Is there life in outer space?

[Ethan]

I don't think anyone ever comes up with a good argument in this topic to be completely honest with all of you. I mean you either say the universe is so big that there must be life, or that the chances of life occuring are so small there must be no life.

Here's a tip, if you actually want to throw some punch to your point, try some mathematics. Why don't you go ahead and compare the statistical chances of life occuring to the estimated size of the universe, and you should have your answer about just how "lucky" we really are. I'd do it myself but math sucks.

 

[Drake Pokétrainer]

I don't think anyone ever comes up with a good argument in this topic to be completely honest with all of you. I mean you either say the universe is so big that there must be life, or that the chances of life occuring are so small there must be no life.

Here's a tip, if you actually want to throw some punch to your point, try some mathematics. Why don't you go ahead and compare the statistical chances of life occuring to the estimated size of the universe, and you should have your answer about just how "lucky" we really are. I'd do it myself but math sucks.

Fine then, here's the Drake Equation to calculate the number of civilisations that are capable to travel to other planets in our galaxy, so it doesn't include us.

http://i40.*******.com/wmjdvm.png

R* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

The annoying thing is that you don't even know half of the factors that are in the formula. Frank Drake used these factors:

* R* = 10/year (10 stars formed per year, on the average over the life of the galaxy)
* fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)
* ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of supporting life)
* fl = 1 (100% of these planets will develop life)
* fi = 0.01 (1% of which will be intelligent life)
* fc = 0.01 (1% of which will be able to communicate)
* L = 10,000 years (which will last 10,000 years)

Drake's values give N = 10 × 0.5 × 2 × 1 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10,000 = 10.

Of course the outcome is probably wrong.

Happy now?

EDIT: And why the hell isn't the IMG code working?

 

[Calm PokeMaster]

Thanks for all these posts guys.Keep it going.

 

[The Director]

I've just got one thing to add to the probability argument. Although it is highly probable due to the size of the universe and the requirements for life that there is intelligent life out there i'll just say this. Life has an annoying habit of breaking or ignoring the laws of probability and forming its own agenda. In short probability means nothing as there is always the alternative no matter how improbable it is.

Moving away from the probability front of life on other planets as that aspect seems to be exhausted.

If i remember correctly they have found life on Mars. Not intelligent life mind, (I think they were bacteria) but still life. So that itself proves there is life out there. If however the debate is rather is their intelligent life out there...

Well first you've got to consider what is intelligence? Some people consider dyslexic people to be unintelligent. However some of our great inventors and thinkers were dyslexic (i'm fairly sure Da Vinci was). So, as we can't actively measure intelligent life on our own planet, how will we tell if when we come across more forms of life if they are intelligent or not? And then you've got to think that aliens are more than likely not going to think in the same way humans do so any IQ tests we have may not apply to them.

Then you've got to think whether we will be able to see them. Or whether they'll be able to see us. We could already have "alien life" on Mars or our own planet and we just can't detect them. We sense things through our five senses and all our instruments of measurement do the measuring dependent on one of these senses. So if these "aliens" we can't detect through these senses then we wouldn't be able to prove or see the life anyway until we develop a "sixth sense" and i'm not talking about telekinesis or mind control or anything like that. It's like describing a blind man what red is, its impossible. So is the sixth sense if we should ever develop it will be completely different to sound, sight etc.

Moving on from all that. Lets say the "intelligent life" that might be out there, exists in a form humans could understand through our five senses and that they think in a similar way to humans. Either they have a lower form of technology, a differently advanced form of technology, the same kind of technology to ours and a higher form of technology.

If it is higher or the same as ours as we would of picked up their signals although the other possibility is that they are so far we haven't detected them yet or any signals they have sent out has dissolved into the background radiation of the universe. Say for arguments sake that they have detected our first radio transmission which was around the 100 years ago. Now if they have replied however long it took to get there will be how long it takes to get back. So say they detected it back in 1970 it will take another 70 years for it to return back to us so we won't get it till 2040. Now thats all very well and good but radio like TV travels at the speed of light. If it took light 70 years to get to the planet then we have aproximately a distance of,
662251133080656000 meters to traverse.
Even if we develop light speed travel it'll take 70 years for us to get there. And by then any news we have of Earth or "Planet X" will be long out of date for anyone to use.

