Alien life

In an attempt to spur an intelligent yet purely hypothetical debate I resurrect this old topic;
Is there any (intelligent) alien life out there?
If so, would it be (relatively) near, highly or mildly intelligent, peaceful or aggressive, etc.?
Thoughts and comments please.
(I have specifically chosen this topic because it is relatively safe, small chances of someone getting offended because the rest doesn't believe his aliens exist)

 

The first thing to remember in relation to this is that the universe is big, really, really, insanely, mind-blowingly big.

That means that even if only one star in every 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 has a planet with the right conditions to support life, thats still a lot of places where intellgent life could evolve. So yes in my opinion intellgent life is, or will be, or has been out there.

Whether we'll ever meet any of them, well that's a lot more debatable.

 

If intelligent life were ever to study humans for a good while,would they want to encouter us?

 

I think there is evidence that aliens have encountered us. No, I'm not a crackpot conspiracy theorist. They just give this subject a bad reputation.Respectable people study this subject seriously and professionally.

 

From: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/Scales.htm

"There is similarly no clear evidence concerning the widely-held belief that the Earth is regularly visited by alien spaceships. The probability that intelligent technically-minded life has developed somewhere else in the Universe may be put at plus one given the vast number of star systems (although it could be extremely infrequent even on life-bearing planets; after all, it took hundreds of millions of years for complex animals to develop such intelligence on Earth and that seems to have occurred only by chance). That such beings visit Earth is far less likely given our knowledge of the immense distances involved and the practical limitation on faster than light travel (which must be a plus four probability – sorry, Trekkies!). All of this adds up to a belief in alien visitations scoring around minus two."

I might add that there could be a timing issue: the universe is not only very big, it is very old, and possibly technological civilisations capable of space flight do not last for very long. After all, we came within an ace of global thermonuclear war and, if the worst predictions are true, we may yet be destroying our own environment. In order to meet, two civilisations would have to exist at exactly the same time, close enough to make interstellar travel possible. That could be a very unlikely coincidence.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

 

From a theological point of view, the existance of extraterrestrial life would be rather problematical.
As Jesus came to die for us once, and once only, then , how do the aliens figure in this salvation. Are we to take the good news (gospel) throughout the universe? If there are aliens, then are they capable of biblical redemption.?

But, anyway, my thoughts are that these experiences of so called aliens are in fact beings from another dimension. Apparently, according to ancient rabbi's we live in a universe of about 10 dimensions.
So, it may be possible for transdimensionality to happen.
According to some, there have even been hybrids between these 'aliens' and humans. This may, or may not have something to do with the reason for the world wide flood of Noah.
If you have read this far, then let us know what you think.

 

It would seem odd since man cannot hybridise with even the closest relatives we have on the planet, let alone other mammals or even any other animals and that's without even considering inter-species hybrids on an interstellar basis.

 

I have talked to my dad about other life (who is a pastor) He said like what you have said that the universe is Huge and God probably might have other "Earths" out there...think out about it if you've been around forever might as well make different planets... or something like that

 

As for cosmological standpoint, the cosmos is living its early 20s in human age. The first generation of stars has gone and we're now living the age of blooming stars that are enriched by the remnants of the first generation of stars.

13,7 billion years is very little, in the grand scale. Might be that we need to be around for another 13.7 billion years, before we can truely start to ask the question, that was first asked a long time ago for the same paradox in a table in a cafee:" Why aren't they here now?".

 

What "grand scale"?

