Is there life on other planets?

After rediscovering this thread and reading Martin Skidmore's responses to me over again (several times), I still think I addressed all his stated objections, as directly as I knew how, and I still find his inability or unwillingness to make plain why he thought my posts were nonsensical to be both sullen and obstinate.

Of all the exchanges I've had on ILX, this one mystifies me perhaps more than any other, since Martin was not usually one to act like this.

dude was obv one of "them"

(x-post)

I wouldn't take it personally - he had a couple of thread mini-meltdowns when battling pretty severe depression.

obviously there's life on other planets tho duh.

you watching 'wonders of the solar system' then?

The First Men On Mercury

Greatest thing I've ever read, maybe

Don't talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

tell us more, oh bad science fiction plot recycler visionary scientist

Some scientist usually comes out with this "Don't talk to aliens 'cause they may come and enslave us and eat our pets and stuff!" every twenty years or so. They always figure that the aliens would have human psycology and human drives.

Aliens will have human drives:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1/1066563_1eceff58e7.jpg

damn. the word I was thinking of was rides, wasn't it? :-/

No, they'll be driving much better cars than that. They'll be taking over the world, remember?

Barney over across the hall in the Chromatography lab is offering 3-1 against the proposition that there are intelligent beings living under the surface of Pluto and I for one am not going to turn down such easy money

― Respected Scientist (J0hn Darn1elle), Sunday, August 31, 2003 9:11 AM (6 years ago)

Belgian tabloid headline about this: HAWKING SAYS ALIENS EXIST

We've been missing the obvious all along.

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/fluxion23/pg-alien.jpg

the alien isn't inside, the car, THE ALIEN IS THE CAR

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/Alien%20queen%20car%20russia-thumb-520x506.jpg

I think we've found out what was really going on in My Mother, The Car: an alien was possessing Jerry (mumble mumble, forgot his last name)'s car and using the voice of his dead mother to lull him into a false sense of security in hopes that he'd later help it take over the world.

omg! Transformers is real, people. xpost

LOL: http://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/12903192862

this is a topic i find fascinating, but the only honest answer to this question is "we don't know, and have no way of knowing until we find some."

here's some interesting arguments from the naysayers:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=7

...the total lack of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence suggests that among the all the many possible numbers of civilizations compatible with Drake-style calculations, very low numbers are the most likely to be right. As Fermi observed, if they were out there, they would have been here, and we would have noticed, or more likely failed to exist in the first place.

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2007/01/aliens-stop-looking/

As another poster points out, because the sample set of life is 1, the standard deviation is infinite, so there is no reason for us to think that the vastness of the cosmos implies anything about the probability of life. It’s that intuitive feeling of the universe being big that causes people to think that there must somehow be aliens. But that bigness is merely big to us. The configuration space is so much larger, and indeed, most atomic configurations are not realized in this universe. People’s intuition is as if there is some cosmic arbiter that says, “okay, it’s been 100 billion planets, time to seed this one with life now!” Why at 100 billion? Why not seed life on every 10^10^123 planets, instead of merely every 10^11? The multiverse is infinite. There can be an infinite number of intelligent civilizations, each living alone in their own universe. To think that the vastness of space implies the presence of aliens is itself statistically ridiculous.

and intelligent life is a whole other ballgame. think about how long life on earth existed without humans. and how long we've actually been sending out radio signals.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife

is this it? because i wanna be the guy who breaks the news to ilx.

my dad sent me a link to that journal article. the abstract contains the fantastic, fantastic phrase "indigenous to this meteor".

do they have enough material for... resurrection?

I was all excited until I read some of the comments on that foxnews interview. Stupid godfuckers ("their monkey theory can't explain the majesty of the LORD" - oh fuck off and die already) - I wish aliens came over here and just annihilated our entire planet right now. We're not worth discovering.

alien fossil taking a free ride on a meteor is the plot to a lot of horror/sci-fi films. i am excited!

<3

stoked, but no one irl seems to share my enthusiasm. my wife's response when I told her: "wow cool hey would you mind walking the dog?"

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php

http://www.theonion.com/articles/mean-scientists-dash-hopes-of-life-on-mars,1423/

Thx for both those links, guys!

I wish aliens came over here and just annihilated our entire planet right now.

we have already started iirc

http://www.mentalfloss.com/store/images/D/pluto.jpg

Hello.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=habitable-planet-gj-667cc

I was going to suggest that this is Lou Reed's "new planetary system", but unfortunately according to Vogt "It's pretty deficient in metals" .

The low metallicity (seen in the parent stars absorption spectra) means the parent star is a population II star formed rather early in the galaxy's existence. If there's enough silicon & iron for a planet 4.5 times Earth's size to accrete, there's likely enough carbon for organic chemistry (and life).

The problem with habitable zones around red dwarfs like Gliese 667c is that they're so near the star that the planets are liable to be tidally locked with one face permanently facing the star (like Mercury and the Gallilean moons of Jupiter in our own system). Gliese 667cC has an orbit of 0.28 AU (26 million miles), so that may not be a problem.

To the OP, I'm largely in agreement with Stephen Webb in Where Is Everybody? and Peter Ward in Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe. The universe is probably teeming with bacteria-like life, but complexity and intelligence are exceedingly rare.

Keep asking for a Pluto:Revolve in Peace t-shirt from the Hall of Science but haven't received one yet, guess I'll have to get it for myself.

Interested to read those books Sanpaku mentions.

Seeing this thread on new answers immediately made me think of Martin S.

Of course I have met many of them and they all think Earth sucks.

Earth: the toilet venue of the galaxy

They don't like all the wrappers and litter about.

aJacques Vallée

bthat lawrence poem upthread is pretty good

there is no life anywhere else in the universe & there is no way a colony of humans could survive a trip to any other potentially habitable planet

whew glad that's settled

I would actually feel glad if this was the case

Consciousness downloaded into nanobots and bodies 3D printed at the other end, how about that?

Burroughs thought of it first

also, there is no way santa claus could possibly visit all of those houses in one night

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-exploration-venus/potential-sign-of-alien-life-detected-on-inhospitable-venus-idUSKBN2652GO

Remember this?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55071058

Its twin has just been deployed in Romania:

https://adevarul.ro/locale/piatra-neamt/un-misterios-monolit-metal-similar-gasit-recent-sua-descoperit-cetate-dacica-romania-1_5fc1178c5163ec42714d36bf/index.html

(Sorry, I couldn’t find an English equivalent but it includes photos and a video embed.)

oh god david surber is totally one of these cumstains who reads every craig childs fart in existence. going to be about 500 more douchebags in utvs on the lockhart basin road next spring.

That Aimless/Martin Skidmore dialogue really cracks me up for some reason - a shame to have missed the golden age of early ilx.