So we have to logically jump to a spirit being energy
Poll: Where is everyone?
- Thread starter Sliver
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So we have to logically jump to a spirit being energy
Fair doos. I just can't bring myself to believe in something like that based on what any of my senses tell me. I CANNOT trust my brain when it chooses to have me believe I'm flying like Superman every other night.
I follow that.
If thought is a form of energy that's a lot supporting a soul. Chemicals translate into thoughts and feelings. Maybe without them the energy has to go somewhere. Hmmm
Aren't thoughts purely conceptual? I know sod all about brain chemistry or lack there of.
I know jack about it outside of the fact feelings are an interpretation of chemicals.
Related to a spirit, as thoughts are energy what happens to energy when your body fails. A poor analogy would be a battery having energy and depleting but that energy is somewhere
Related to a spirit, as thoughts are energy what happens to energy when your body fails. A poor analogy would be a battery having energy and depleting but that energy is somewhere
We are only looking for life that we can understand, life that requires water etc as a minimum. What's out there that we can't detect or see? Beings that don't need water or air. Of course there's another planet with similar properties to this one, which is habitable for life as we know it, but what interests me is life that we can't comprehend.
How do we know we're not already living beside other beings?
How do we know we're not already living beside other beings?
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Soldato
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I'll put you down for a meeting with our silicate overlords!
True but in this short period we have observed events going back billions of years and these observations suggest there are major issues with the idea of life being abundant.
In 4.5billion years of planetary history life occured just once(that we know of). So that's 1 form of life on a planet with apparently perfect conditions in a time period equal to 1/3 of the age of the Universe. Furthermore, once it occured, life was limited to single celluar form through most of its history. Culture is less than a million years old and only one species(and its descendants) developed it.
Considering the concrete evidence I'd say the appearance of life is an extremely rare event and the Universe is simply not old enough to be teeming with it. Intelligent life(capable of creating/preserving culture) is so rare that the odds of finding it are practically zero.
But one planet holds potentially millions of life forms.
You are talking about consciousness. There are 7 billion conscious individuals on this planet and it started with just a few.
The variations we see today are the results of the evolution from that one life form.
Consciousness has nothing to do with my points.
True, but at he same time we haven't fully studied our own planets and moons in our solar system. We may very well find markers for life in those that we could use to study the chance of life elsewhere. There may well also be other physical methods for the creation of oxygen that we don't yet know about, so the discovery of a planet with relatively high oxygen levels in its atmosphere can only give us an indication that there may be some form of life there.
I'd broadly agree with your two point list, my contention to that point is the assumption that evolution and natural selection would give rise to photosynthesising plants in most cases (or even many cases). I could easily foresee natural selection and multiplayer evolutional steps leading to intelligent life without one of those steps being photosynthesis. As the example above shows, there could well be an entire billion year old evolutionary system under Titans ice, with no photosynthesising plants and energy originating from volcanism and resulting chemical ejections.
Assuming there is only really one type of life, having gone through the same steps as that on earth is at best short sighted and at worst wrong.
Consciousness is a natural byproduct of highly evolved brains. The mind can not exist without the brain, and the mind is consciousness. Many animals exhibit consciousness, including octopus, dolphins, dogs, chimpanzees etc. If you think about what it would be like to meet intelligent aliens then a good example may be an octopus. We automatically think that aliens would look similar to us but that is probably not the case. One thing they would share with us though is consciousness and that would be large highly evolved brains.
Who is assuming that? Not me? So why say that?
Based on our current understanding of physics and evolution then I would think it applies quite literally universally. For life to exist it needs energy, energy can be transferred from one place to another and as we understand it there cannot be an infinite energy source. Therefore with a finite energy supply there has to be competition and as such Darwin's evolution.
This is discounting things like eugenics or immortality (whether 'real' immortality or something like transferring your consciousness in to a clone).
On an OP point though, personally I think with the number of planets that have, do and will exist there will be other intelligent life within our universe. However, the more interesting question is whether there is intelligent life out there right now and if so what do we need to do to have the technology to get there.
