decent distance in light years

Your post has been hijacked by the master of deception. It's too bad it had to be your thread that he hijacked.

Back on topic, read post #5.

BTW, oiram, do you have a link for that 30 light year figure?

 

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OK! The great derailment is over, so back on topic.

Two series of debates at Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net/news/Debates.html, are very pertinent to the (original) topic of this thread.

The first of these debates covers the topic "Complex Life Elsewhere in the Universe?" Participants include the coauthors of "Rare Earth", Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, who argue that complex life is very rare, and Frank Drake, the developer (with Carl Sagan) of the Drake Equation, and an advocate of the hypothesis that life is widespread. The first of six parts is here. Follow the links near the top of each page to advance to various parts of the article (the links at the bottom of the page don't work so well).

A follow-on debate "The Great Alien Debates". The first of seven parts is here; once again follow the internal links to follow the debate.


Bottom line: The only consensus position is that nobody takes the extreme position that we are entirely and truly alone in the universe. Beyond that, opinion varies widely, from life (intelligent life) being so rare that we are effectively alone to life being so abundant that we are literally surrounded by life.

 

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I read the distance reference in this article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28148553/

 

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I would think life is common in our galaxy but the problem is time. If in our galaxy which is ten billion years old, in a solar system formed six billion years ago, life could have formed there, evolved and mostly died just leaving low life forms there a billion years ago. If a solar system formed just four billion years ago, it may still only contain primitive ocean life. Even with solar systems that formed the same time as ours, a million years either way would mean a huge difference in the kind of life there. That assumes similar evolution. It is possible that some kind of hot blooded lizard or even insect life on a heavily oxygenated planet evolved to become intelligent there, instead of evolving from simians as we did.

It is generally believed that microbial life could exist in the upper clouds of Venus, under the surface of Mars and who knows what beneath the surface of a few of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? The universe might be teeming with life, though maybe over 99.99% of it is about the level of fungi and plankton.

 

Verily, quoting out of St James' is so pretentious...getalife.

 

I'd say Alpha Centauri and/or maybe one of it's components at 4.3 lightyears away is where we should be looking first. It's nearly identical to our sun and approximately the same age. There is a chance that we might find a planet that might be orbiting Alpha Centauri at a distance similiar to our earth is to our sun. If so, then the possibilities become a little more interesting. don't they?

 

Life on Earth is only here for a small fraction of the right events. If the Comet that hit in the prehistoric age didn't hit. Humas wouldn't be here. If Earth hadn't have collided with another planet shortly after they formed we wouldn't have a moon. So really life would need to be extremely lucky for the right events to happen to determine what happens, maybe there is life only 30million light years away. Maybe not.

Also they probably might not be carbon-based lifeforms maybe other elements will be the main part of their life. Like silicon or iron? all is a possibility.

 

Andromeda is getting closer all the time--our galaxy is going to colide and merge with Andromeda in about 6 billion years.

 

Can't wait

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So I presume, Fraggle, that you support the space initiative to colonize the Asteroid Belt or Mars as a worthy human endeavor? That should buy us a few extra million years, right?

 

I think we'll be doing very well to even be present on this planet in a couple of hundred million years as you say. Will we survive dinosaur-extinction type meteorite collisions?

 

True, and the earth might also be recolonized by those guys watching from up on the moon*

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*in our future moonbases

 

Would that be in the month of March or April? Just curious.

 

Apparently, it won't be in spring at all

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They're saying late summer now

 

Darn. Now I am going to have to reschedule my vacation.