Anyone interested in Extra-terrestrial life?

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I'm trying to make some friends who are interested in Extra-terrestrial life and other topics concerning space.

Sure I am willing to discuss it.

The odds of one planet being populated and only one planet being populated in the entire galaxy seem beyond astronomical (pun intended?) to me.

What do you think about it?

Yes, I believe that it is possible for there to be other life forms out there. Surely, Earth cannot be the only planet that has inhabitants living on it.

Aliens.

Do they exist?

Yes.

Do they want to take over Earth?

Unlikely.

Most take-over-the-universe races would have likely either undergone a culture change or gone extinct sometime during development, or have been eviscerated by larger alien federations.

That said, I wonder what kind of videogames they have...

Hello! I'm far from knowledgeable about the topic, but I'm certainly interested.

If you are talking about any life (bacteria etc), maybe we can't even deny the possibility of it on other planets in our solar system.

If we talk about intelligent life, then it sounds far less common, but I believe some intelligent beings are somewhere in the universe.

Astronomers have found planty of gas giants because they are easier to detect, but I think they probably might have found more earth-like rocky planets recently (I'm not really up to date with these things), on which life is more likely to form. I think it's a long way to go before we could detect life itself on those planets though.

I have read a rather simple book on this topic. It was not easy to understand, but was very interesting. I'm currently reading a very simplified book about evolution of life on Earth, which might be loosely relevant.

I didn't understand exactly what Popsicle said. Does she mean that it's highly unlikely to find a populated planet or that it should be more common? I'm a bit confused.

Sorry. To clarify, I meant that it is very likely there are other populated planets in the galaxy besides ours.

Sure!

Know of any?

Evidence, please?

Thanks, Popsicle, for the clarification. In that case, I tend to agree with you. And that idea somehow excites me!

You're welcome, jk1.

I like the idea also. I just hope they would be benign or nice to us...And not like some of the ones on Dr. Who.

Considering the violent tendencies of our own species, why wouldn't an alien race be hostile?

I believe the odds of earth being the only planet to have harbored, harbor, or will harbor intelligent life are astronomically small. However, I also believe the odds of us ever meeting other intelligent life is even much (exponentially) smaller.
And I believe that if another intelligent species ever visited earth, it would be to colonize the earth for resources and either enslave or kill us all.
In fact Stephen Hawking said so himself.

Think about, it an alien race has found ways to discover other inhabited planets and achieved interstellar travel, their intelligence level will be so far ahead, the difference between them and us would be the same as between us and ants.

Last edited by sixstring on 15 May 2013, 3:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The only form of life we recognize is based on carbon. In actual fact, life based on silicon is theoretically possible. Such a silicon life form would exhale silicon dioxide, i.e. sand. We could even now be surrounded by alien life and never even recognize it was there. The reality is that we don't know much of anything yet.

Im always game for discussing aliens!

One in a million solar systems probably have a planet with life forms equivalent to our bacteria.

Of those, perhaps one in a thousand, have life that gets beyond the bacteria stage and makes it to the ameoba stage ( it took earth two thirds of existence to accomplish that). And then some unknown subset of that subset have the time and the conditions to get to the mulicellular stage- and beyond.

So intelligent life forms probably exist out there. But they are so few and far between in both time and in space that they rarely encounter each other.

So I dont really believe we are being visited.

Silicon-based life is quite improbable. The Si-O bond has a much higher bond strength than the Si-Si bond, so most of its compounds known are silicate minerals, and the Si-Si bond isn't as strong as C-C bonding. Partially because of this, the molecules required for biochemistry aren't particularly stable if you just replace the carbon with silicon.

There are over 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy. There are over 100,000,000,000 galaxies. Therefore, if there is only one civilisation per 100,000,000,000 stars there are at least 100,000,000,000 civilizations!

It's an hypothesis not a theory (or a fact). This means that while the concept is testable, there has yet been no observable instance.


Evidence, please? It might exhale phosgene or silane, for all we know.


Another hypothesis, albeit a possibly (if improbable) one.


We know what chemistry a silicon-based life-form would need to live, but no such chemical signatures have been detected ... yet.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves here.