Is there life in outer space?

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GEddie said:
Actually, technically, pure spirits are not “alive”. Life is the union of psyche and body.

ICXC NIKA
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Really? Huh, I am learning a lot on this thread… What would we consider Angels then?
 
I like the argument that somebody made about the Queen of Heaven. Can there be two? Although, I suppose that God could change the way he redeemed another race of fallen rational beings.
 
John_Savage said:
I like the argument that somebody made about the Queen of Heaven. Can there be two? Although, I suppose that God could change the way he redeemed another race of fallen rational beings.
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I really thought the Queen of Heaven point was really good too!

I am really curious about Angels not having life per se. And I do not want to hijack this thread so I will make a thread dedicated to that question since I am really curious what the answer is…

If you have any thoughts on the topic feel free to post over there
 
I believe there is life out there. As big as the universe is, I know humanity is not God’s only creation. 🙂 That’s like a writer only writing one book, or an artist only making one painting or musician only writing one song. 🙂
 
DaddyGirl said:
You don’t think God could have put humans elsewhere?
I mean…if he can resurrect people, part seas, produce virginal births, admit or refuse people to heaven, make a worldwide flood, cure fatal diseases, have a man live to 1000 years old, start an entire human race using one guy and a piece of his rib…and God is all powerful and imnipotent…you are saying he couldn’t choose or is not able to place some intelligent humans on one other of the over six sextillion planets that exist?

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Exactly! For all we know God could have made 2 planets like earth and one planet could be full of people like us who never fell. 😉
Ion said:
We are in a terible fight for our salvation.
How would they relate to this fight of ours? How do you know on which side would they be ?
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If they never fell they would be on God’s side naturally.
 
It all boils down to numbers. In this universe of billions of planets in billions of galaxies, the possibility of life, even intelligent life, is technically possible SOMEWHERE out there. But the likelihood of us finding them, or of us being able to communicate with them, is slim to none.

In other words: Your guess is as good as ours.
 
Gricken

It all boils down to numbers. In this universe of billions of planets in billions of galaxies, the possibility of life, even intelligent life, is technically possible SOMEWHERE out there. But the likelihood of us finding them, or of us being able to communicate with them, is slim to none.

Exactly! By some reckoning, the nearest star that** might** have planets capable of supporting life is far away. With our present technology, accessing that solar system would take 30,000 years. And if there is no life there, traveling into deep space far beyond that solar system might require time and resources that would be impossible to develop.

So we are, apparently, pretty much locked into our own little world, the adventures of science fiction explorers notwithstanding. God must have made the universe so big for a reason. We are alienated from alien visitors by the sheer fact of how distant solar systems are from each other through time and space.
 
Gricken said:
It all boils down to numbers. In this universe of billions of planets in billions of galaxies, the possibility of life, even intelligent life, is technically possible SOMEWHERE out there. But the likelihood of us finding them, or of us being able to communicate with them, is slim to none.

In other words: Your guess is as good as ours.
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I consider the argument “there must be intelligent life out there because the universe is do big” very unconvincing. The Earth itself is 4 billion years old and there has only been intelligent life capable of producing civilization for something like 10s of thousands of years. And with millions of species only one has evolved that can so so. Intelligent life is damn rare on our own tiny planet.

God is infinite, the argument that only creating us once is like a author only writing one book makes no sense mathematically. Being infinite, the same argument would hold if He had created billions of races of intelligent life. Compared to infinity, a billion is no bigger than 1.

At the end of the day, there is absolutely no scientific evidence of other intelligent life out there, besides the argument from probabilities and the size of the universe. But that does not hold water. You can easily conclude that it is actually impossible for all the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, so the number of attempts is irrelevant.
 
brian614 said:
No offense, but this is not dogma… This is just the opinion of a person in the Vatican. Not even a bishop…

Thus the reason for debate.
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devoutchristian said:
A priest does not constitute “the Vatican”. He’s not the first priest to spread heresy and he probably won’t be the last.
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As the article states, Fr. Jose Funes is the director of the Vatican Observatory and was appointed by Benedict XVI, and I’m sure he is a better expert on the subject than any of us.

I doubt someone holding an official position in the Vatican would express “his opinion” without some sort of official approval.
 
The most profound and philosophically sophisticated answer I can hypothesise to this question is: beats me.
 
Indeed. If we have a need to know, Heaven will see to it that we know. :cool:
 
tafan said:
I consider the argument “there must be intelligent life out there because the universe is do big” very unconvincing. The Earth itself is 4 billion years old and there has only been intelligent life capable of producing civilization for something like 10s of thousands of years. And with millions of species only one has evolved that can so so. Intelligent life is damn rare on our own tiny planet.

God is infinite, the argument that only creating us once is like a author only writing one book makes no sense mathematically. Being infinite, the same argument would hold if He had created billions of races of intelligent life. Compared to infinity, a billion is no bigger than 1.

