Do you think there is life on another planet?

[Thingsarebecomingstrange]

If so what do you imagine it would be like?

Similar to us humans, just plants, sea creatures, something beyond our imagination and totally out of this world.

Something much more advanced than we are or far behind.

I've been watching 3 body problem and it gets you wondering.

There is great book called The Rise Of The Dinosaurs that I still have to read yet.

I think that common theory is they would not have needed to evolve particularly, as they had no enemies other than themselves.
So just better Dinosaurs maybe? 🤔

I agree with some others. Hundreds of billions of galaxies and many more hundreds of billions of planets, some of which must have the right conditions for the potential for life to evolve. I find it almost impossible to believe that it hasn't.

Evolved into what, though? Sentient creatures with the ability to build spacecraft and time travel?

Life on Earth began over 3 billion years ago. Modern human civilisation has been around only a few thousand years. It's only in the hundred years that we have been even remotely capable of communicating at great distance, let alone achieve space travel. The way things are going, we will be extinct in a few hundred years' time.

The window of opportunity is incredibly small.

What would be the chances that another life form could have evolved elsewhere in the universe at broadly the same time that we did, and into sentient beings with the ability to travel both in space and time, and be able to make contact with us? Chances of that are almost nil.

For all we know, they might have arrived a million years ago, looked around and thought 'Well there's nobody here who has any idea' and buggered off again. We'll never know.😂

The dinosaurs had a long time in which to evolve, they were dominant for 160 million years. They did evolve a lot into lots of different shapes and sizes but, as far as we know, never developed into tool users. By comparison it's been only 60 million years since the asteroid wiped them out, so it's not likely that humans would exist as we are now if the dinosaurs were still the dominant species it's also not likely but also not likely that the dinosaurs would have developed technology if they hadn't been wiped out.

I find the Fermi Paradox and the Drake equation absolutely fascinating and always have. Years ago I would definitely have said that there absolutely must be or have been other civilisations somewhere out there just because of the sheer volume of stars and planets. Now I think that there is bacterial life all over the place, possibly even in our own solar system on other planets and moons, but maybe not other civilisations.

Firstly, the reason that we can have complex life is that at some stage one cell somehow got inside another cell and they survived and multiplied. Everything more advanced than bacteria relies on that double-cell setup and, as far as anyone can tell, in the entire history of the earth it only happened once, which is vanishingly small odds.

Also, we need quite a narrow range of conditions and those conditions need to be stable, preferably for a few billion years. Lots of things could wipe out life on a planet or prevent it from leaving the bacterial stage. Things that are quite common like supernovas or gravitational disruption from other solar systems passing nearby etc.

There are some interesting theories about that speculate about the possibility that two civilisations at either end of the their evolutionary timelines could be so dramatically different in their nature that they simply fail to recognise each other at all.

If some other being has evolved to the point whereby they exist only in an ethereal state, or their lifecycles are so long that they would be imperceptible to us as living beings, they could also be at the stage where they wouldn't recognise human civilisation as a sentient lifeform, so we'd more or less walk right past each other and not notice.

Firstly, the reason that we can have complex life is that at some stage one cell somehow got inside another cell and they survived and multiplied.

Kind of. Single-celled organisms may have found it advantageous to live in close proximity to one another and clumped together. Over millennia they began to co-operate and share the aptitudes of digestion, defence, locomotion and so on. Gradually they became reliant and unable to survive without the help of one another. That's how multi-celled organisms began. There are organisms living like that today.

What I find interesting is how we really
couldnt have co existed with dinosaurs and what a stroke of luck I suppose it was for humans that they were wiped out .

