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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Hi Natural - I think you were talking about colonising planets and Prozac was furthering that idea by talking about colonizing planets with people we'd be better off without here on earth.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
I don't believe, per se, but I think it's more than likely and it makes sense to me. Then again, it's probably life that we cannot understand, fathom or sense with our limited senses.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
If you read it again (reply #31), I think you'll see that he was being sarcastic and criticizing a straw man version of what I was talking about. Hence why I said it's irrelevant. I have no problem with his criticism, it's just that it doesn't apply to anything I've written.
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This. We assume that life must be carbon based and conform to what our image is of "life". There could be sentient rocks on some planet, but we wouldn't recognize them as life because they are too far from our frame of reference.
There is the possibility of other carbon based life forms like us out there I think, it's just silly to assume that all life will be like us. To quote a famous star trek song, quoting a star trek episode: "It's life Jim, but not as we know it"
I think it's pretty egotistical to think we're the only ones out here.
"Shepherd Book once said to me, 'If you can't do something smart, do something right.'" - Jayne
Personally subverting biological evolution in favor of social evolution every night I go to work!
I'm fairly certain there's an episode of The Jetsons that answers this question.
R
Article in New Scientist about this very thing - the nature of alien life - and there was a strong case that replicating life elsewhere in the universe would be carbon-based and would have DNA. I don't remember enough of it to say much more but I'll go through my back copies and see if I can find some references for us.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck