It Looks Like We're Not Alone

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Even finding simple life out there would be a monumental discovery. If we find life on Europa, and it’s biochemically similar to life on earth, it likely means it and us had an early common ancestor. If it is alien biochemistry, then that’s an argument for life being fairly common in the universe. If the latter, then considering the likely hundreds of millions of earth like worlds in our galaxy, and the trillions in the observable universe, it doesn’t seem far fetched to suggest that there is probably intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. As well, as I said, our definition of life is biased towards the kind of organic chemistry we find on earth. There may be other kinds of chemistry that leads to life quite different from what we might expect.
 
Yes agree. In the book I read (Haven’t read the Ward and Brownlee book) Dr. Ross explains how most of the star systems that are as old or older than ours would not be able to form rocky planets capable of evolving life and the ones that can have younger stars than ours so it’s unlikely they would have a civilization advanced enough to be able to traverse space. I’m not explaining it well just paraphrasing from memory so you almost have to read the book.
And I’m not an astronomer/astrophysicist so I’m not sure if he is the final word,lol.
The book is written for laypeople to understand.(As I am!) He also is skeptical of wormhole travel too.
 
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niceatheist said:
If we find life on Europa, and it’s biochemically similar to life on earth, it likely means it and us had an early common ancestor.
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Of course. Wasn’t it Carl Sagan who pointed out we’re all star dust?
 
We’ve already discovered exoplanets within their own stars’ habitable zones (the zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet with a reasonably dense atmosphere). But if there are other possibilities, like planets with subsurface oceans, then life may have other places to evolve.
 
I’m interested in this subject not only because I grew up on Star Trek but also have friends who claim to have seen UFO’s.
 
Vanny said:
I’m not explaining it well just paraphrasing from memory so you almost have to read the book.
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No problem! I came across the Ward and Brownlee book almost if not over a decade ago and I had to rely on Wikipedia to refresh my memory.
 
Yes but then they have to be able to have complex life that evolved technology that can get here from there! But maybe it exists and we will never know it because we can’t get there and they can’t get here.
But like I say, I keep an open mind.
Of course I believe if such life exists God created it.
 
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I have the Lights in the Sky book in my library but I read it about 15 years ago. Of course people are going to say that he is prejudiced by his Christian conviction but he states in the book(and on his website Reasons.org) that he is not theologically opposed to extraterrestrial life.
He just believes, as Ward and Brownlee do that it is unlikely due to the way things have formed, etc.
 
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Vanny said:
I have the Lights in the Sky book in my library but I read it about 15 years ago. Of course people are going to say that he is prejudiced by his Christian conviction but he states in the book(and on his website Reasons.org) that he is not theologically opposed to extraterrestrial life.
He just believes, as Ward and Brownlee do that it is unlikely due to the way things have formed, etc.
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And my argument is that we don’t know enough about “how things formed” to really extrapolate anything from that. Furthermore, we have a sample size of precisely 1, the planet we’re living on. In other words, these claims are wildly premature, both from investigations into how abiogenesis may have occurred on Earth, and from the various kinds of organic chemistry that can occur elsewhere. It’s an argument to sell books through controversy. I can’t imagine any researcher seriously hanging too much on that claim. Even the Drake Equation, which at least attempts to make an actual argument, is little more than an appeal based on our ignorance.

I’m not impressed. At this point, the only thing we can say with certainty is that we know nothing for certain. With research into how organic chemistry could lead to self-replicating molecules still very active, let’s see what researchers figure out about how organic chemistry may have worked on Earth 4 billion years ago. And let’s start snooping around worlds like Europa and Ganymede, sniffing the geysers that regularly erupt, as well as checking out what kinds of materials might be deposited on their surfaces. There’s also Titan, which has an incredibly dense atmosphere, no lack of organic compounds, though the temperature is far cooler and probably not as amenable to any kind of active biochemistry, but probably is a fossilized relic of what the terrestrial planets may have looked like early in the solar system’s history.
 
RidgeSprinter said:
They would do to us the same way we did to the Injuns.
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That was certainly Stephen Hawking’s fear, that if we do broadcast our presence, we may not like the attention it brings. I’m a bit more hopeful, insofar as I think the speed of light is an absolute barrier, and even if it isn’t, a civilization capable of producing the amount of energy capable of accelerating space craft to some healthy fraction of c, or even find a way around it, probably has evolved long past the point where it’s interested in colonizing Earth-like worlds. A civilization capable of producing that much energy probably has technological capabilities that allow to build habitable worlds and biospheres anywhere it wants, and other than as a scientific curiosity, would have no interest in us.
 
A search “flaws in the theory of relativity” results in some interesting reads. I’ve never really bought into the limitation of the speed of light fully. Having worked a nuclear power plants and have seen first hand Chrenkov(Cerenkov) Radiation. This is beta particles escaping faster than the speed of light.
 
There are hypothetical ways, like wormholes, though whether you could actually create one, and more importantly keep it stable, is a pretty open question. And then there’s the whole causality violation issue to deal with.

But even if we can never effectively move faster than the speed of light, time dilation means if we could move at some significant fraction of the speed of light, those on such a vessel might only experience a few years “ship time” even if here on earth decades of centuries past. But that again would require us to be able to produce and harness a lot of energy. To achieve relativistic speeds for even a modest space craft would require more energy than we produce on the entire planet in a year.
 
Tucker: Do you think Officials at the Pentagon are unnerved by this? Does it scare people who know more about this information?

Lue: I do.

 
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Phatmass1 said:
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Vanny:
I believe they are inter-dimensional.
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Same…
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Same. In fact, I think scripture supports it.

Luke‬ ‭16:22-26
“Now the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried. In Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and *saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great chasm fixed, so that those who wish to come over from here to you will not be able, and that none may cross over from there to us.’”
 
I read this series but it has been so long that I don’t remember them very well. My favorite was Out of the Silent Planet. I think I will reread them.
 
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