Here's a question for you...

Yes, I think there's other life out there. Although, if they're visiting us, I don't think they're too smart

Both.

I love this question!!! The show "Ancient Aliens" (15 hours on Netflix streaming) got me all excited about this possibility!! There are countless TV shows and books about it.

I don't have any reason to NOT believe it......and it definitely is possible, IMO.

Who knows?????????????????

I believe whatever that guy with the crazy hair on Ancient Aliens says!!

And because of him I can't stop saying Puma Punku!!

I believe in other beings, hard not to look at the stars and think we are all alone, are they visiting us??? I highly doubt it.

Maybe, they could also be time travelers from earths future.

yes and possibly

We as homosapiens and (I use the term loosely) .. ummm .. an "intelligent" life form here on this plant have a very limited understanding of reality. We can only comprehend a small portion of what has been discovered or what we can decipher from information that has presented itself to us .. or at least we 'think' we know what's going on in relation to the information given us. We tend to want to rationalize the information we are given .. thus the confusion. Rationalization only works properly when you have all the facts straight. Therefore, we end up with an under developed and juvenile rationale because there is just soooo much we don't know yet.

We have only scratched the surface of understanding the world around us. Gosh, it wasn't even that long ago, man thought the earth was flat, and in order to cure a disease we had to use leach therapy. Geessh! What we knew then doesn't even compare to what we know now .. and in another few hundred years, what we know now pales in comparison to what we will know then.

Even explaining it confuses me.

I think the same reason why there is certainly intelligent life in the universe besides us is the same reason why we will almost certainly never meet or interact with it: the size of the universe.

The universe is so mind-bogglingly large that it's almost a mathematical certainty that there is an abundance of intelligent life out there (read: Drake Equation). However, because of the sheer size of it (we're talking billions of light years just for the observable universe), it's unlikely we'll ever interact with other intelligences. The distance just from our solar system to the nearest star is probably going to turn out to be prohibitive for our species. Panspermia will most likely end up being the only way our species becomes an interstellar civilization.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we're not just talking topological distances here, but temporal ones as well. The universe is ~13.5 billion years old at least, and humans as an intelligence have only existed for the last ~50,000 years or so. Let's do a little math, and we'll be conservative about it:

We'll say the universe is 13 billion years old.
We'll say that humans have been sentient for 100,000 years.
13,000,000,000 / 100,000 = 130,000

So there have been roughly 130,000 chunks of time in our universe's history in which human sentience could have evolved. Not only do we have to evolve close enough in terms of spatial distance to another intelligence for communication to be possible, but we have to evolve close enough temporally as well. Entire million-year civilizations could rise and fall throughout the history of the universe, relatively close to each other, and have no idea the others even existed.

Now, for a final thought. Personally, I believe it's likely that any civilization sufficiently advanced enough to create the technology required for interstellar travel will likely be able to create some facsimile of artificial intelligence as well. Since all life is mortal by definition, it may occur to this other civilization (as it most likely will with us) that it makes a lot more sense to send robotic probes out to explore the universe (like the Panspermia I was talking about earlier). Since an advanced enough robot is going to be basically immortal, it seems likely that any encounter we have with an alien intelligence will be a machine intelligence sent out by a species which may have met its end millions years beforehand.

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Because the universe has no limits it is infinite. Therefore infinite mathematics has to be used. The answer will always be "an infinite number" ....how many planets out there have life? An infinite number

andreascjonsson wrote: »

gcibsthom wrote: »

Because the universe has no limits it is infinite. Therefore infinite mathematics has to be used. The answer will always be "an infinite number" ....how many planets out there have life? An infinite number

Well the universe is expanding so i dont think its infinite. Actually im what you call a finite. A person who doesnt believe the infinite exists outside of the human construct. It´s simply an idea made up by us. Though if we check statistically speaking there are still very likely lives on other planets. If they are advanced enough to actually visit us i think they would pay us no mind as they would be close to gods compared to us. We would be more like insects. A very toxic self destructive insect at that.

Interesting. However I have to disagree that the universe is expanding. By definition, the universe is all of space and time and their contents. Therefore infinite. When we say that the "universe is expanding", it is somewhat of a misnomer. The OBSERVABLE universe is expanding, yes. But the observable universe is finite....If the entire universe is expanding, that means it has limits and is therefore not the universe.

YES!!