How many atheists believe life elsewhere in the universe is probable
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Listening to Dr Ellie Arroway droning on the other day I thought ok - so there are 400 million stars in the milky way and many seem to have planets. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe - that adds up to a lot of planets.
I know there are range of ideal planetary preconditions required as to distance of orbit, presence of water, longevity of local sun and so forth but what I wondered was how many atheists think that given our presence on this planet, life - I mean any life - exists elsewhere in the universe?
Just to get things started I personally think life is probable elsewhere in the universe and I know that Luminon agrees with me...
Anyone else?
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
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Offline what edict? there's no place in the bible that says the earth is the only planet that contains life. even if you take for granted a geocentric system, it never says there's only one geocentric system. in fact, there is enough ambiguity in genesis that later kabbalists were able to say that the "stuff" god created the heavens and earth from was the remains of former worlds that were destroyed by the "breaking of the vessels" (a very technical concept from lurianic kabbalah which i won't get into unless someone absolutely insists).
Btw, how did the planets appear? The Rosicrucian teaching said that they are pieces of outer solar matter that got too dense and were shot away by centrifugal force, or something like that.
This chapter was the most boring and diffcult in the whole book, I'm still not sure I understand it completely.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
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Offline Their seems to be organic molecules on meteorites in space and with so many planets and suns life is inevitable
intelligent life tho is very rare but in a big universe that will still be lots of intelligent life 
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Offline iwbiek wrote:Would you mind, please? I have studied some Theosophic and Rosicrucian books, and there was a concept of incarnations of Logos. Every solar system is embodied by a living being, (such a solar-level piece of God) called Logos. Every incarnation the Logos did a certain progress of life in it's domain, then in the end everything was destroyed and Logos entered a period of calmness, concentration, evaluation of past cycle and planning of the next cycle. Every cycle of Logos incarnation requires to repeat all the progress of previous incarnations in mini-cycles, before the work in actual cycle starts to be done. There is 7 of these incarnations, and in each cycle there are more perfect forms of life. It's like bell curve turned upside down, initially the life was not material, just dim, sleeping consciousness in dark but hot clouds of gas. Every cycle the solar system got more material, precipitating and dense, but in the future it will break down again and the life will be more spiritual, living independently on the biologic materiality characteristic for the life today. So I presume that these incarnations of Logos were the "previous worlds" the Kabbalah speaks about. There were 3 so far, we're in the middle of the 4th incarnation. That probably includes dinosaurs.what edict? there's no place in the bible that says the earth is the only planet that contains life. even if you take for granted a geocentric system, it never says there's only one geocentric system. in fact, there is enough ambiguity in genesis that later kabbalists were able to say that the "stuff" god created the heavens and earth from was the remains of former worlds that were destroyed by the "breaking of the vessels" (a very technical concept from lurianic kabbalah which i won't get into unless someone absolutely insists).
Btw, how did the planets appear? The Rosicrucian teaching said that they are pieces of outer solar matter that got too dense and were shot away by centrifugal force, or something like that.
This chapter was the most boring and diffcult in the whole book, I'm still not sure I understand it completely.
Fascinating the stories people can come up with, when they don't require any actual evidence whatsoever, just something based on a bunch of pre-suppositions.
There is a pretty solidly established process for the development of the solar system.
The beliefs of the Rosicrucians and Theosophists are total fantasy. Any correspondence with reality is purely coincidental.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
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Offline that the galaxy as we know it is just a molecule of sweat dripping off the forehead of an enormous beast, among hundreds and perhaps thousands of beads of sweat dripping onto a slaughterhouse floor, and that within that one bead of sweat, there are a zillion trillion atoms molecules germs bacteria species etc within it. and that one drop of sweat, on an enormous monster, falls onto a salmon in a fish cannery, and is replicated a zillion times over in every can of salmon you eat?
In that context, do you really think Elvis and the Beatles really meant anything?
