Do you believe?

hornetstinger · 12 Jul 2017 at 14:23

FoxEye said:
There's no evidence of life on other planets... none at all. There is the possibility of some water, etc, but absolutely no evidence of any life except that which exists on Earth. None. Zilch. Nada.

As for your other point - an ultra-low probability actually is considered impossible. Beyond a certain very small chance we can and do say that such things will just not happen, ever.

For example, the probability of randomly combining a few billion atoms and ending up with a fully functioning Hotpoint washing machine signed by Elvis. You might be tempted to say that "with enough time and enough combinations this will happen." In reality, it will never, ever happen no matter how long you run the combinations.

Not the same at all.

A hotpoint requires and external lifeform to make it. It will not appear from natural processes.
A planet on the other hand will occur from natural processes. So will chemical reactions. And life.

You are coming from the "watchmaker" arguement and therefore fail bigtime.

FoxEye · 12 Jul 2017 at 15:07

hornetstinger said:
Not the same at all.

A hotpoint requires and external lifeform to make it. It will not appear from natural processes.
A planet on the other hand will occur from natural processes. So will chemical reactions. And life.

You are coming from the "watchmaker" arguement and therefore fail bigtime.

That last bit (bold) has never been observed, ever.

Nobody has ever witnessed, or been able to reproduce, the creation of life from non-living matter.

Do correct me if I'm wrong there.

Scientists believe we evolved from non-living matter, and this theory has been accepted by the scientific community as fact. I'm not disputing that this is the case. However it is pretty unique in being one of the only facts established by the scientific community not based on direct observation, and not verifiable by experimentation.

aardvark · 13 Jul 2017 at 13:39

FoxEye said:
That last bit (bold) has never been observed, ever.

Nobody has ever witnessed, or been able to reproduce, the creation of life from non-living matter.

Do correct me if I'm wrong there.

Scientists believe we evolved from non-living matter, and this theory has been accepted by the scientific community as fact. I'm not disputing that this is the case. However it is pretty unique in being one of the only facts established by the scientific community not based on direct observation, and not verifiable by experimentation.

a number of things have been observed.
Many molecules such as amino acids, rna nucleotides, phospholipids, even larger structures like phospholipid bilayers and rudimentary virus like structures have been observed and created by replicating primordial soup environments.
The laws of chemistry are quite well established - given enough time and with the right conditions the likely hood of highly complex systems forming are not high, they are certain.

you don't need to directly observe a phenomenon to have it established as fact.

Casdawer · 13 Jul 2017 at 13:58

Does life exist outside of Earth? absolutely.

Does that life look like the Hollywood movies or how we imagine them to look? probably not.

Will it impact religions? Who knows but I'm sure most will twist it to their agenda. If you believe in God, then you believe in Aliens because by his very definition he is not of this world.

We could be the most intelligent species in this universe at this time and we might be the 'visitors' from space when we start to explore the unknown but given the age of the universe, that's unlikely.

Sliver · 13 Jul 2017 at 17:40

Casdawer said:
We could be the most intelligent species in this universe at this time ..

Judging by some of the posts on this forum I highly doubt that

. But yes, I agree, as I've said earlier nature does not do things once so other life must exist. Given the vastness of the universe you'd have to say it's there. Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence as they say.

Rroff · 13 Jul 2017 at 17:48

Sliver said:
Judging by some of the posts on this forum I highly doubt that . But yes, I agree, as I've said earlier nature does not do things once so other life must exist. Given the vastness of the universe you'd have to say it's there. Evidence of absence is not absence of evidence as they say.

I think the (known) scale of the universe might actually be quite small compared to the possible scale of repetition - most of what we can observe shows quite low probability for conditions favourable to supporting advanced forms of life emerging. Though also there is that we really are quite early on in the universe for life emerging (even though there is the possibility for some civilisations to be millions of years ahead of us development wise) and hence the data we do gather is quite time delayed with the distances involved - if observable life did emerge in another galaxy we could still be a few million years before we could see the signs of it here and vice versa.

balky12 · 13 Jul 2017 at 18:22

At a tangent, after reading into things a bit more... the universe is expanding, everyone agrees on this. The further an object is from the observer the faster it is travelling (if i have understood that correctly.) If the object gets far enough and fast enough, it travels faster than the speed of light.

So eventually... despite the universe expanding, we would slowly see less and less of the universe in our skies? Due to objects getting further and further away and travelling faster than the speed of light?

My head hurts.

Obviously the time scale on this is stupendous.

something daft already!! · 13 Jul 2017 at 18:25

No. Nothing can go faster than light afawk. However the space between objects is theorised to have gone through inflation in the early universe which was faster than light but that was not something moving but space expanding.

Freakbro · 13 Jul 2017 at 18:34

howiepoohs said:
No. Nothing can go faster than light afawk. However the space between objects is theorised to have gone through inflation in the early universe which was faster than light but that was not something moving but space expanding.

Well the universe expansion (the stretching of "space time") is accelerating so there are stars/galaxies we can see now that will end up in regions of space that will be stretching faster than the speed of light relative to us so will eventually blink out in our night sky.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170307-the-fact-the-sky-is-dark-reveals-a-lot-about-the-universe

Sliver · 13 Jul 2017 at 19:21

Space is not constrained by the special theory of relativity. Nothing can travel THROUGH space faster than light, but space it's self has no speed limits on it's constant expansion.

