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Are we alone in the universe?


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The search for new worlds

ESA's mission: to discover new worlds outside of our Solar System, to help answer the ultimate question; are we alone in the universe? Research goes on during and after Cassini/Huygens' exploration of Saturn with a planned new mission, Darwin, seeking the origins of life.

 

Everything started with the Big Bang and 15 billion years later we are starting to understand as the universe really functions.

Currently the scientists are rethink very radically the questions on the key of our existence:

- Because we are here?

- Of where we came?

- We are alone in the universe?

The researchers are making discovered surprising, as the existence of the primordial blocks of the life in the universe. We are knowing world beyond our solar system for the first time, all indicating the most surprising of all conclusions, of that we can be foreign in our proper planet. We are dust of stars?

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The chances of there being extra terrestrial intelligent life forms are incredibely low. The requirements for life are so precise that only about a dozen planets could even fit the criteria - and then the chances of life coming into existence on these planets? Very low.

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Well, don't be shocked, but I do believe extraterrestrial life forms could excist. I once said that in at school, years ago, and they looked at me like I came from Mars or something. rolleyes.gif

 

However, I believe there is a change life can excist on other planets, which doesn't necessaraly mean intelligent life. I'm talking about bacteria, micro organsims and stuff like that, not about the "one-eyed green aliens coming over here in their flying saucers abducting people" which are typically associated with the term "alien".

 

The Universe excist of billions of galaxies, containing trillions of stars. One of those galaxies is the Milky Way, and one of those millions of stars in it is our Sun, which supports our solar system. Even if the chances are small, I believe there might be a realistic chance life has developed somewhere out there..

 

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Does life exist on other planets? I can see the possibility, but whether there actually is life out there, we don't yet know. So I'm sticking to my answer of "maybe".

 

Hm... I'd like to try an experiment in thought. I'll explain later if I get a few responses from this. Now, imagine the world sometime in the future, when we finally manage interstellar travel pretty nicely. One day, we manage to chance upon a planet with intelligent lifeforms. How would we interact with them, if they had the same level of intelligence and technological developments as us? What if they were less developed? More developed?

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Depends what sort of conditions that life has evolved for, though, doesn't it?

Any kind of life needs precise conditions to function, and for this life form to actually become significant the margin in which it could exist would be tiny. And like EE says, if life does exist, it is almost infinitely more likely to be single celled organisms.

 

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Also you have to keep in account time and space are relative concepts.. Given the fact that the Universe is some billions of years old, and humans only appeared on Earth some hundred thousands of years ago, while most of the major scientific discoveries and technical inventions were only developed in the past couple of hundred years; electricity, machines, ships, cars, trains, airplanes, radio-signals, rockets, satellites,...

It could very well be that there was intelligent life, or maybe even a civilisation if you will, on some planet at the other end of the Milky way... some 10 millions years ago. Who knows?

 

The Universe makes you feel small, doesn't it...

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I believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. smile.gif

Do not exist evidences that support the idea of beings of other planets to visit the Globe nor of that exist intelligent life in the solar system are of the Globe. The great distances between the stars and the limitation of the speeds that the bodies can acquire become improbable such visits extremely. In the last decades, however, they have been stopped quarrels, constantly brought up to date, on the probability of extraterrestrial life. For the whole world, millions of annual dollars are expenses in research that searchs the detention of signals emitted for extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations. The great characteristic technological advance of our time can be in leading the wide steps for the detention of these signals that, a time caught, confirming the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, can come to modify significantly the current society human being. borg.gif

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I kinda like this kind of topic, ?cuz no one gets an exact answer, but we all get wiser from it.

 

Well, we?re not alone in the universe. Probably there are at least bacterias somewhere. If there?s intelligent life forms out there, we?ll only know when we pay them a visit, or vice-versa, and i bet this is going to take an awfully long time...

 

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star-wars-smiley-043.gif * lid a 'glow in the dark' * biggrin.gif

 

I think we are not alone... However, we might be too far to reach our neighbour; either by distant travel, or by technology to make it possible...in near future... However, it's a good and constructive challenge to stretch our effort toward such goal, as the applications of the technology along the way is very fruitful.

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I must say I do agree with Europa.

 

Sure there is other life in the galaxy. If we can be here, so can others.

 

I just don't believe that extra terrestrials have visited earth. They exist, but they're probably not close-by.

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Any kind of life needs precise conditions to function, and for this life form to actually become significant the margin in which it could exist would be tiny.

 

This is correct - for Earth-based lifeforms. We have no frame of reference how non-Earth-based lifeforms could be. Mankind has just analyzed the life of one planet in a universe with so many stars that we can't even count them. How can we possibly say that there can be no other life out there?

 

In my ears that sounds like the statement of a caveman saying that beyond the "big mountain" the end of the world awaits.

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The existence of any life form larger than single celled organisms in irregular or elliptical galaxies would be unrealistic. Planets are frequently subject to turbulence from supernovae in such galaxies, whilst we may not have a reference these events would cause such change that something would have to adapt to conditions left behind by this at a fantastically speedy rate. Whilst this isn't impossible, it is very unlikely, but for smaller life forms it would be easier.

 

The force of gravity is universal, beyond a certain size, a planet won't even be able to support rocks more than a few feet high, let alone life forms. Anything too big would be crushed, regardless of how advanced it is. Such sizes would not allow for anything larger than ants, which are unlikely ever be regarded as intelligent (unless you take several billion years of evolution into account).

 

Whilst these two things don't rule life out, they do make it very difficult. Certainly, life can adapt through evolution - but if a planet has been intolerable since it's existence it would be very difficult for life to start in the first place.

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The existence of any life form larger than single celled organisms in irregular or elliptical galaxies would be unrealistic.

 

Your facts look nice and I'm sure that they represent today's scientific opinion. But before Voyager 2, "today's scientific opinion" also stated, that vulcanism was something you wouldn't find on a moon...that "fact" died when the pictures of Io were sent back...

 

So...unless an Earth survey ship scouts those galaxies and finds no life form, I won't accept such "impossible"-statements. They sound too much like "it is impossible to cross the Atlantic / to break the sound barrier / to build a computer that fits on a desk"...

 

No offense to you, but as someone who studies history in his free time, I have often read some statements from scientists who "proved" that this or that was impossible...

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I have no problem with scepticism, Ide. I just have a problem with "impossible"-statements.

 

Also, we SciFi-geeks need to have our sceptical counterparts... wink.gif

 

 

 

 

If we were to have more advanced weapons technology (all other technology doesn't count), history would be added with another colonization era...

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