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Offline ProzacDeathWish wrote:Yes, we need to export our human species as quickly as possible. All the serial killers, child molesters, gang members, smart ass teenage punks, high school beauty queens, shitty cell phone drivers, religious freaks, corrupt politicians, brutal dictators, etc, are tired of being so cramped up and crowded on our planet Earth. We need to make room for all those future generations. Time is running out. PS, don't forget to equip those space colonies with a nice police force and prison system.
All quite irrelevant to anything I've written. Ever.
I don't write for your pleasure. 
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Offline that the galaxy as we know it is just a molecule of sweat dripping off the forehead of an enormous beast, among hundreds and perhaps thousands of beads of sweat dripping onto a slaughterhouse floor, and that within that one bead of sweat, there are a zillion trillion atoms molecules germs bacteria species etc within it. and that one drop of sweat, on an enormous monster, falls onto a salmon in a fish cannery, and is replicated a zillion times over in every can of salmon you eat?
In that context, do you really think Elvis and the Beatles really meant anything?
Stop it - I just had my third cup of coffee and you're giving me heart palpitations.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
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Offline Yes, we need to export our human species as quickly as possible. All the serial killers, child molesters, gang members, smart ass teenage punks, high school beauty queens, shitty cell phone drivers, religious freaks, corrupt politicians, brutal dictators, etc, are tired of being so cramped up and crowded on our planet Earth. We need to make room for all those future generations. Time is running out. PS, don't forget to equip those space colonies with a nice police force and prison system.
I missed this earlier but I wanted to point out it sounds a lot like the birth of modern Australian society, with all the misfits ferried off to the ends of the earth. What was funny was that the next generation was profoundly law abiding and so ashamed of their tawdry ancestry that it was taboo to talk about 'The Stain' as it was known, for the next 150 years. Not sure about sending on the kiddie fiddlers and brutal dictators though. Concrete gumboots prob the best solution there.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
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Offline what is intelligence ? The Cro-magnon man and the Neanderthal man begun 25,000 BCE and they were around for a long time and us so called intelligent Industrial man has only been around since the 16Th century,and just look at all of the pollution that we have generated,the Earth is at a tipping point due to all of the carbon that we emit,we have systematically destroyed our environment and built weapons that can destroy all life on the planet and yet we call ourselves intelligent ??? living in a sustainable way is intelligent !!!
Signature ? How ?
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Offline I hope they are like the 80's V aliens and thin the herd.
Would it be too much to ask that they wear sexy lingerie?
How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais
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Offline natural wrote:All quite irrelevant to anything I've written. Ever.
I don't write for your pleasure.
Again, irrelevant. If you're not writing something relevant to my post, why quote it? I wouldn't have replied in the first place if you didn't quote me.
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Not much more to say than this: http://www.setileague.org/general/drake.htm
From the seti page by Steve Ford
Is there a way to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilizations that might exist in our Galaxy? While working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. The Drake Equation, as it came to be known, was formulated in 1961 and is generally accepted by the scientific community.
N = R* fp ne fl fi fc Lwhere,
Frank Drake's own current solution to the Drake Equation estimates 10,000 communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Dr. Drake, who serves on the SETI League's advisory board, has personally endorsed SETI's planned all-sky survey.
Here are some other good links I like on this topic:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/drake.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/drak-flash.html <-- Drake calculator (with explanation of terms)
http://www.classbrain.com/artmovies/publish/article_50.shtml <-- another calculator
http://www.airynothing.com/smackerels/DrakeEquation.html
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The sheer number of galaxies would tend to make me believe that if life occurred once that it would therefore not be a huge stretch to assume the statistical probability of it occurring elsewhere.
