What is your belief on the subject of Alien life?

 

Do you believe that Extraterrestrials/Aliens exist? Or is it all just a hoax?

 

Also, what is the reasoning behind why you believe that they may or may NOT exist

 

I have seen many debates on the subject. Where does the majority of the vgc community sit with this one?

Considering the size of the universe it would be naive to think that we're alone. We'll probably never make contact though.

C64 said: Considering the size of the universe it would be naive to think that we're alone. We'll probably never make contact though.

This

Saeko said: C64 said: Considering the size of the universe it would be naive to think that we're alone. We'll probably never make contact though. This

/thread

We could be alone but that doesn't mean this is the only place life ever existed or ever will.
I heard a scientist put it this way once and I really like it.
Imagine a field at night during Spring. Now in that field are hundreds of lightening bugs. They do not all light up at once but in different intervals. Think of those flashes as Civilizations starting and dying out. We are but 1 flash in a huge field. There were flashes before us and there will be flashes after.
The universe is billions of years old so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that millions of light years away and millions of years ago there was life somewhere else in the galaxy.

C64 said: Considering the size of the universe it would be naive to think that we're alone. We'll probably never make contact though.

Since you believe that we are not alone, What makes you think that we will never make contact?

I'm an agnostic on this one. However, I still often silently disaporove of those who rationalize their opinions based on statistics and chances. We know nothing, really, about of those! Hard to sample something out of a single example. So in reality we know nothing about of those, such as the likehood of abiogenesis, of said life becoming multicellular, of surviving every geocatastrophe, of finally giving rise to an intelligent species, and if intelligent social, and if social technological, and if technological, surviving over deep time.

Please do consider. The milky way and it's planets are nowadays what Mars and Venus were in the beginning of the 20th century, the Atlantic Ocean for the first colonial explorers, Africa and China for the average middle ages man, and the dark woods a day's walk for the little children of the same man. Our subconcious seem to always place something out of the ordinary just beyond reach. It could very well be, and perhaps it's even likely, that one day, after we have sampled billions of stars, we reasonably assume there is one civilization per galaxy, or something along these lines.

On my current understanding of how it's possible for basic life to form, I am pretty sure we are not alone in the universe. Indeed I think it is probable that many star systems will form basic life (single cell/viral)

I don't think it likely humans will meet life like ours (complex, technological society) in a long time if at all, I believe we will be fortunate if we manage to colonise anything outside our solar system within 10,000 years unless some of the theories about fast travel (like single figure fractions of light speed at least) provide realistic solutions. And speed is only one issue of many in trying to get a human to travel to another star (sustenance, oxygen, heat, and protection from radiation), never mind the supplies that would be needed as well if colonisation is to be possible. (unless we luck out and find a duplicate of Earth in the neighborhood)

The very fact that Earth is inhabited by humans, not some alien colonizers that settled a billion years ago, could mean a few possibilities:

-We ARE, in fact, alone

-It is impossible to circumvent, in any way, the limitation of light speed

-Life capable of traveling from their own planet is exceedingly rare

-Earth an alien experiment, or a sort of 'wildlife preserve' protected by alien powers (as in the nifty freeware game, Transcendence)

A Star Trek/Wars type of universe with an abundance of alien species is extremely unlikely.  I hope it is just that intelligent life is very, very rare and not that we're permanently stuck here in this solar system.

C64 said: Considering the size of the universe it would be naive to think that we're alone. We'll probably never make contact though.

I don't think it is naive to think that we are alone. Even if the universe was ten time the size (hypothetically) it doesn't mean that we are not alone.

For all we know we could be.