The Biggest Questions of All

[Katahu]

Is there microbial life on Mars?

Is there intelligent life in the universe, other than us?

These are the biggest questions that has kept us all guessing for over a century.

None of use can prove that there is life elsewhere in space without evidense. However, we also can't prove that there isn't life elsewhere without proof or a VERY VERY VERY VERY good theory about it.

Anyways, what could happen if we found life or if life found us?

[Katahu]

PS: I found a NASA webpage that provides a 8MB High-Resolution digital image of the surface of Mars. This image was taken by Spirit's panaramic camera.

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html

[Travis]

Don't you remember the meteorite found in Antarctica a few years ago?  It had imbedded in it the fossils of ancient microbial life.  This means that there is life out there, no matter what we think.  It probably isn't in our solar system, and it may not even be in our local galaxy.  But it is out there.

Besides, I always follow the old "Contact" logic.  Say that only one star out of a million has planets around it.  Only one out of a million of those has the conditions to support carbon-based life.  Only one out of a million of those has any life on it at all, and only one out of a million of THOSE has intelligent life.  That would mean there are literally BILLIONS of civilizations out there now, or ever have been.

But that also begs the question "Where is everybody?"  We should have picked up by now at least the remnants of a civilizations radio age.  We've been scanning the sky for fifty years, using radio telescopes that can see almost to the end of the universe, and we have yet to hear a single peep of communication, intelligent or otherwise.  Of course, there may be only ONE other civilization out there at all, and they may already have passed the radio age or have not yet reached it, but that goes straight back to the Contact question.

So, where are they?  I personally find it highly unlikely that EVERY single civilization that has heard from us or is out there is taking painstaking efforts not to be heard, but it is possible.  But unlikely.

What is more likely is that there is something out there that is listening.  Whenever this civilization picks up a radio transmission from anywhere, they come in and destroy the opposition.  That in itself seems a little far-fetched, as it would need to be either:

A) A civilization with FTL (Faster Than Light) travel, which is an improbability.

B) A civilization able to fire a small asteroid at close to the speed of light and hit us from ACROSS THE GALAXY.  That's like shooting a BB gun and hitting a moving baseball five miles away.

This is all based upon my reading of science fiction over the past ten years, so take it all with a grain of salt.

[denishc]

 You can't underestimate "life".  Even on this planet you can find tube worms flourishing next to sulfer vents in the depths of the oceans and penguins rearing their young in the harsh conditions of the antartic.  "Life" finds a way!  So why can't there be "life" somewhere in the vastness of space?

[Hagar]

I've said many times before in similar discussions that there is almost certainly some form of life "out there" somewhere. This might be completely different to anything we can imagine with our tiny brains. It's also most unlikely they would have any interest in us whatsoever. The Human race has always been so arrogant in its belief that we have any importance in the grand scale of things.

[Katahu]

To give you an idea as to how big the entire cosmos is, take a look at this fact.

If you take all the grains of sand ever found on Earth and  piled them up and counted, and then counted all the stars in the entire cosmos, you will see that there are more stars out there than all the grains of sand that you have gathered.

So, the basic answer to humankind's first question is "YES, there is life elsewhere in the cosmos".

But then comes an even bigger question. Where the H377 are they??

Believe it or not, even with our most advanced technology of today along with decades of satellite and telescope observations, we human beings have only managed to scan and document about not even 5% of the cosmos.

This is because our current satellites and telescopes are limited in power and range.

The cosmos is so huge, it's like the world wide web. It's so big that no one can control it.

Here's another example.

Imagine you and a friend are in a football stadium. You are at one end of the stadium and your friend is at the other.

Your friend's job is to light one match once every hour for a few seconds or less. Your job is to close your eyes and open them once every hour for a few seconds or less.

While your eyes are opened, you have to quickly look for the match light that your friend made.

You think this is hard? Imagine this at a cosmic scale.

[Paz]

 Technology that seems so advanced to us may be quite primitive to alien life forms, other races may have forms of communication that our equipment cannot detect, this possibly being one reason we have never detected any signals from out there.

[farmerdave]

Assuming the universe goes on forever, there has to be other life forms, possibly even human.  Atoms can only arrange themselves in so many different patterns, so eventually they willl have to repeat, creating "paralell universes".

[Omag 2.0]

Perhaps the other life is all around us, but we're not able to see or understand it .

Think of a bird and a powerline. It sees it, it can sit on it, but it doesn't know what it is, where it came from and what it does.

And who says we are all that intellegent? Perhaps we are a joke to other life forms.

Well, i am still quite convinced something is out there, but will we ever know for sure?

[Fredgirardo]

Well, even if we found life on Mars, the technology is not enought far to pull direct benefits from this life.
May be in 100 years we will be able. We won't see that, but uor small child yes.

                                                                             Ciao

[Hagar]

I used to be interested in such things myself. It once got to the stage where I drove myself almost round the bend trying to figure it all out. Fortunately I had enough sense to realise that this was an impossible task. Far more intelligent & educated people than me don't know the answers & never will.

Now I have a more simplistic attitude to life. We're never likely to know so why worry about it? Plenty of more important things to sort out here on this planet first.

[Katahu]

Let's assume that the aliens DID visit us and shown themselves.

What would you think their first reaction about us would be?

They're probably going to be surprised that we VIOLENT and DESTRUCTIVE humans has lived like this on our own without blowing ALL of ourselves straight to h377. We almost did in the Cuban Missile Crisis [those 13 scarest days of our time].

They'll also probably be surprised to see that this Solar System is so full of vast resources, yet we humans haven't even gotten anywhere close to using any of them other than what we have here on Earth.

They'll then probably be surprised that with all of the time that has past for us, they probably laugh at our technology as one of you pointed out. Or maybe not. What if they never thought of inventing gun powder and we did? That's when all of a sudden, they be interested in our machine guns, if they like. Or what if they never thought of making fiber optics.

The biggest surprise to them will probably be the fact that this planet consists of over 110 nations and yet we still survived.

[Mr. Bones]

of course there is!  ::)

but my question is: what members of this board you think NASA had to bring back home now they were in the neighbourhood? (after all, ET also wanted to return home so...) Hagar maybe?   just kiddin

[Travis]

[quote]

[Tequila Sunrise]

They're probably going to be surprised that we VIOLENT and DESTRUCTIVE humans has lived like this on our own without blowing ALL of ourselves straight to h377

but how do you know we wera all alone, maybey Big Brother is watching, sure would explain a few folk  ::)