Are we talking life in general, or inteligent life? If we are talking life of any kind I would put the possiblity extremely high, for me personally it would be 99.9% When I think about the probability of inteligent life all I really have to do is take my 99.9% and factor in the chances this life was sustainable for long enough for it to evolve to inteligent life, personally the number would still be fairly high. But I am no mathmatician or scientist, it just seems rediculous to me given the vastness of the universe to believe that no where else except here did it happen. So my personal opigion is that ofcourse they're is life out their, and if their is, its really just a matter of if life out their existed for long enough to evolve into inteligent life, which I would also believe to be very possible.
Though according the math Sapient plugged in it could be 10,000 with communication capability in the milky way alone. Mmmmm. Wonder what the miss universe contest would be like?
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Well of course the first challenge is being able to co-exist with such life. What if they're parasitic and see us and our planet as resources rather than equals? Or worse, what if they're more religious than our nuts are and try to convert us or kill us?
Then you're assuming that we can communicate with them. That of course presupposes that we have enough in common (many concepts could change simply based on their star, planet, and concept of time) to be able to come to some form of common ground on which to build. Math would always be a safe bet, as seen in Contact, since math is necessary to travel in space to begin with.
With recent discoveries showing just how plausible the emergence of basic self-replicating molecules is, under likely conditions on parts of an early Earth, along with the number of planets found just within detectable range of Earth, it would seem to be incredibly UNlikely that there are no other life bearing planets anywhere else in the Universe.
Given the figures, even the likelihood of intelligent life would still almost have to be pretty much inevitable in many parts of the Universe.
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), given the scale of the Universe, and the constraints of relativity and the speed of light, the probability of there being a civilization with which we meaningfully communicate close enough for us to physically contact still seems remote.
It would require something like wormhole technology to provide even a glimmer of the possibility of physical contact.
Our best chance to discover the existence of other cultures has to be SETI, we have seriously surveyed only a tiny fraction of the possible star systems within reach.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
the entire universe and heard not a peep, which is bollocks. But they are very insistent about it. My younger brother for instance, along with singing with his hands in the air, thinks firmly that if there was intelligent life out there it would have called us up or something. I think this area requires an expert on the principles of interplanetary comms. Enter, Luminon.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
And the cable looms draping out of those racks in the background....yikes.
I'd say it is very probable, given the sheer number of planets that must be around the enormous numbers of stars that we know exist. However, all of them are located at staggering distances, so if they exist, we would never know.
i am working only from a very fuzzy memory of a very cursory perusal of an article in a science mag maybe 10 years ago, but hasn't microscopic life, or at least traces of microscopic life, been found on mars? or was it the moon? in fact, i seem to recall reading that there is at least one type of microscopic life form that exists in the vacuum of space. can anyone corroborate?
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
I think it's definite. Just considering the unimaginable size of the universe, I don't see any chance that there isn't life elsewhere.
^This has already been said but I certainly agree.
I never thought there were corners in my mind until I was told to stand in one.
I have learned so much, thanks for keeping it real RRS.
Given what I know, I'd say that life elsewhere is a certainty. I expect that it will turn out to be far more common than most people think. Life which has gained intelligence enough to manipulate their environment as we have is the only real question in my book. Is it inevitable that intelligence will arise if life exists? Or is it something of a fluke, and therefore exceptionally rare?
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Bizarre life forms appear in my refrigerator all the time. I'm sure this happens on other planets, too.
And I think there's still considerable conjecture over whether or not those little casings contained worms or were just funny little shapes formed naturally. Having said that I don't think the jury is out on that one. I've not heard of bugs in space myself.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Billions of stars in our galaxy alone. Billions of galaxies in our universe would mean trillions of stars which would mean googles of planets. We know that asteroids can carry amino acids.
I think whatever life there is out there would be a ratio and a minority, but highly likely considering the sheer number of stars in the universe.
But it is higly unlikely with what we know now that our species will ever contact any life like ours, the distance is just to great. I think we will eventually find mircrobes somewhere in our solar system outside our planet, We have found microbes on our planet that can and do live in extreme conditions.
