that life exists out there.

In terms of what we might find in our own backyard, be it Mars, Europa or wherever, I'd suspect if we do find anything we may well end up discovering that they have some relation to earthbound life of one form or another - I'd be wary of defining such a case as truly 'alien' life.

Beyond that, whether we will ever establish contact with other intelligences, that's more of an open question, there's a lot of opportunities for life out there, but space is also staggeringly huge, and then you throw in the timescales - Earth's had civilized humans for thousands of years, and technology like radio for hundreds of years.  These are blips in the billions of years that the solar system has existed for, and we realistically have no idea how long we will survive as a civilization, nor do we have any idea how long an alien civilization would persist.  We could have missed our nearest intelligent neighbours by a few hundred thousand years, or be too early by a similar amount.

Alien plants and the like,we could likely discover a few of them though.

[munlander1]

1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

ased. I believe we will find silica based life forms, even if they are only some sort of bacterium or virus..

Kind of stemming off of this, but expecting them to be similar to life on earth is highly unlikely. 

[WinkAllKerb'']

alien: something, that live somewhere in the universe, yes they do, call them cat, dog, human, plant, cleverbot,parametie whatever, wherever ... as far as you can travel for now ^^ and statistic related both is possible

Edited March 17, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[Bill Phil]

Jury's still out, and that isn't evidence for there being aliens. But looking at the logic of it, the jury is simply out. We're looking mostly on the radio part of the spectrum, at a tiny part of the sky for a tiny amount of time. Why should we expect to find anything? The only interesting thing we've found is the Wow! signal. But there's no reason to assume that's from aliens... And there isn't any evidence against, and there's none for. It's basically Russell's Teapot. You can't prove it's there or not, and it doesn't even matter, at least for now.

Who knows, maybe we're the Universe's Elder Things? We could be the ancient species that seeds life in the Universe.

[paulprogart]

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

[Nuke]

we will probibly find it in our own solar system. lots of underground oceans out there.

[razark]

18 minutes ago, paulprogart said:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

The Fermi Paradox annoys me.

We start with "We don't know", then feed into a machine that asks a question, starts the answer with a bunch of repetitive "if"s, wrapped in speculative probabilities, bundling a little that we do know, compounding it with a bunch of things we don't, and finally grinding out "We still don't know".

 

Edited March 17, 2017 by razark

[SinBad]

I think as our own technology develops and we start looking at utilising mass and energy on solar system scales we will begin to see evidence that much of the natural universe around us isn't natural after all, but rather the debris left over by the the expanding spheres of ETs exploring thier way to a bubble bursting extinction.

I mean, just look at our solar system.

Murcury is mostly metal. Almost like someone needed somewhere close to an energy source to park the core of a small planet while they built new ships.

Venus is sluggish

Mars is shriveled

The next planet had its core mined out

Jupiter has retrograde moons

 

[YNM]

Aliens in the sense of a life form, no matter what condition, out there ? Yes.

Aliens as in intelligent beings like us ? Big if. Fermi paradox is a paradox because the parameters aren't solid yet. Once we found one, it shall be set in stone that there really, really is.

[Shpaget]

6 hours ago, StupidAndy said:

probability of us being alone in the universe is about 1 in 1x100¹⁰⁰ at my rough estimate

Care to expand on your calculation?

[kerbiloid]

• The chemistry divides in two parts: Carbon and Miscellaneous. The latter one can be moved into appendix from the main book.
• Unlikely we could have enough patience to speak with sapient continents using magma as blood.
• Unlikely we have common topics to discuss with plasma clots whose language has 400 synonyms for the phrase "locally unstable turbulence", but who never can understand what is "tabourette".
• "Aliens" too strong word for something you watch on a glass slide under microscope

So, probably we can confine ourselves with a carbon-based life as "aliens", enough sapient to watch our TV shows (even without understanding, like a dog).

Edited March 17, 2017 by kerbiloid

[0111narwhalz]

I think we need a more reliable definition of "life" before we can argue whether it exists elsewhere. I mean, we can barely pin down whether our own cohabitants are alive. What chance do we have with entities which evolved from different conditions to solve different problems?

In any case, I would assert that there are many starting conditions which yield a universe with zero life and many which yield one with life atop life, but only a few which yield exactly one instance of life. With a sample size as big as the universe, you can expect even things which are very improbable to occur multiple times, somewhere. Based on this insubstantial reasoning, I'd expect that we are in a universe with multiple instances of life. Whether they are within observable space or time is another matter entirely.

[YNM]

22 minutes ago, 0111narwhalz said:

I think we need a more reliable definition of "life" before we can argue whether it exists elsewhere. I mean, we can barely pin down whether our own cohabitants are alive. What chance do we have with entities which evolved from different conditions to solve different problems?

That's the similarity - life solve "problems", no matter what that is.