I think where we are today is a series of coincidental events and the life we have on earth has evolved due to those events, a unique set of chain reactions that have led to what we have today.
Anything slightly different, maybe a different temperature of a few degrees at a certain time, or the earth rotating minutely faster or slower, or being slightly closer to the sun, or slightly further away would have sent life on earth in a completely different direction and could have resulted in completely different life, or none at all.
I don't think there's any reason to think that a series of coincidental events haven't happened on other planets, somewhere , and that has resulted in life of some form - but possibly not in a form we recognise because we can only really understand what we already know, we may not even recognise other forms of life if they're not in some way similar and recognisable to us, and they may be at a completely different stage of their own evolution - or now extinct.
Most imagined life from other planets is based on a life form from earth - I think the life on earth is completely unique because of the chain events that created it, and that any life on other planets would be a result of different, unique events.

And now I'm not even sure what I'm going on about 🤷🏼‍♀️

This.

If there are other intelligent life forms out there, that would be amazing.

If there aren’t, and we are unique… that would be amazing.

Either way, the creation of life is incredible.

@pipproblems What I find interesting is how we really
couldnt have co existed with dinosaurs and what a stroke of luck I suppose it was for humans that they were wiped out .

On a similar note it's interesting to me how many former human civilisations existed and were wiped out. Advanced civilisations writing and learning about mathematics and studying the stars etc

Yes. At least I hope so.

https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/monty-python/the-galaxy-song

13.7 billion years?? Your maths is very dodgy.

That's the current estimate.

Yes this is what I meant when I said something completely out of this world. You've explained it really well. I don't mean little green men because that is based on what we know.

As pp said - if ''aliens'' arrived to look at Earth before humans appeared (which is a mere fraction of a second in Earth age terms) they'd have seen nothing, made a note of it (with one their weird green tentacles), and gone away.

If we ever get to the stage of looking at the likely planets and moons we also may be millions of years too early or late. The window is small. Suns warm up and cool down and planets shift in their 'perfect' orbits to change everything.

This is what I think. Look at humans as an outsider. We are a selfish species who think only of ourselves, do unspeakable things to each other. All the wars we’ve had and continue having. We let people starve while others have ridiculous wealth. Yes there is some kindness of course, but the majority of our acts are destructive, to other humans, to animals, to the planet itself. Who would want to contact us?

I don’t think we are special enough to be the only ones here. Thinking about the size of space literally blows my mind and I love that feeling. Do we know what’s beyond space?

This is the thing that confuses me - what is beyond space ? Is there anything beyond ?
Do things work differently in different areas of the universe and are we judging the likelihood of discovering alien life or being discovered by alien life based on our known principles of how time and space work? What if it’s not straightforward and the same across the whole universe and does that increase or decrease the chance of alien life being known to us

Thanks for backing me up. I'm not sure what the poster was trying to say about the age of the universe.

There are some suggestions that the universe could be double this age, but most sources are still suggesting 13.7 billion years and it isn't considered incorrect to estimate this age.

I think life yes -intelligent life perhaps - intelligent space faring life - less likely but possible - intelligent space faring capable of interstellar travel least likely.

Anything out there would likely be very different to us - as we evolved though chance and many variables interacting. Re-run earth and we may not evolve again let along have technical level we currently do.

I firmly believe that if octopi lived as long as humans, they would have taken over the planet by now. 😄

Statistically speaking, it's practically impossible that there isn't life on other planets in the universe - what that looks like is a different question altogether. There are so many freaky creatures living in extreme conditions just on earth alone, other planets with different chemical makeups and different evolutionary paths are just outside the realm of my puny imagination.

The chances of us ever finding another intelligent, technologically advanced species, though? Basically impossible.

Definitely. There has to be life elsewhere in the universe. I should imagine most of it is bacterium or other simple life-forms. A lot of sea animals. There is likely to be intelligent life also. Someone once said though that any life-form capable of travelling to us or contacting us would also have had the capacity to develop its technology to bring about its own destruction. And that would likely happen first.

i’m no scientist, but i think if other life forms could exist outside earth-like conditions, we would see some sign of it considering that’s what there is more of. So if aliens exist i think they will look alot like us…maybe an evolved version, and could even be us (humans) in the future who have travelled back (like interstellar haha)