Are We Alone In The Universe?

[HigHurtenflurst]

enditall727 said:

happydolphin said:
I've been watching Star Trek and the fantasy of space travel and inter-stellar, inter-galactic exploration makes the idea more imaginable, but I remind myself that really, none of it will ever be possible.

Also, as much as I would love for it to be true, I don't believe there is sentient life outside of earth. But it's definitely a fun idea, much like fairies and dragons and all sorts of fantastic things the human mind was created to imagine.

Why do you think that it would never be possible?

Also, why do you think there is no Sentient life outside of earth? If there is Sentient life here then why wouldn't it be outside?

What makes us so special?

The distances involved are ridiculous.

The middle point I disagree with happydolphin so I can't answer for what he might say.... though I guess it could depend on how sentience is measured, I suspect that anything developing similar intelligence to us is an incredible rarity compared to life in general, so in that sense:

Yes we are probably pretty special, but again compared to the distances involved it doesn't mean much... for example if 10% of star systems develop life, maybe only 0.01% of those develop complex life (it took 2.5 billion years from simple to multi-cellular life developed on Earth), and 0.01% of those develop any kind of sentience, and 0.01% of those become self-aware to higher mammal-like level... we are already down to a few dozen star systems in our galaxy and while i'll admit I am pulling figures out of my ass, I believe I am underestimating the difficulty life can have in advancing to more complex stages... probably particularly the change to multicellular.