Sm31415 wrote:
The idea of an alien species coming all this way to steal our resources, or our territory or our technology is to my mind,



anything we have an alien species that can get here, could replicate



save for one thing



as people have pointed out, intelligent life is most likely rare



so what we are is a planet full to brim with 7 billion chunks of a life form they would never have encountered before



And if they have interest in their version of genetics, id bet any money theyd be coming here to get a look at our make up, and see if theres anything interesting they could nick.

Uh,what?You are speaking like we have encountered actual aliens.

I believe that since the universe is huge,and considering the fact that our galaxy alone has 100 billion stars and 160 billion planets at the least,I think that someone somewhere and sometime is watching me from afar...or from up-close that is.

42! and 42! of course

as far as im concerned space bird magic.



just look at corvid intelligence.



on a less humerus note i think there is more than likely bacteria out there and extremophiles or simple creatures with or without skeletons still its a pretty big universe so a sentient species is probably out there in the sea of entrophy and violent radiation.

Yes, there is rational and intelligent life out there

If they mastered space-travelling tho I doubt they would bother coming here

Humanity is small enough to the point of nothing compared to the universe but big enough to understand some of it or be awed by the size of its magnitude i say why wait for entropy when things could lead up to new discoveries and wonders by keeping interest on space and mainly optimism.

There's a possibility we can even find life inside our own solar system. We have found examples of extremophile bacteria living on earth in conditions similar to venus (i.e. very hot, very acidic vents deep under the sea) and there's even a possibility of life inside the galilean sea in Europa. As for space-faring civilisations, it's not really possible. There's probably thousands of empires out there who finally admitted that space travel is just far too impractical and succumbed to the inevitable entropy of the universe. If we did manage "warp drive", we'd probably find countless graveyards of such civilisations.

ThePurgatoryFire wrote:
There's a possibility we can even find life inside our own solar system. We have found examples of extremophile bacteria living on earth in conditions similar to venus (i.e. very hot, very acidic vents deep under the sea) and there's even a possibility of life inside the galilean sea in Europa. As for space-faring civilisations, it's not really possible. There's probably thousands of empires out there who finally admitted that space travel is just far too impractical and succumbed to the inevitable entropy of the universe. If we did manage "warp drive", we'd probably find countless graveyards of such civilisations.

With the proper tech,nothing is impractical.

My lecturer on evolution touched upon aliens once in the light of that theory.



What he said was that if life began on other worlds it wouldn't necessary mean they would develop intelligent life at all. If you look at our own history, it took 3 billion years for mammalian sized brains to develop along with high sociality. The dinosaurs was doing just fine with a baseball-sized brain. Intelligence is not the goal of evolution, rather just another evolutionary adaptation that may or may not occur.



Indeed, intelligence can actually be a very bad adaptation until it becomes evolved enough to support real cultural and technological development. With high intelligence, at least in the case of Earth-life, a lot of resources and a lot of time is required for an individual to grow. Just compare human babies who can't walk or do pretty much anything, with the offspring of cows who can walk within the first hours of their lives. Other highly intelligent species on this planet, like the other great apes, are rather evolutionary unsuccessful and few in numbers. Indeed the only reason why humans are such a success is simply because we are intelligent enough to develop and run a civilization, and had the time to do it. So there's a big chance that creatures intelligent enough for civilization would simply not make it that far to begin with.



So intelligent life out there would most likely be rather rare. Also, who's to say only human-like intelligence would develop on alien worlds?

Bugg wrote:
My lecturer on evolution touched upon aliens once in the light of that theory.



What he said was that if life began on other worlds it wouldn't necessary mean they would develop intelligent life at all. If you look at our own history, it took 3 billion years for mammalian sized brains to develop along with high sociality. The dinosaurs was doing just fine with a baseball-sized brain. Intelligence is not the goal of evolution, rather just another evolutionary adaptation that may or may not occur.



Indeed, intelligence can actually be a very bad adaptation until it becomes evolved enough to support real cultural and technological development. With high intelligence, at least in the case of Earth-life, a lot of resources and a lot of time is required for an individual to grow. Just compare human babies who can't walk or do pretty much anything, with the offspring of cows who can walk within the first hours of their lives. Other highly intelligent species on this planet, like the other great apes, are rather evolutionary unsuccessful and few in numbers. Indeed the only reason why humans are such a success is simply because we are intelligent enough to develop and run a civilization, and had the time to do it. So there's a big chance that creatures intelligent enough for civilization would simply not make it that far to begin with.



So intelligent life out there would most likely be rather rare. Also, who's to say only human-like intelligence would develop on alien worlds?

Don't take examples of species on Earth because the possible variations of life in the universe make taking Earth as an example...well close minded.But I can understand the way of thinking,we do not know more than what we can observe so we make conclusions out of these,and that is partly logical,but it's a way of thought I do not embrace by just thinking the near infinite possibilities the Universe can give us.Hell,we can't even be sure if Nucleic acid is the only biomolecule capable of coding for life.That's just my opinion though.

