Do you think that there is life out there other than our own? I maean the galaxy is pretty big just to be occupied by just humans. I personally think (and this is probably crazy) that we are the only ones out here.
Yep.
Well, there’s no question whatsover that there are non-human lifeforms in this galaxy.
There is a line in that Jody Foster movie “Contact” where a character says of alien life, (paraphrasing) “Afer, all if it’s just us, it would be an awful waste of space.” And there’s the arguement that says with trillions of stars and billion of planets, sheer probablity say there MUST be someone else out there.
And I think all the above is crap. Until little green men land in my backyard, I will be adamant that we are alone in the universe. Not because I can prove it, but because I think the arguments to the contrary are more like religious creeds than science. Sure, it’s POSSIBLE there are others out there, but who really knows? I don’t think the existence of other planets makes the existence of other forms of intelligent life inevitable. I mean, why would it? There’s no way of measuring how probable (or improbable) our own existence is, so there’s no way of calculating the probabilty of existence of any other form of life.
As for that line from the movie, I thought it was BS when I first heard it. “Waste of space”? Speak for yourself, bucko. Perhaps we DESERVE a universe to ourselves. With that, I rest my case.
A rough approach to guessing amount of non-Earth life (or technological civilizations, if you want to narrow it down) is to use Drake’s Equation
An argument against the existence of non-human intelligent life in the Milky Way is the Fermi Paradox.
Personally, given the known ability of bacteria to live in a pretty wide range of environments (including miles under the sea and earth, across a fairly wide temperature range) plus the law of large numbers (WAG millions of galaxies, millions of stars per galaxy), I find it difficult to believe that life is limited to the planet earth.
Whether we are the only technological civilization (TC) in the galaxy is a separate question. TCs might be inherently self-destructive. Or self-limiting: Matrix-type technology may precede Star Trek (interstellar) technology and seduce the species into omitting further technological development.
Certain sorts of technological civilizations can perhaps be ruled out.
Or complex multicellular life, never mind TCs, may be very rare.
‘Contact’ (which had lots of scientific input as far as movies go) was expressing a hope/opinion. It (or I should say, Carl Sagan et al.) was not making a scientific statement that there is definitely life elsewhere, just that it seems like a good possibility.
It doesn’t. The existence of other planets makes intelligent e.t. life more probable.
True (at least not yet). But, by the same token, you cannot claim that e.t. life does not exist with certainty. The only way to find out for sure is to search.
LOL. Deserve? According to whom? Ourselves? What great feats have humans accomlished that merit the deed to the universe? We still kill each other over artificial boundaries here on Earth.
Also, have you actually thought about how big the universe is? Earth is not even a noticeable speck on the scale of the universe.
The most pessimistic estimates for the Drake Equation typically come up with approximately one radio-level civilization per large galaxy, which is still an awful lot. Just as an academic excercise, consider the first term in the Drake Equation: the number of galaxies in the Universe. There’s many billions of galaxies in the observable portion alone, and it’s quite possible, or even probable, that the Universe is infinite. If the Universe is in fact infinite, then it is guaranteed that there are an infinite number of civilizations in the Universe, with at least our level of technological development. The question then just becomes a matter of how far apart they’re scattered. It’s conceivable that our nearest neighbors might be so far away that we can’t even see their galaxy, but that wouldn’t mean that they don’t exist.
More precise answers than this are impossible until such time, if ever, when we actually encounter intelligent life.
I’m in with the pro-life crowd here (never thought I’d utter those words, but I digress.)
There are just far, far too many beakers out there in the universe to grow life from to believe that we are alone. The human mind can’t even imagine the limits of the universe, if there are any.
Why don’t you help us look?
The apparent emptiness and “awful waste of space” may simply be a function of when we are.
When life began on Earth, it likely occupied only a small area of the total planetary area available. Said one proto-archaea to another, do you suppose there’s life in other puddles? It would seem an awful waste of space if there weren’t. Well, no, not really. Just a function of where life was in spacetime. If my layman’s understanding of the current state of cosmology is close to accurate, and current cosmology is more or less on the money, the universe right now is only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of how long it can expect to last.
The Fermi paradox and such are pretty powerful arguments against other civilizations past a certain level of development, at least in our immediate surroundings. Further away, other galaxies and certainly other local groups, superclusters, and galaxy walls, it’s anyone’s guess–but all it really comes down to is a matter of faith.
For myself, I kind of hope we’re alone in at least our own galaxy. Mostly for the sake of whoever else could be out there.