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They wouldn't have to be "immortal", just age on a different scale to ourselves to a point our minds cannot comprehend. we have plants on earth that are technically tens of thousands of years old. It's certainly not inconceivable there may be some kind of colonial based life forms evolved that can technically be millions of years old, but at the same time have no parts of them older than say 1000 years. As you rightly point out an organism that lives for longer may have a better chance in all this. At the same time it could also lead to major issues for "survivability". Larger life forms generally have slower reproductive rates here on Earth, which is a problem when major events happen. We just can't keep up.
Very true, good point.
One other thing I always wonder: going back to the scale point, but this time rather than age, we need to look at size.
All very speculative and more a vomit of words and ideas than coherent thought, and possibly a bit religion and/or men in black like....
Perhaps we are just thinking on the wrong scale when looking for life? That life we know ranges from microbial single celled organisms to huge trees a hundred feet high. That seems a large variation in size, but astronomically and physically it's really not. When you consider the other "things" we know of range in size from quarks and preons, absolutely tiny things millions of times smaller than the smallest organism we know about, to the size of the universe suddenly it becomes apparent that what we know as life is pretty consistently sized. What if we are the small end of the scale?
Perhaps our galaxy is actually just a single "cell"? Perhaps the universe is actually a living organism, so large that we just cannot comprehend it being a single "being".
For all we know life as we know it may be the equivalent of a virus, with humans not almost at that point where we are about to "burst" out of the "cell" we are in and spread to other "cells" (planets/solar systems), slowly infecting and weakening our host. On our time scale this could be other thousands/millions of lifetimes, but for a much larger organism this could be the equivalent of a few "weeks".
It's something we are unlikely to ever be able to prove, but I think gives a good example of scale and its effects on how we perceive things.
In a perhaps more realistic scenario there may be life forms evolved on another planet in our galaxy, but rather than doing so on a small rocky planet they may have done so on/in a large gas giant. Perhaps they are multiple times larger and stronger than any life on earth (obviously here we could use physics to get an understanding of the maximum size, to an order of magnitude anyway). Having the resources of a much larger planet to start with, along with the size (and potentially lifespan as jack mentioned) increase over ourselves it may be the case that travelling the huge distances in space is easier in some way, just like it is easier for us to travel and build further and bigger than an ant. That does still beg the question, as again already mentioned - Where are they? And why have we not seen them?
Perhaps because the galaxy is so huge, they just haven't explored this area yet? Or perhaps they did so several million years ago (or even 100 years ago), before humans had the equipment to receive their communications and/or see their ship in space pass by. If an organism had the ability to travel through space I'm sure the scanning technology they would have may must be pretty good. For all we know a ship passed by the edge of our solar system, had a quick scan and moved off. We are making the assumption that we (and Earth) are so special that alien life would stop by and take a closer look.
Perhaps we aren't? Perhaps there are millions of planets with life equivalent to us and we just aren't that interesting, even if an alien "ship" passed by our solar system. Now that's a rather sobering thought. Perhaps we really are just ants to other more advanced alien species, not even worth taking a closer look.
Anyway, as I said, more a mind splurge/philosophical muddle, but perhaps there are some interesting points in it people can either pick apart or ponder on.
My issue with this is what you're basically saying is we are "special", in the sense that we are the only one and lucky to be where we are. What we see all around us in nature is that there is very rarely anything "special". Even things that we note as special and singular initially usually run out to be very common when we start looking for them, both in nature and geologically on this planet and astronomically in space.
As much as we as humans like to think of ourselves as special and important (be that as individuals, as nations, as species or as a planet the chance of being unique or special in that sense is arguably astronomically small.
Lofe may be rare, but with billions of galaxies, stars and planets rare is relative. With that many possible starting locations rare could still mean millions/billions of "rare" occurances.
Edit: re reading what you put I realize now you probably don't mean as rare as I initially thought you did...
the post is mostly a commentary on the philosophy of many people, who don't appear to be able to accept that they (and humans) are not as important/special as they like to think (for example that we aren't just another animal that happens to have evolved to use tools).
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It sounded like you did with the two points you made in the previous post.
I'll apologize as that appears not to be the case.
It sounded like you did with the two points you made in the previous post.
I'll apologize as that appears not to be the case.
Ok no problem, you had me confused there for a moment.