At the end of the day, there is absolutely no scientific evidence of other intelligent life out there, besides the argument from probabilities and the size of the universe. But that does not hold water. You can easily conclude that it is actually impossible for all the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, so the number of attempts is irrelevant.
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You misunderstand me. I didn’t say they do exist. We really have no way of knowing yet. What I said was that, given the size of the universe, the POSSIBILTY that the conditions for life could be met in other places in the universe isn’t far-fetched. Not that “aliens are real because the universe is so big” but “The size of the universe makes it plausible that the conditions for alien life can be met in other places”
 
Gricken said:
You misunderstand me. I didn’t say they do exist. We really have no way of knowing yet. What I said was that, given the size of the universe, the POSSIBILTY that the conditions for life could be met in other places in the universe isn’t far-fetched. Not that “aliens are real because the universe is so big” but “The size of the universe makes it plausible that the conditions for alien life can be met in other places”
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You said it boils down to numbers and the size of the universe is such that the posdibiliry of intelligent life exists ( I did not read conditions in your post) I even take exception to this. The possibility is out there because God may have created it, but not due to the size. Of if one is irreligious one might say the possibility exists simply because we exist. But the size of the universe has nothing to do with it, beyond it being some minimum size to fit two if our solar systems in it.

Look at it this way, if it impossible for intelligent life to come into being naturallty, then no matter how big things are, it’s not going to happen. It is impossible for a monkey to type out the words to Hamlet, no matter how many times you set him down at a typewriter. Saying if you set him down enough times ( even if it is trillions and trillions) it will happen is wrong. It is a misunderstanding of probabilities.
 
I think the real question here is that even if intelligent life did exist elsewhere in the universe, the universe is so vast that we could never reach into it to find out during the time required to do so. Stephen Hawking says the human race will not last more than 1,000 more years on this planet. How he knows this is beyond me. But if it takes 30,000 years for us to reach the nearest star that might (but probably doesn’t) have life on it, why does it even matter to us whether life exists beyond in deeper and deeper space.

Imagine yourself on a star-ship for thirty thousand years (several hundred generations of your progeny would have passed before reaching that solar system). You reach your destination and find there is no life on any of the planets. The next closest star system might be 30,000 more years. How do you fuel and provide food sufficient to keep a single star-ship going for 60,000 years … with still no certainty of reaching a destination capable of supporting life such as our own?

To me this is all a losing proposition … pure science fiction. That won’t stop plenty of scientists from applying for a federal grant to accomplish the supremely improbable, if not the impossible
 
Lost_Sheep said:
As the article states, Fr. Jose Funes is the director of the Vatican Observatory and was appointed by Benedict XVI, and I’m sure he is a better expert on the subject than any of us.

I doubt someone holding an official position in the Vatican would express “his opinion” without some sort of official approval.
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Lost Sheep the point me and DevoutChristian were trying to make is:

There are lots of people at the Vatican with different views this would hardly be the first time that someone there said something that was not official Church teaching. Heck their have been Popes and Great Doctors of the Church who have said things that are not true(When not teaching doctrine of course)

You may very well be right that Father Funes is a better expert than us but to think that because he works at the Vatican means he speaks for the Church is false… Priests that work their do not (to my understanding) need permission to talk to the press. He was just stating his opinion which you can believe or not.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
I think the real question here is that even if intelligent life did exist elsewhere in the universe, the universe is so vast that we could never reach into it to find out during the time required to do so. Stephen Hawking says the human race will not last more than 1,000 more years on this planet. How he knows this is beyond me. But if it takes 30,000 years for us to reach the nearest star that might (but probably doesn’t) have life on it, why does it even matter to us whether life exists beyond in deeper and deeper space.

Imagine yourself on a star-ship for thirty thousand years (several hundred generations of your progeny would have passed before reaching that solar system). You reach your destination and find there is no life on any of the planets. The next closest star system might be 30,000 more years. How do you fuel and provide food sufficient to keep a single star-ship going for 60,000 years … with still no certainty of reaching a destination capable of supporting life such as our own?

To me this is all a losing proposition … pure science fiction. That won’t stop plenty of scientists from applying for a federal grant to accomplish the supremely improbable, if not the impossible
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It doesn’t work that way. Time and space are relative. If you can maintain an acceleration of 1g for the entire trip, then you could travel to most nearby stars in a matter of years. It would seem a lot longer to observers on Earth, but to you it would go by pretty fast.

That is what I like most about space travel. It’s reverse suicide. You basically make everybody else grow old and die before you return.

The trick is to maintain a constant 1g acceleration. I think that might be possible with the 1960s era Orion drives, but I am not sure if we have enough warheads anymore to maintain the acceleration. If all you do is accelerate and then coast at some velocity, then relativity doesn’t come into play and it takes a long time, as you described.

The difference comes when you accelerate rather than maintain a constant velocity. You can do it for the entire trip by flipping the ship over half way, and then accelerating in the other direction to reach the same relative velocity of the destination star.

So… yeah… if there is life anywhere near our little corner of this galaxy, it will become possible to reach them. I suspect we already have the propulsion technology. The problem is maintaining a closed ecosystem which can support human life. It’s not like on television where people live in metal ships. It would be more like hurtling through space in a giant garden forest, with farms and everything. Otherwise you risk losing biomass and that’s the end.
 
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