Basic chemistry. All to do with how easy carbon bonds are to break.
Are we not far away from discovering alien life
- Thread starter Arazi
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Basic chemistry. All to do with how easy carbon bonds are to break.
Ahh right ok. Any chance you have some reccomended reading on that?
Always intrigued me why we expect such similarities from something alien.
Quick google seems to cover th basics.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...iamond-why-humans-are-carbon-based-lifeforms/
Chance of finding non carbon life is pretty much zero.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...iamond-why-humans-are-carbon-based-lifeforms/
Chance of finding non carbon life is pretty much zero.
you may be interested in an episode of Horizon called Cosmic Dawn. May be available on youtube.
Alien life was found many 1,000's of years ago
Now we just called them females/girls/women...
... (And many other names 
)
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There is a good article about The Great Filter that is worth a link in these discussions for anyone that hasn't previously read it. Unfortunately for the rules of this forum it contains a rude word, so you will need to amend the following:
http://waitbutwhy_com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
http://waitbutwhy_com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html
. replaces _
I love Fermi's Paradox on this subject. This article http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html explains it well. If there is Alien life out there and they visit, I'd wager it won't end well. For us. Think Incans and Spanish soldiers invading central and South America. But worse.
Damnit, too slow!
Damnit, too slow!
I didn't say I know, I said that's what the evidence is suggesting. All life that exists, all traces of life that we have ever found share a single, common ancestor and we have found bacterial DNA that goes back 400+ million years. They too were our cousins. A past or current life form that belongs to a different tree of life would be easy to differentiate.
Only one form of life in our planet's perfect conditions in 4.5 billion years are low odds even for the size of the Universe.
Unless of course life, as you mentioned, appeared somewhere else. That would mean our conditions are perfect for the evolution, not the appearance of life. If that's the case then yes, life could be abundant. I hope that's the case but until we find some evidence, I'm skeptical.
While I kinda agree with you there have actually been 5 mass extinction events, and a sixth is currently underway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
The KT extinction isn't even the biggest, that was the Permo-Triassic. Humans and dinosaurs are/were around largely because of "luck", their precursors being able to exploit the holes left by mass extinction better than the other organisms at the time.
The idea we are the "apex of the apex" species - that somehow our physiology and form is the epitome of intelligent life throughout time and space - is wrong in my opinion. There could easily be plenty of other intelligent life taking different forms, we and what we look like now are just a creation of our history, including those mass extinction events, earths mavity, atmosphere and the makeup of the earths crust. Change any of those and a totally new form could have evolved. For all we know if the Permo-Triassic event hadn't occurred a totally different form of intelligent life could be on earth right now, with technology far advanced for what we have.
Same with comments about technology. That's unlikely to be true. For example if we hadn't discovered oil the we may well have skipped the oil age and jumped straight into an electric age - if we didn't discover nuclear fission perhaps we would already be at fusion or some other form of clean energy, perhaps that could have fitted perfectly with space exploration. Exploiting of tech and evolution of species both go in fits and starts, not much movement then suddenly an event that causes "hyper" evolution where discoveries and changes occur rapidly - dead ends die out and only those that have adapted the best survive. Those would be very different depending on the planet they occurred on.
We see this in some ways by looking at cultures throughout the world, where some cultures value different things, and discovered different things at different times, in different orders. Many of these cultures have now died out, being swallowed and out competed by other cultures, who in turn may have been outcompete by yet more cultures with different technology and "better" things (eg weapons). Heck, even blind luck is in play here. Look at the Minoans, an advanced culture pretty much destroyed by a large volcanic eruption.
So in summary "intelligent" life certainly doesn't need to look like us, have the same physiology or the same technological roadmap. Hopefully one day we may see that there is a vastly different life form to us in the oceans of moons surrounding the Giants. Which leads to the next question - would be even recognize life if we saw it, if it was so different to ours?
Would we be able to recognize an organism in its dormant state - for example a microbe on Mars that only becomes active when it is in contact with water? We know from earth that microbes (and multicellular organisms) can stay in dormant states for thousands of years, looking almost unlike life. There is no reason this couldn't be the same on other planets, in fact it's actively being researched on places like Mars where we believe water does flow occasionally.
Interesting article - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/will-we-know-extraterrestrial-life-when-we-see-it
So in answer to the original question - if we are lucky we may well find life in the next 20-50 years, although "intelligent" life will probably take longer than that.
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That is more what i was getting at, i am not actually saying that we are to go and collect life forms or shake it's hand, i was looking at it from more of a technology angle and some of the planned launches like the James Webb telescope, what can this detect? from the little i know and documentaries on the tv\google some of the technology we have is impressive.
I was aiming along the lines of that we will detect life of any form within 50 years and hopefully my life time, or that there once was, that would do me
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Perfect conditions for a certain form of life. We really don't know if there are other perfect conditions for other forms of life.
Go back 20-30 years and scientists generally believed that the Suns energy was needed in some way for life to occur (photosynthesis for plants, then the food chain up). Turns out that wasn't the case. Chemical energy is another big source, for example the black smokers teeming with life at the bottom of the Atlantic and other oceans.
As much as we don't like to admit, we are just scratching at the surface of what life is, how it forms and how to recognize it. Like tech and evolution it jumps forwards in steps.
Isn't there a quote something along the lines of "each scientific discovery advances us by a decade but holds us back by 3"? Basically pointing out each discovery can narrow our minds to what is out there, until someone builds on it and points out that there are other options.
Soldato
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Stars, not stats.
Okay, but having lots of locations doesn't mean there's lots of life.
Life could be plentiful, or we could be the only ones, we simply don't know.
That is also what i was thinking, there could be other life out there that we cannot see or detect because it has developed completely different than on earth, non carbon is it?
Or even different again?
We're very far away from discovering intelligent life IMO. I reckon it is more likely for us to be discovered by intelligent life in our lifetimes than it is to discover.
Simple extraterrestrial life though, thats a real possibility with the missions to jupiter's moons and the rest of the solar system.
Simple extraterrestrial life though, thats a real possibility with the missions to jupiter's moons and the rest of the solar system.
I think we aren't far off from having a much better idea in regards to our more immediate part of the known universe.
We saw a massive leap in technology over the last 2 years, especially in regards to space, with solutions/workable theories found for many things that were purely science fiction not that long ago and considered utterly impossible - even if we are a long way from feasibly putting them into use and many developments of things into actual use that for most of my life were considered utterly in the realm of theoretical.
IMO the next 20-30 years are going to see some incredibly advances though it'll probably be more like 100-200 years before we really start to see the fruits of this technology in terms of finding life elsewhere unless it comes to visit us first.
We saw a massive leap in technology over the last 2 years, especially in regards to space, with solutions/workable theories found for many things that were purely science fiction not that long ago and considered utterly impossible - even if we are a long way from feasibly putting them into use and many developments of things into actual use that for most of my life were considered utterly in the realm of theoretical.
IMO the next 20-30 years are going to see some incredibly advances though it'll probably be more like 100-200 years before we really start to see the fruits of this technology in terms of finding life elsewhere unless it comes to visit us first.