Evosparki · 14 Jul 2017 at 22:59

Its blatantly obvious we are not the only species in the galaxy, that's not even considering how many galaxies there are.

All Trkkies know this shi.... get with the times noob so-called smart arses....

SlyReaper · 14 Jul 2017 at 23:15

The mediocrity principle suggests we're very unlikely to be the only life in the universe. The fossil record shows that life emerged on Earth almost as soon as the Earth was capable of supporting it, so the event of abiogenesis (whatever that may be) is probably not that rare, given the right conditions.

But there's the small matter of Fermi's paradox. There are so many stars in a galaxy and so many galaxies in the universe, you'd think there must be alien intelligences out there a few million years more advanced than us. In which case, we'd expect to detect some evidence of them. Some of them should have spread their species throughout entire galaxies by now, and encased their stars in dyson swarms to provide the immense amount of power they would need to support their civilisation. Even if this isn't the pattern for every technological civilisation out there, all it takes is one, and we should be able to detect it. So either evolutionary paths that lead to intelligence are vanishingly rare, or technological civilisations aggressive enough to want to colonise a galaxy almost always encounter some kind of obstacle (e.g. nuclear war) that prevents them from colonising the galaxy.

Evosparki · 14 Jul 2017 at 23:21

Star Trek.
Star Gate TV series
Battlestar Gallactica.
and to a lesser extent Star Wars.

Provides more thought provoking ideas of the galaxy than any religious bible, by far, waaaaayyy far!

sigma · 14 Jul 2017 at 23:27

Sliver said:
Space is not constrained by the special theory of relativity. Nothing can travel THROUGH space faster than light, but space it's self has no speed limits on it's constant expansion.

What is 'space' in this context? Dark matter/energy? Normally when I think of space I think of the planets/matter within it.

Zethor · 14 Jul 2017 at 23:34

SlyReaper said:
The mediocrity principle suggests we're very unlikely to be the only life in the universe. The fossil record shows that life emerged on Earth almost as soon as the Earth was capable of supporting it, so the event of abiogenesis (whatever that may be) is probably not that rare, given the right conditions.

How can we assume mediocrity when only one form of life (that we know of) emerged here in 4.5b years of history? And out of billions of species, over billions of years, only one (or one family) was capable to create culture. Considering the current evidence, we can only conclude that both life and high intelligence are extremely rare phenomena.

Evosparki · 15 Jul 2017 at 00:48

For those who believe or theorise that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light then you're a bigot. Simple as that!

Back at ya leftistis

Rroff · 15 Jul 2017 at 03:43

SlyReaper said:
There are so many stars in a galaxy and so many galaxies in the universe, you'd think there must be alien intelligences out there a few million years more advanced than us. In which case, we'd expect to detect some evidence of them. Some of them should have spread their species throughout entire galaxies by now, and encased their stars in dyson swarms to provide the immense amount of power they would need to support their civilisation. Even if this isn't the pattern for every technological civilisation out there, all it takes is one, and we should be able to detect it. So either evolutionary paths that lead to intelligence are vanishingly rare, or technological civilisations aggressive enough to want to colonise a galaxy almost always encounter some kind of obstacle (e.g. nuclear war) that prevents them from colonising the galaxy.

An interesting perspective on this is that we might not notice the signs of alien civilisations because our experience might not have progressed enough to discern between natural effects and the effect those civilisations have had or entire galaxies might be missing from our ability to detect them which we don't know are there because we don't know any better, etc. interestingly we are able to detect things like the great attractor so eventually could probably figure some of these out unless a civilisation was advanced enough it had complete control of the laws of physics, etc.

Angilion · 15 Jul 2017 at 04:24

mrk said:
Why should it be impossible? Two photons in a lab have the exact same state even though they are separated by a distance. the distance doesn't matter one bit, if one photon's state changes, the other mirrors that change instantly due to entanglement. Quantum mechanics breaks our understanding of how things "should" work, yet it's right there in front of us working. In the future, the internet will not be limited to just fibre optic cables spanning the sea floors around the globe, it will be solar system wide thanks to this.

Universe is weird, yo.

But you know the real issue here? China could be our overlords. They've just beaten everyone else to the above by teleporting photons from Earth to an orbiting satellite.

http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-...-on-way-to-ultrasecure-communications-1.22142

I'm not a physicist, but as far as I know there are a few relevant issues:

1) Nothing is teleported. It's more like a fax - something is scanned at one end, data is transmitted and the thing is recreated at the other end.
2) You can't entangle quanta remotely, so you'd have to transport them in a more conventional manner first.
3) To fax an object that way, you'd have to scan it to a subatomic level. If it was alive, you'd definitely have to do so for all particles instantaneously because movement would be occuring (e.g. blood flow). That's not even theoretically possible yet.
4) It's not faster than the speed of light anyway.

Rroff · 15 Jul 2017 at 04:44

If we could instantaneously teleport matter it would likely open up possibilities with stasis/cryostasis as well either via some kind of buffering or the ability to change the state of every atom of an object simultaneously.

aardvark · 15 Jul 2017 at 11:59

i think people are getting carried away with this entanglement stuff - it is not possible to use it to transmit information faster than the speed of light and there is no evidence that such a thing is possible (and lots of evidence that it is impossible).
its a very interesting phenomena that is rightly being investigated, but this talk of teleportation is a bit premature.