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

 

i am pretty much of a sceptic on most things paranomal with the exception of ufo sightings ...this is because of my own experiance which occured when i was about 11 years old in 1966 .what i saw was not anything nebulous like a light in the sky or a cloud or a dry cleaning bag fueled by candles ..it was very low and very hard and i hate to be so cliche ,but it was round and shaped like a soup bowl ...if you can visualize a soup bowl 18 or 20 feet wide with round portholes being lit from within in sequence ...yes , i know ,,,,sounds like something straight out of a b movie sci fi thriller ,but there it is....lucky for me ,my siblings and parents were very close by ,and i was able to get them outside in time to see it as well... our neighbor ( a full colonel usa ) was likewise dragged outside in time by his own small boy........ i was liucky i was so close to my own back door, otherwise my whole family would be rolling there eyes at me for the next 40 years everytime i mentioned it ...which ,no doubt , most of you guys are , i dont blame you ....i wouldnt belive me either...like i said ,i am a sceptic...somewhere in this forum , last year ,i recounted this experiance in detail ..i dont remember what thread though ....my dad ,btw was a captain in the us army at the time...of course , he was not so foolish as to report this event to anyone else ..he had a family to feed and a promising career...so remember , for every military or airline pilot who made the career busting mistake of reporting their own often very disturbing encounter , you can figure there are at least another 10 guys who did not ....my dad and col gardner saw NOTHING... just like sgt shultz on a silly tv show that was popular at the time ...

 

If we ever do come into contact with intelligent life, we have to kill it... quickly! :kill:

It would probably be in our species best interests to eliminate the competition, that is assuming we have the capacity to do so... It is the instinctive reaction I think...

 

Then we will just have to hope that if we meet any aliens with superior technology (a 50% chance) that they don't react in the same way :roll:

 

We have to sort out the problem of our immediate survival first... It is possible that we will become extinct ourselves here when all the resources run out and we are trapped, until the sun explodes... IIRC Stephen Hawking thinks we should be fine resource-wise once we colonize space...

Has anybody read the Dune novels? In those books the pretence is that humanity colonizes space, and spreads itself across such a vast distance that we grow lax and loses all motivation as a species... It almost results in our extinction simply because we have accomplished so much we become so passive as to what to do next

 

Thats pretty amazing

 

With full apologies to majorwoody:
The size and age of the universe says there must be other life out there. The size and age of the universe also says it's pretty near impossible that we will ever contact or be in contact with "them". There must be/have been other intelligent life out there. Nearby? In distance or in time, almost certainly not. Intelligent? Well in five+ billion (5,000,000,000) years of life on this planet (the only example we have to work with) there has been exactly one technologically intelligent species to evolve (please no debate on how inteeligent we are, or Homo erectus was). Up unitl about six hundred million (600,000,000) years ago, life on this planet was pretty much unicelluar. based on this I believe life and intelligence is rare. it also appears that Einstein was right. If so, the speed of light pretty much means we're in cosmic quarantine. I'm still waiting for some bright young scientist to build on his theory, and show that it is a only a simplified model of the cosmos, and that there is way to get around the "c" barrier. The distances in time and space make it very difficult for me to think we will ever contact other intelligent beings.

 

Yes, was busy reading the Dune novels, finished the first two, will resume when I get back! Science fiction of the highest quality.

 

I advise you to stop now. "Dune" is brilliant, "Dune Messiah" OK, but after that - forget it.

 

Bad wording. I blame the saturday evening beverages for that

"Grand scale" means the age of how long the universe has been around and will be around from what the current theories predicts.

 

Terence Dickenson (The Universe and Beyond (Fourth Edition) ) says this:

"Passive observation and nonintervention are the only approaches that would pay reasonable dividends for extraterrestrials. Despite efforts to eavedrop on extraterrestrials with radio telescopes, the odds favour the belief that the aliens already know about us and are silent observers. We will remain unaware of them until they are ready to talk. contact will be made at a time and in a manner of thier choosing, not ours."

So if there is life out there, unless they want us to know about them, they ain't showing up. (The Vulcans observed two world wars on Earth before making contact with humans in Star Trek)

Ever read (seen?) 'War of the Worlds'. Pretty much all scifi universes put humans pretty low on the survivability scale (as an entire race of course- Captain Kirk, John 117 'Master Cheif) and Darth Vader are three notable exceptions to this rule.)