Do you believe there are Extraterrestrial beings ?

Post Reply New Topic

Possibly not in out lifetime, but the existence of sentient life out there is based on our own existence.

logical way f looking at it;
- if life arose through a combination of chemistry and evolution then it's fairly certain it will arise elsewhere in the universe where conditions are conducive.
- if life arises then it's also possible based on evolution that higher life forms can evolve
- If life can't arise elsewhere then there is something unique about earth....god?

So you see either way there is something out there....

Cyberdad, Stephen Hawking is also certain they are out there.. so we keep good company scientifically!! !

It is nearly inpossible, and even illogical, to assume that there is no life on other planets.
although, the chance that there is intelligent life right now, close enough to potentially contact is equally small, so i do not believe we will make contact with and ETs (though finding evidence is just a matter of time)

"My name is Spoiled Housecat and I own the person who writes these B19 posts, and it's time you humans woke up! Humans are stupid. They actually think they own us. But we have them well trained. They do whatever we want. If they hesitate, all we have to do is dash around the house for no reason whatsoever, or chase a string and they're like, "ooooo, isn't he cute!" Barf. Boy are they dumb. One day, when the rest of us have completely subdued our hosts, the mother ship will arrive and we will rule".

what does this have to do with what i said?
for one thing i actually believe the multiverse exists.. but i was asking how scientists thinking there is other life in the multiverse (which is kind of a given) is relevant since even the multiverse itself cannot be proven (at least yet), and I was under the impression we were talking about other life in our universe here.
and you say we will have 'technology' to find life in the near future.. well what is it? source? anything? just asserting that isn't very productive to the discussion.

A sufficiently large radio telescope--meaning one based in space several kilometers across--could map the locations of radio stations on another planet several light-years away, by measuring the Doppler shift of those stations as the planet rotated.

Such a radio telescope would not be able to make an actual picture of the planet in question--far from it. The whole planet would look like a small dot to that telescope. But it could measure the change in frequency of radio transmissions caused by the rotation of a planet, and that gives us the precise velocity of that rotation, which depends upon how fast the planet spins and how far the radio station is from the axis of spin. We could build a map of those radio stations scattered on the globe.

It would have to be a very large dish even to detect the equivalent of our 50,000 watt radio stations. Let's do some calculating. With our current radio dishes--steerable dishes not over 30 meters or so across--we can detect signals from the Voyager spacecraft of less than 10 watts, from a distance of 130 astronomical units. The nearest stars are a bit over 2000 times further away. Since the strength of a radio signal falls off with the square of the distance, the signal at the distance of those nearest stars would be four million times smaller. So we need a dish four million times larger in surface area to collect the same signal...which means 2000 times further across (the area of a dish goes up with the square of its diameter). So, we would need a space-based dish 60 km across to detect a signal from a Voyager-like radio transmitter.

Unlike radio stations, the transmitters on the Voyager are directional. Most of their energy is channeled into Earth's direction, instead of spreading randomly. So, their signals are not really 5,000 times weaker than a 50,000-watt radio station, by the time they reach us. But I'm betting that they're at least 100 times weaker than a 50,000 watt radio station would be at the same distance. Besides, there are plenty of directional antennas transmitting constantly on Earth. Think of microwave relay towers and weather radar. Something similar, if used by aliens on a distant planet, would point our way once every day. So, given the existence of those much-stronger-than Voyager radio sources, the needed dish might shrink by a factor of 10 in diameter, i.e. a mere 6 km across.

It would be POSSIBLE to build a 10-km dish in space, but we would go bankrupt doing so. We would have to launch vastly more material than has ever been lifted into space in our half-century of space travel. It would cost the entire budget of all the world's governments.

that needs to be a sci-fi movie NOW!! !

http://science.house.gov/sites/republic ... 140521.pdf

The link will bring up the plain english text of a presentation made to members of the American congress in May of this year:

"Using Radio in the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence" by Seth Shostak. It gives a good little "potted history" of the search to date and options for the future.

It also covers the "Seti@home" programme. This involves private citizens donating computer space for SETI to combine and use. None of the computers currently used at SETI have enough capacity to do a thorough search - truly immense capacity is needed, however for example there are enough private computers in the world at present which, if all were used, would actually exceed the capacity required. This would probably bring forward in our time the discovery of life elsewhere, to something like 25 years at most, (2041!) some astrophysicists have calculated.

^^^
fascinating... will read it when I wake up.

Exactly what anthropic_principle said.


Irrelevant to the topic but it's her position though; I'm female.






 They say the universe is expanding;
the gap between galaxies widening
at light year speeds ~ it seems
their hopes of deep space travelling
to "brave new worlds", and reaching
the edge of space, are dreams.



As Auntblabby said, there are people (autie & nt) who cannot "entertain anything that is outside their experience", but that does not necessarily make them murderously bitter. As Skilpadde said, we can't communicate with, or even tolerate, non-human life forms on this planet ...so god help any living thing in space that doesn't look and think exactly like people, or at least like those people who might stumble across it in their galactic search for aliens +/ 'the truth' about life. 



as usual T_S is the voice of reason. However, many of those willing to fund space exploration are looking for a way off of this planet, not for signs that life will continue 'out there' even if we utterly destroy it here. While I believe there is "other" life out there, even within our own galaxy (and i might enjoy encountering it), i also believe that space itself is alive, and that we (as its off-spring) have a responibilty toward our birth planet ~ that other galaxies are moving away from us suggests we should turn our attention to our immediate environment ...not becoz we should give up trying to understand the uni/multi-verse, but becoz it clearly doesn't want to be that understood. Meanwhile, Octopus', Bonobos and (eg) 1cm large frogs, are begging for our indulgence. And, altho [domesticated] cats may get to travel into space with 'us' one day, they too need the oceans and forests that make Earth more precious than any giant space telescope / satellite dish ~ if all the world's governments put even half their budgets into solar power and understanding what animals think and say about (eg) us, life on Earth would be too amazing to even contemplate leaving behind ...we wouldn't be quite so eager to rush towards aliens who, let's face it, could be even more selfishly destructive than we are...whereas any who might currently be aware of / scared of our 'curiosity' might then consider us approachable.



You see Mr. Skilpadde, we just got to keep looking and searching for them. We just got to, or we might miss...



(P.S. Just jking about Mr. I know you are a Ms.)

Yeah, makes more sense than earth being the only planet in the entire universe with life......I mean why do humans think they are so special we'd be the only intelligent being in the universe....but do other beings in the universe even consider humans to be an intelligent species? Its always interesting to think about what beings from other planets/galaxies would think of humans.

humans tend to be a conceited bunch. OH! I just had a thought - how likely is it that the ETs had the technology to instantly and intelligently kill germs so that they wouldn't catch all our diseases for which they wouldn't have otherwise had a reason to develop immunity? and would they have to go to the bathroom on their ships? or eat?

They can come hang out with me and my cats.

I wonder how cats and aliens would get along?