(September 30, 2011 at 1:04 pm)paintpooper Wrote: 200 Billion galaxies. 100 billion stars per galaxy. Do some math. Yes it is finite... but incomprehensible to our brains to fathom the actual size and scope.

That's transfinite numbers for you, while not "infinite" its still insanely immeasurable and innumerable. Numbers go from the realm of the practical and precise into the hyperbolic, so to speak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfinite_number

(September 30, 2011 at 8:44 am)HAYWARD Wrote: any1 also think there is life on other planets? wud like to here peoples reasons for/against??

A logical person always has to answer, "yes, it's possible" to this question.

I think the real question should be:

Do you think that life on other planets is also made up of imbeciles who believe in fairy tales and have mutliple gods they have to worship while destroying other races and communities under god-sanctioned bigotry and superstition?

Then ask yourself, if we showed up on in their skies one day in a space ship, would we then destroy their beliefs in their god?

Would we immediately start preaching to them about the one "true god", or would we just start killing them and robbing their planet right away?



Leads to a plethora of questions:
Do you think lifeforms on other planets are as stupid as us? I wonder what the name of their god's son is? Do aliens kill other aliens who don't pray to the same entity they do? Do they have gods that they used to believe in, but now mock? A Zeus equivalent if you will? Did our Jesus visit every planet to save all the races of the universe? Did he use the same name every time or is he known as Quwargle on another planet? Did he only spend 30 years on each planet? Maybe that's why he couldn't stick around longer ... he's got billions of light years to travel and millions of planets to save?

Or perhaps, there's a god for every solar system/star, and perhaps their god actually does show up on their planet and interact with them and actually does all kinds of amazing things to actually improve their lives. Loves them unconditionally and already knows that the god of our solar system is a self-absorbed dickface with a shitty attitude.

????

See .... lots better questions to ask than that first one. That's almost certainly a guaranteed yes. So lets move on ....

hubble has observed 3000 galaxies, with a minimum of 1 billion stars, so 3 trillion is the absolute conservative minimum.

The only thing more conservative is my gf knickers.

No-one has shown me any evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life and I see no logical reason why there has to be such a thing as extraterrestrial life, so on that basis I do not believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. This is basically the same reasoning which causes me to be an atheist. However, I would nevertheless concede that despite both numbers being incredibly small, there is probably slightly more likelihood of an eventual proof of ET than there is of an eventual proof of the existence of an all-knowing all-powerful creator. But that's not really saying very much and IMO whatever sum of money is being spent looking for ET, it is too much.

Good thing we're not doling out money hand over fist for such a project eh?

(September 30, 2011 at 8:44 am)HAYWARD Wrote: any1 also think there is life on other planets? wud like to here peoples reasons for/against??

At least in theory, given the right conditions and chemicals, life can arise relatively easily. This also assumes life at least somewhat similar to ours. That is to say, that these are life forms made of matter and uses chemical processes (particularly carbon or maybe silicon-based) to thrive as opposed to something more exotic, like a life form based on complex magnetic and plasma interactions. This is why Mars and several ice moons around Saturn and Jupiter (among others) in our solar system my have simple (microbal) life forms and possibly even more complex ones.
Venus, like Mars, may have even had a liquid water ocean at some point before the entire planet literally went to hell (for a number of reasons I won't get into) so even Venus may have had life on it at some point. If the conditions that caused Venus' runaway green house effect occurred gradually enough, there may even be some extremophiles still on its surface or in its upper atmosphere above the sulpher clouds.

If you consider the totality of the universe, the possibility of non-earth-based life has an extreme mathmatical likelihood.
The real question at this point isn't if there is life out there, but rather the question of how common life - especially life with humanlike intelligence and technological capability - actually is in the cosmos.

THAT is definately something that would be interesting (not that a more mundane form of exobiology would be - it would definatley be interesting to find an ocean filled with fully evolved life forms in Europa or even a higher life form in one of titan's methane oceans or surface or something similar in another solar system.

The Hubble deep field photo contained approx 10,000 galaxies, and that in a slice of sky equivelent to looking through the eye of a needle.
http://www.universetoday.com/36610/how-m...iscovered/

It is estimated that there are 190 billion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing roughly 300 billion stars.

So statisically the likelyhood of life(at least what we consider life) arising elsewhere is greater than one.

Lets look at this another way, if life is a self replicating chemical reaction driven by chaos theory to ever greater levels of complexity then it will appear anywhere that chemical reactions can be sustained.

If you subscribe to the goddit theory then he/she/it will put life everywhere it can. Otherwise what is the point of creating a universe this size to accomodate one planet with life?

It would be like building a jumbo jet hanger so you can keep your skateboard in it.

As to whether it would be what we consider "intelligent" life(and I have my doubts as to it arising on Earth). Different story, since the entire 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth has produced just one species out of all the millions that have existed that has created a technological civilization I would suspect it will be very rare.

Also worth noting, that one species really only flirts with the title of "intelligent"...lol.

(September 30, 2011 at 8:17 pm)Zen Badger Wrote: As to whether it would be what we consider "intelligent" life(and I have my doubts as to it arising on Earth). Different story, since the entire 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth has produced just one species out of all the millions that have existed that has created a technological civilization I would suspect it will be very rare.

That's why I qualified it with "humanlike" intelligence - because otherewise, we could consider other primates, like chimps, to be intelligent life forms - they are, after all, capable of emoting, language, society, and so forth. Dolphins and certain other animals are also individually capable of this (as opposed to creatures like ants and bees, which also have many of the above traits, but only when you consider the whole society and not each of them, individually.)

You also need to conisder that our kind of intelligence, while rare and required 4.5 billion years of time (starting from the formation of the planet capable of sustaining us) that if you consider that amount of time average, then the universe has had about three times that length of time necessary for intelligence to arrive - especially if you consider our the length of that time to be average and also considering the extinction events that could have allowed technological humanlike intelligence to develop sooner.

For example, if the cretacious event happened 10 million years later (55 million years ago instead of 65 million years ago) and thus allowing a kind of intelligent dinosaur to develop the ability to avert the distaster) or with conidtions that allow for fewer extinction events.

Many of these things, plus when you consider the enormous expanse of time since the big bang and the formation of the first second-generation and third-generation star systems (which would have the chemicals necessary) can point to life having been around for well over 10 of the 13.7 billion years of the universe's current lifespan.

That gives plenty of time between now and the degenerate age of the universe for intelligent life to arise as well as plenty of environments that could potentially be suitable for it.

Forgot to add in some numbers there, if you're going by averages. Every species of life that is not what we would call a "human-like intelligence". We wouldn't expect every planet capable of life to be on some sort of march to intelligence. So there's another barrier to a theoretical approach towards ET based on what we do know. The dinosaur example is a good case for this. They weren't marching towards civilization (by any count).