The idea of an alien species coming all this way to steal our resources, or our territory or our technology is to my mind,



anything we have an alien species that can get here, could replicate



save for one thing



as people have pointed out, intelligent life is most likely rare



so what we are is a planet full to brim with 7 billion chunks of a life form they would never have encountered before



And if they have interest in their version of genetics, id bet any money theyd be coming here to get a look at our make up, and see if theres anything interesting they could nick.

StK wrote:
Could someone please give us an offtopic board?

Dont get me wrong I really like those threads (^^,) and I will post in them frequently but they should be kept together in one place so they dont end up between the discussions about the game

I also agree. An Off-Topic board is quite essential if you ask me.





On the topic of alien life, I personally believe in an infinite universe that has lasted an infinite amount of time, it is completely impossible for Humanity to be the single, one and only, sentient species to evolve to a technological level as to colonize the entire planet and achieve a level presence in space as well. Though, whatever life is indeed out there at this moment, they most likely have not achieved anything near our level of technological supremacy.

Space?

KingofParis wrote:




Space?

I approve.

Mtwo wrote:
With the proper tech,nothing is impractical.

The proper tech doesn't exist. FTL travel is not possible, fullstop. And don't use any "space-time" warping engines theory because they're absolutely not possible, the gravitational flux from such a drive would be enough to tear apart the ship (no matter its make-up) before you even go an inch.

ThePurgatoryFire wrote:
The proper tech doesn't exist. FTL travel is not possible, fullstop. And don't use any "space-time" warping engines theory because they're absolutely not possible, the gravitational flux from such a drive would be enough to tear apart the ship (no matter its make-up) before you even go an inch.

I bet your the type of guy who thought that the ablity of flight was beyound our grasp.



No we will sparead our wings and take to the stars, ot die trying.

Mtwo wrote:
Don't take examples of species on Earth because the possible variations of life in the universe make taking Earth as an example...well close minded.But I can understand the way of thinking,we do not know more than what we can observe so we make conclusions out of these,and that is partly logical,but it's a way of thought I do not embrace by just thinking the near infinite possibilities the Universe can give us.Hell,we can't even be sure if Nucleic acid is the only biomolecule capable of coding for life.That's just my opinion though.

Proteins can code other proteins. Look up a little something called a Prion.

It is arrogant and utterly stupid to believe humanity is alone in the Universe, especially since fossilized bacteria exists on Mars and aquatic life is highly suspected on one of Jupiter's moons (the Ice moon that has volcanoes of hot water). Also the biology branch of science was thrown into disarray recently as non carbon (arsenic based) life was discovered on Earth recently!!!



Actually scientists don't doubt the existence of other life, it's just the debate that is there "intelligent" life out there that is controversial? Keep in mind that any civilization wishing to explore and colonize space outside of it's solar system must leap to a technological level that is beyond current understanding since the scientific community on Earth is "positive" nothing can go faster then the speed of light, yet the nearest star being 4 light years away means that at the speed of light it will take 4 years to reach it. Keep in mind the stars that are visible to the naked eye present no small feat, and the middle star of Orion's belt is some 1300 light years away or 2600 years at half the speed of light.



The best anyone can do in an attempt to "find" another intelligent civilization is to join the Seti@home program and start crunching, although there is doubt to it's accuracy since signal degradation is a confirmed effect.



Forget the UFO pictures or the so called smoking gun of proof that are supposedly videos of alien spacecraft, the best evidence and one that the scientific community itself has concluded that it is likely ET (that is until such phenomena is observed occurring by a natural source) is the WOW signal that was recorded in 1978 however at the time computers were complete junk in terms of processing power and we only received a fragment of the entire signal making analysis of it almost impossible.



If ET does exist and in a nearby system it is possible that they could be utterly uninterested in contacting us. Consider our relationship to mice, we don't try to explain science, the arts or civilization to it because it does not have the capability to understand or communicate with us at such a level. I believe if aliens exist that are capable of interstellar travel then it's possible that they could be seeing us as mere mice running in our own self constructed maze unaware of the freedoms or scientific knowledge that they have achieved. At best we may be stone age primitives to them; let us hope though that no such aliens such as the Cravers are nearby lol

There is definitely life outside Earth. Both intelligent and primitive. Life can exist in almost any environment; whether it's the freezing tundra, the blistering desert, or the dark, isolated bottom of the sea. Lifeforms have different DNA compounds on this planet alone. We have no idea how flexible life can be. We've found planets that seem to be life-supporting, and Mars (Our neighbor) has evidence that life could have existed on it at one point. We haven't probed many planets, if one of the handful of planets we probed had life on it at one point, think about the trillions of other planets out there.

ThePurgatoryFire wrote:
The proper tech doesn't exist. FTL travel is not possible, fullstop. And don't use any "space-time" warping engines theory because they're absolutely not possible, the gravitational flux from such a drive would be enough to tear apart the ship (no matter its make-up) before you even go an inch.

And if we were in the 19th century you would say we cannot fly.Right now it does not,but with the rhythme of technological leaps,I am pretty sure that there is a way.I did not say that we can FTL travel now.I said that there is a really high possibility that we will be.