Do you think Aliens Exist?

Since when does 60% = ALL?

 

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not saying ALL, <the majority>

 

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No. A "Maybe" vote is not a secret "yes."

Personally I think there is other life in the universe, though see no reason to assume it's multicellular (let alone intelligent) without better information.

It's the "and they have been to Earth" part that I'd say a categorical "No" to myself.

 

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You don't see a reason? Ok.. you don't see a reason.

 

I see no reason to think there isn't intelligent life. After all, it happened here. (Ignoring debates on if there is actually intelligent life here.) I see no reason to think that we're special in any way.

 

tough. it wasn't about hawking and resources so you'll have to read them to find the real reason. or not.

 

With the old technology we reached the moon. We have just started teleporting - albeit on puny levels. Overestimates of progress by SOME people in the 50s - I think that generalization was rather misleading - does not mean that other people cannot underestimate. In fact I would say it supports the idea that we can only be uncertain.

And we also, as I said, have no idea how many thousands of years some civilizations may be ahead of us - or whether there are any. Or whether we are rather poor improvers, always trying to make a profit rather than what the intelligent squids of XRW3837893 who learn much faster and put a global priority on travel, being frustrated by their original thicker travel medium.

 

Thank goodness you said 'might.'

 

Then you need to look at how multicellular life began. You see, there were two unicellular organisms...one of them somehow infiltrated the other's cell. The infiltrator then somehow wormed its own genetic code into that of its new host cell. That infiltrator then somehow transformed into what we call a "mitochondrion" (aka "the powerhouse of the cell") and provided far more energy to its host cell than the host cell ever had.

WIthout the mitochondrion, it's not clear that we would ever have had multicellular life. Remember Life started 3.5 billion years ago...and for 3 billion years there was no multicellular life. It's only in the past 500 million years that any multicellular life form has existed.

Remember, evolution has no goal, and no path. In most ways single celled life is more successful than multicellular life. It's far more abundant, even if we tend not to notice it. Evolution doesn't care how genetic material is propagated, and multicelular organisms represent an almost unfathomable increase in the amount of resources needed for that propagation. It's many orders of magnitude different.

There is no reason to believe that the absorption of the mitochondrian was anything more than a happy accident for us. What that means is that we do not have enough data to conclusively state, one way or another, how likely multicellular life forms would be. You can pretend we do know enough based on a "we are not special" assumption...but the validity of that assumption is not really known as there's no data that proves it.

It's rather like sexual reproduction. Biologists have no idea why it developed, since it seems to be measurably less reliable and more costly than asexual reproduction. We can and often do assume that aliens will have sexual reproduction of some sort even though we do not have data that shows us why it was a favored trait even on this planet.

I am not saying there is no intelligent life out there, I am simply saying we do not have the data needed to make any reasonable prediction of its likelihood. In that case, it is better to say "maybe" with the caveat "we can't really know" than to make assumptions about variables based on a single emergence of life.

The emergence of life on Earth isn't "data", it is at most a single datum. Relying on what we see here and extrapolating into the universe is to reason on the basis of a single anecdote. If I told you I saw a herd of ostriches, the analogy would be your concluding that all birds, everywhere, are 6-9 feet tall and very fast (and flightless) runners. Maybe, though, that species of bird is an outlier (i.e. ostriches really are "special" in their physical characteristics), and the reasoning from anecdote is therefore flawed.

Why do people have such a hard time saying "I don't really know" rather than expressing false certainty in accordance with their preferences? Whatever the reason, your belief is one based on faith in your assumptions, and not logically compelled.

So the logical answer is "maybe." The faith-based answer is "yes."

 

Do you think that Non Biological Extraterrestrials could exist?

 

Agreed!

'No' being faith based also. And I would argue any statement of liklihood without qualitification.

To say 'It is unlikely' is a claim to knowledge that can only be faith-based also. As are all the speculations on whether they have come here or not.

 

I have no problems saying I don't know. It is the only logical response. I also have no reason to "assume" we are the only ones. The universe is a big place.

 

And the "maybe" answer I gave does not assume that. If I did assume that, my answer would be "no", by assumption.

 

That's certainly correct. One can say, of course that in the absence of positive evidence on their existence, it is often pointless to debate or discuss such things.

Can we say as a matter of ironclad logical proof that Oberon, King of the Elves does not dance a jig on my front lawn when no one is looking? No. But in the absence of positive evidence that he exists and is doing so, I'd be a fool to devote resources to proving his existence.

That is where assumptions come in that might tip the scale in favor if devoting resources. If one assumes we are nothing special, then it makes sense (under that assumption) to look for aliens.

Many of the assumptions one might make, though are could be colored heavily by the fact that we have only a single example of the emergence of life, and all known living organisms stem from a single source and are related. The assumptions we make should therefore, imo, be as conservative as we can manage because we are generalizing based on a single (if familiar) example.

 

Agreed. It is just so damn expensive to get out of this gravity well we live in using rocket technology.

We have?

 

No it's very easy to say yes. He didn't say "intelligent", he didn't say our galaxy. It could be a doglike animal on some spiral arm of a galaxy in the virgo cluster. Even the most pessimistic numbers plugged into the drake equation will give you more than 1 for the whole universe. Yes is a very valid answer. Maybe even in our own solar system if you include small life like bacteria.

 

I feel that some parts of this thread have some small relationship to this latest science news....


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111026143721.htm

 

Nope.

The most pessimistic number for any of the variables in the Drake Equation would be ZERO, which would make the end result equal to zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

And it is certainly not inconceivable that if it turns out that fℓ = the fraction of the planets that actually go on to develop life at some point is very low, then fi = the fraction of fℓ that actually go on to develop intelligent life and fc = the fraction of fi civilizations that develop technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space could be zero.

Arthur

 

Well considering that it took about 4 billion years for intelligent life to form and that life on earth came close to being wiped out at least several times during that interval, and because the sun continues to get hotter, like on earth won't last another billion years (I've seen scientific estimates as low as 1/2 a billion years), I think it's fair to say that we are somewhat special.

Arthur

 

I noticed the paper was published in Nature

Unidentified infrared emission bands at wavelengths of 3–20 micrometres are widely observed in a range of environments in our Galaxy and in others1. Some features have been identified as the stretching and bending modes of aromatic compounds2, 3, and are commonly attributed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules4, 5. The central argument supporting this attribution is that single-photon excitation of the molecule can account for the unidentified infrared emission features observed in ‘cirrus’ clouds in the diffuse interstellar medium6. Of the more than 160 molecules identified in the circumstellar and interstellar environments, however, not one is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecule. The detections of discrete and broad aliphatic spectral features suggest that the carrier of the unidentified infrared emission features cannot be a pure aromatic compound. Here we report an analysis of archival spectroscopic observations and demonstrate that the data are most consistent with the carriers being amorphous organic solids with a mixed aromatic–aliphatic structure. This structure is similar to that of the organic materials found in meteorites, as would be expected if the Solar System had inherited these organic materials from interstellar sources.

nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10542.html