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Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Based on what I have read and understand of our universe, I would have to agree that the chances are high of life somewhere out there ~
~many of you have mentioned that due to the distance, that 'we' may never have a chance to communicate with other intelligent lifeforms ~ Are you thinking 'we' as within the lifetimes of all of us reading this post or 'we' as the human race?
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/
i don't want to be a nazi, but it's googol. "google" is just the search engine.
i couldn't resist because that's one of those linguistic memes i really hate. pop culture strikes again.
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
I didn't know there was such a thing as "googol" ~ after a billion my mind shuts down
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/
hey, that's nothing to sneer at. i'll pour myself a brandy, light a triple maduro robusto, put on some jane monheit, dim the lights, and you just start counting. then i'll take up the slack.
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
Yeah, someone wanted to have a name for a really big number. so they came up with "googol", and defined it as 10100, that's 1 with 100 zeroes after it.
Then they wanted an even bigger one, so they came up with "googolplex", that's 1 with a googol of zeroes after it: 10^10100.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
The universe is SO huge, and the more we learn about possible explanations for abiogenesis, the more it seems like there MUST be other evolved life elsewhere.
I doubt we humans will ever encounter any of it, and I wonder whether second order thought isn't extraordinarily rare. I suspect it is.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Books about atheism
Yeah, as Arther C. Clarke said:
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
i fuckin' love clarke so much. i'm just starting to get into his work. i'd like to read the odyssey series, but the local bookstore that has an english section has all but the first one, so i'm waiting for that. i saw the kubrick film years ago, but i heard the book is much better, even though kubrick and clarke developed both the film and the novel simultaneously.
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
Always been one of my absolute fav writers, esp in Sci-Fi.
Reading his "The City and the Stars" back in high school totally blew me away. The first really intense "Sense of Wonder" experience I can recall.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
i actually think "we" as the human race. there are just some things i believe that humans will never be able to achieve, and traversing the vastness of space is one of them. even if our extreme stupidity doesn't cause us to kill each other off first--the most likely scenario--then the damn sun will burn out, or the required resources will run out, before we're able to travel any significant distance.
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson
Once the life makes contact, it suddenly becomes officially fiction, hallucination, unproven thing and impossibility, and unofficially a threat, rival authority, potential invader, and so on. It's curious how people send interceptors at UFO and watch alien invader serials ( "V"isitors, being the most recent ) and then wonder why there are no landing marks on the lawn in front of White House. It's also curious how in our strictly profit and fame-oriented society there are hordes of anonymous non-profit decorators of crop fields worldwide.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Don't want to get into a lengthy debate, but I'll just raise my hand as one of those who believes humans will eventually (as long as we don't blow ourselves up first) be able to colonize other star systems, and we will even discover other life in our galaxy. However, it probably won't be very intelligent life, and almost certainly won't be technologically advanced to any significant degree.
Basic life is just advanced self-replicating chemistry. I would be very surprised if there is not at least one other planet supporting life in the Milky Way. Probably there are many.
But technological life leads quickly to space travel, and space travel leads to space colonization, and space colonization will eventually lead to interstellar travel, and once you've got that, filling up the galaxy with life is just a matter of a few million years. Considering the universe is currently about 13.5 billion years, and a few million years is a drop in the bucket compared to that, then if there was technological life more advanced than us in the galaxy, it would almost certainly already be in our solar system harvesting the Sun's energy. Since it's not, we are almost certainly the first.
This argument is analogous to why there is only one kind of life on Earth, not two or more. Once you get one form of life that can reproduce, it will quickly fill up all available space, and new forms of life never get a chance to even get started. As soon as we are able to travel to another star, the entire galaxy will be filled shortly after that (a few million years). It would be like the first single-celled organisms filling up the first lagoon ever to host life on Earth, and them thinking, "Hey, how come we don't see any other kinds of life here or out in the vast ocean?" It's because they are the first. No other form of life ever gets to ask that question on Earth, because soon after the Earth is filled with the first form.