So really apart from peace of mind and curiosity there is very little to be gained from discovering new life unless we develop truely phoenomenal science that shatters the laws of physics as we know them.

 

[Darkrai00]

i say there is defintely a chance, but if there is its way out there and i wouldnt really see a point in further pursuing finding it right now, we have our own planet and we could use the millions of dollars there using to go on space mission to better the planet we are on and make it survive, so maybe there is life, maybe there isnt but i dont feel it really matters right now for us.

 

[-Dark-Knight-]

I don't think so, but it might be true.
Like people say that "Aliens exist", they have no proof, and there is no proof that there might be life in outer space.

 

[Bill Nye the Sneasel Guy]

Probably is out there somewhere or other, though I doubt anything resembling intelligent exists.

Even if not, it's probably only a matter of time until you have more people going more regularly into space, and thus a higher chance of people not decontaminating the ships properly, and then some extremophile perhaps gets introduced to a place favorable enough and adapts to it. Depending on how you look at it, this could count as alien life.

 

[hailflameblast]

Let's look at the possibilities.
If their tech level is below us, probably no communication.
If their tech level is above us, probably no communication.(They might have discarded the devices which could pick up the signals)
If their tech level is equal to us, probably possible communication.
Let's assume that there is a 75% chance of life existing on other planets.
The chance that we can contact them = 75/100*3 = 75/300 = 1/4 = 25%.
Chance that they respond = 25%*70%=1/4 * 7/10 = 7/40 = 17.5%.
Chance that they are coming to eradicate us = 17.5/100 * 30/100
= 0.0525 = 5.25%
Therefore, the chance that the world will be destroyed by aliens coming to invade us = 5.25%
P.S. Calm, got the reference?

 

[Erienne]

Technically, no, we haven't found life on Mars. We did find, however, from a meteor that came from Mars 10,000 years ago what look like fossilized bacteria, but they could just have been Earth bacteria that became fossilized instead.

 

[Rezon]

I'll answer your question with another question.

Look at the ground in your house. Whether it be tile, wood, or anything just look at it.

Now look at the very corner of the floor in your room. See that very tiny tiny spot in the corner? Thats Earth. Now imagine the rest of your house the Universe. The universe is much bigger then that comparison. So yes I beleive that there is life out there somewhere. I mean, government has tried to cover things up for years but we all know about it. But in that whole universe people really try to say that we are the only ones here. I do not beleive that and I beleive that there is life out there somewhere

 

[hailflameblast]

There probably is life out there BUT a bigger question is : Is there intelligent life out there? Scientists are trying to build space probes to explore the universe but I'm pretty sure that they won't be greeted on so-and-so planet by extraterrestrial octupes.

 

[mattj]

Life is too complex to have evolved anywhere else. It's not like throwing a simple puzzle on the ground and it just happening to all fit together right. It's even way more complex than that.

 

[Skaisdead]

People who say that aliens don't exist (which evidently is nobody in this thread) because there is no evidence are very close minded. There is a very small chance that among the billions of extrasolar planets that exist, we would have found anything. Lo and behold, he have not. If we found life anywhere, there's even less of a chance that it would be intelligent life. I don't know what thought is more frightening: Unknown extraterrestrials that coexist with us in this universe, or that we are completely alone in this black, abysmal void.

 

[palingensia]

Of course without any evidence to prove either way, we can't say anything and hence this isn't really a debate.

However, I do believe we can't be the only sentient beings in this universe. It just wouldn't make sense if we were.

 

[shaymin]

It takes a series of lucky curcumstances to have the right mix of climate and stuff for life to be able to survive. Now if earth was able to combine these elements, whose to say that there arent hundreds of other Earth similar planets with the same circumstances?

 

[palingensia]

It takes a series of lucky curcumstances to have the right mix of climate and stuff for life to be able to survive. Now if earth was able to combine these elements, whose to say that there arent hundreds of other Earth similar planets with the same circumstances?

