Aliens

[orbsycli]

didn't get my facts from the government. they wouldn't be facts if i did so

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by burnitall31

says the government

What sort of discussion is this? Stop throwing oneliners back and forth or I'll move this to the watercooler before you can say "taken".

[infamous]

Just look aroung our planet, a multitude of various life forms we haven't even begun to completely catolog yet. Why would we consider ourselves so special, considering the vastness of our universe. Oh yes, there are some that want to believe that they are so unique that there could not possibly be others out there in the endless expanse of space. How utterly egocentric for some to believe themselves without peer. Right now there are probably others asking this same question about the existence of others in this universe. And there are in my opinion others that already know the answer to this question, but deem us unworthy of any scrutiny because of our infantile position in history. But please don't ask me to prove this, for we all know that no such information is available at this date. There are however many others that view the possibility of extraterrestial life as quite possible if not even inevitable. If there is no interest in this possibility, why is there so much time and money being invested by our government in the space program? The question is continually asked, "will we find any life". If we were sure that none existed, I'm confident that we would not be looking.

[spennithorne]

Originally Posted by infamous

Just look aroung our planet, a multitude of various life forms we haven't even begun to completely catolog yet. Why would we consider ourselves so special, considering the vastness of our universe.....

There are however many others that view the possibility of extraterrestial life as quite possible if not even inevitable. ...

Thanks, Infamous----One does have to embrace the fact that after finding ~156 (Jupiter-class) planets orbiting around ~143 stars in the last 10 years, "we" have just in the last month have found a planet only twice Earth's diameter orbiting a fairly (15 lightyears) near-by star. [Google: extrasolar planets]. With the development of further technology, already well-along and funded (!), we will be technically capable of discovering many more Earth-size planets quite soon. Presumably a few percent of these will be in the "temperate zone" in distance away from their star, that is, where water is largely between freezing and boiling.

This however, is very different from saying that some sort of civilized being will be living there, even if we found some. For example, the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. For the first billion years there was essentially no life here, and for 3.5 billion years, there has been no intelligent life to speak of, excepting only the last 5 thousand years or so. Prior to that, any one coming to Earth would have been meeting people who were prehistoric, literally. You can do the math---these 5 thousand years are a very tiny sliver of time out of 3.5 billion; and the probability, the pure chance, of meeting intelligent, let alone civilized beings on our Earth itself, for a visiting species from somewhere else, is extremely small.

Now, let's take a look at the probability of civilized intelligent life on some other planet---one has to look at all the Earth-size planets in the "temperate zone" of other stars that haven't and won't ever evolve intelligent life that we could recognize---and unfortunately, that's likely to be a majority of them. And most of all, there's the teensy little problem of travel time. One has to take into account that "nearby" stars are still dozens to a few hundred light-years away---and that's no short hike.

Well---where's the positive note?---there IS one! That's when we as a species have solved the travel-time problem (I don't anticipate that'll be any time soon.) And that's that there are ~100 billion stars in our galaxy. The majority are NOT Class-M stars like our sun. Some Class-M stars may have (had or will have) Earth-class planets in their orbital temperate zones. However, the segment of TIME that they will have intelligent life on them may preclude us from finding them, or they from finding us. And the Milky Way galaxy is, after all, some 100 thousand light-years across----we see any star on the other side as it was 100,000 years ago---it may not even exist now. And that's just in our little old average non-descript galaxy....

I think humanity will at some point encounter extraterrestrial life, but I think the chances of encountering extrasolar life, particularly intelligent life, are vanishingly small before our species conquers faster-than-light travel. And the chances of that .....??!

[selky]

was that roswell by any canse