Outside the Milky Way, this argument gets weaker, as traveling intergalactic distances is even more difficult, and timescales get bigger, making the window for the development of technological life open wider and wider the further out you go. But still, I would wager that there isn't any technological life within about 1% of our light-diameter sphere of the universe. That would be about 100 million light years from here, which would encompass about 2500 large galaxies, according to http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/virgo.html
The more likely technological life is, the more likely it would already be here. The only explanation that makes sense to me for our being alone is that such life is rare, and that we are the first such life within a fairly large sphere of the universe -- too large for distant technological life to have reached us traveling at sub-light speeds.
Our finding other life depends crucially on not blowing ourselves up. The key step to preventing such a catastrophe is to be able to colonize our immediate solar-system, and not just the planets, but the actual space itself. If we can sustain a biosphere indefinitely in space, we are no longer dependent on Earth for our survival. Until we get to that point, we're in danger of self-destruction.
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Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Well they could also differ on their perception of the universe. To start, our five senses aren't necessarily the only senses that exist. The only way to realize the lack of a sense is by the presence of some with it and our senses and theirs could be completely non-overlapping. If anything can be pursued after that, there'd still be innumerable problems to solve. First, even if we share the only senses that do exist, they could just as easily be on a different range of the spectrum in every single sphere. Plus you aren't involving any human concepts. The exchange of information is good, but if that's all we can do then it's really just exchanging notes with a lab buddy, isn't it. And to assume that they have the biological ability to comprehend most of our concepts, or vice-versa, is a huge leap of confidence.
Yes, we need to export our human species as quickly as possible. All the serial killers, child molesters, gang members, smart ass teenage punks, high school beauty queens, shitty cell phone drivers, religious freaks, corrupt politicians, brutal dictators, etc, are tired of being so cramped up and crowded on our planet Earth. We need to make room for all those future generations. Time is running out. PS, don't forget to equip those space colonies with a nice police force and prison system.
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100 zeros? That wasn't enough to defeat the allies. SORRY couldn't resist.
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I certainly think there is life out there. What intrigues me, however, is the fact that dinosaurs dominated Earth for millions of years, but only had extremely developed physical capabilities, but not necessarily the intelligence we have. Humans have been around for a mere fraction of that time frame, and our intelligent development has been rapid relative to the scale of the dinosaurs. For me this makes me wonder if certain species have to be dominate in a given time frame to develop intelligent life. If the dinosaurs had never gone extinct, we might not be here (at least not now)
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Sure, but it is unlikely than any situation, like the dominance of the dinosaurs, is going to last indefinitely, because eventually even the most unlikely events are gonna happen. Meteor strike, super volcano, extreme ice age, will eventually reset the living environment, allowing for some different species to become dominant.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Right, but I think this allows for planets with highly developed life to potentially never develop intelligent life. For example, here on earth there was the potential for reptiles to dominate again if there hadn't begun a cycle of ice ages ushering in the era of warm-blooded mammals. I'm just saying this is another limiting factor in the development of intelligent life; the domination of species that can (apparently) not develop intelligence like ours.
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a very good question:-
But the answer is a forgone conclusion, Anyone who thinks that life does not exist elsewhere in this galaxy or any other galaxy is
following the edict laid down by the Bible, and that is that THIS earth, has a monopoly on the existence of life.
Of life in the Oort Cloud or something that would really put these twits in a position of having to wriggle and squirm to make their book fit. It would be the best christmas present I ever had.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
All quite irrelevant to anything I've written. Ever.
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what edict? there's no place in the bible that says the earth is the only planet that contains life. even if you take for granted a geocentric system, it never says there's only one geocentric system. in fact, there is enough ambiguity in genesis that later kabbalists were able to say that the "stuff" god created the heavens and earth from was the remains of former worlds that were destroyed by the "breaking of the vessels" (a very technical concept from lurianic kabbalah which i won't get into unless someone absolutely insists).
"I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . . Or maybe 'stupid' is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots."
--Hunter S. Thompson