That's only for out species too, if aliens do exist the climate of their planets would almost certainly be different to Earth.

 

[~-Overheat-~]

Who knows? Elements they are made of might not even be visible to the eye. It gets that freaky when you think about it.

Recently we have discovered so many planets, there must be life, atleast microbes, on some of them.

 

[Erienne]

Life is too complex to have evolved anywhere else. It's not like throwing a simple puzzle on the ground and it just happening to all fit together right. It's even way more complex than that.

Uh, that statement is total BS, 'fraid. See, you're thinking that all life is based off of deoxyribonucleic acid. Truthfully, we've seen interstellar clouds with carbon organic compounds, and Titan rains methane, all needed for life. In addition, why would life need DNA? It could use a different system, or even silicon. Hydrogen and Oxygen are the 1st and 3rd most common elements in the universe, so water must be plentiful. Carbon (which with hydrogen and oxygen form sugar) is also very common. So is nitrogen. All of these form life. Life is random occurences, these molecules brought together by chance, and then managed to duplicate themselves. It only takes one similar molecule to begin life, that's all.

 

[dracoburn]

yes. there may very well be life that is so intelligent that we cant even comprehend it. perhaps said life hasnt attacked us because theyre a calm, peaceful organism. haha the hippies were right!!! lol
scientists have found traces of water and ice on mars. there r some planets that entirely consist of giant chunks of ice. anywhere water can be, life can be. 'nuff said.
EDIT: and may i remind everyone that all that is required 2 make something "alive" is that it 1.can reproduce, b it by cloning, sex, splitting etc... 2.it depends on some form of nourishment 4 survival and 3.it has the ability 2 die. pretty simple, eh?

 

[Maruno]

There is life on Europa. There is life on Titan. There is life on Mars. There is life on Earth.

Remember that bacteria are a lifeform, and the most abundant one on Earth by trillions of times. There are extremophiles that can exist anywhere at all (we've frozen them to near absolute zero, boiled them in a furnace, poisoned them, irradiated them, and generally been Guantanamo Bay on them, and they can survive without a scratch. And there's no reason at all such bacteria couldn't have developed elsewhere in the Universe.

As mentioned above, scientists have discovered complex organic compounds in interstellar clouds, and they're not even planets or somewhere nicer for life to form. We've also discovered signals (using spectrometry) that some of the 300+ extrasolar planets we've found contain gases that are a good sign of life (I forget which case, but it's created here by bacteria), and said planets are gas giants or other really nasty places to be, most of them much closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun.

And remember that out planet detection methods are currently heavily biased in favour of larger planets (they cause their stars to wobble more, they block out more light in transit, etc.), so we're simply not seeing all the planets available.

So if we're finding all kinds of (admittedly non-absolute, but still pretty promising) signs of life if these kinds of places, it's unfathomable that life doesn't exist anywhere else in the Universe.

This is all bacteria, though, which is what the question was about. The intended meaning, though, was whether intelligent life existed. And all I have to say about that is that there's 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, and millions of billions of galaxies in the Universe. Scientists have been able to create proto-life in the lab simply by copying conditions that existed on the early Earth (various chemicals and gases and lots of lightning - we have no reason to suspect this wouldn't be a commonplace scenario on rocky planets). Assuming even a trillionth of such planets with bacteria ever evolve into animals, and a millionth of those planets develop intelligent life, there's still plenty of planets with people on them in the Universe.

Space is big, as a certain popular Guide once mentioned. There's virtually no chance any of these people-inhabited planets are anywhere around us (unless my figures are greatly pessimistic, which they are, and that all other kinds of calculations are way off, which they could be - the Drake equation is a laugh at best). We won't be able to communicate with them, or ever really know they exist, but they are there.



We've recently launched a space-based telescope that can find Earth-sized planets (albeit transiting ones, which accounts for only about 5% of the total), which should be getting some good results in the next 3 years. It'll tell us how abundant Earth-like planets are, with reputable scientists expecting anything from 10% to 70% of all stars having an Earth-like planet, which is very promising when it comes to finding alien life. We've got 4 in ours, for instance, and we're not expecting this to be a huge fluke.