Aliens, hell yes, hell no, get outta here.

Short and to the point. This being a board for things science fiction a short poll. Do you believe in aliens or not? Nothing fancy, just 3 options but feel free to offer your own thoughts and or comments.

 

Somewhere in this galaxy there's probably life many places.
Somewhere in this universe among billions of galaxies... certainly ...
isn't it like mathematically impossible to not have life other than on earth?

Someone on this very forum once told me that its more likely that it exist a
planet with only pink elephants than a possibility of no life other than here

 

I think they might exist, but not in the way many expect. I think that as humanoids, we tend to think too much of humanoid-like life, but the reality is that, just like life on earth with it spawning in myriad forms, that there likely are other forms of life out there waiting to be discovered. They just might not have the ability to communicate.

 

Sorry, I don't. As much I love watching all forms of extraterrestrial creatures done by the best visual artists out there, I don't believe they're humanoids out there. They are lifeforms like alien form of plants or some organism but Intelligent life??? I don't believe so.

 

beyond earth is a pretty vague scope, especially as there is not a "universal present" in terms of time. So yes, absolutely there is life beyond earth.

 

See that is exactly where I sit now. YES there is life out there beyond Earth but it's likely not intelligent life as we would see it, but maybe tons of plant life and animals that might be a lot different to what we expect. If there are civilizations sure they might exist too but they are so far away from us that the likelihood of our species meeting is not very high bar some great breakthrough that breaks the current laws of physics or some exotic method of travel that is even more unlikely.

 

Yes, simply based on Drake, but too far away from us

 

That will be the killer of any kind of first contact.

Maybe an automated probe is the best we can hope for, hopefully not hostile.

We do have one "no" voter so friend tell us why you think that? I want the other side of this discussion too so why a no vote?

 

I think there is life out there in the stars but is there sentient life, is another question, altogether. The question can intelligent life survive its technological advances without causing its own extinction. We will learn that answer for ourselves in the coming centuries...

 

See alien life doesn't necessarily mean "aliens" like walking and talking aliens but could include planets with lots of plant or animal life, they'd still be aliens technically even if they can't build spaceships or wonder about the stars like we do. I think there's a more then fair chance of worlds like that out there.

 

oh I think in a star system with the right level of stability (not too stable but definately not too violent), the right chemistry (including that elusive phosphorus), then single cell life, or something even more basic like "RNA world" life, is probably very common. But a billion years of life on earth was spent in the single-cell era, and it doesn't seem to be some kind of given that life must evolve from that. And there are a lot of major unknowns out there when you step out of the "As we know it" zone.

For instance if there is some kind of plasma interaction/system that forms naturally and would be considered a kind of non-organic life, then it might outnumber by mass all organic life by orders of magnitude. But the likelyhood of star-based life interacting with planetary life would probably nil, and if there was intelligent life on or within stars (or if the stars themselves could become sentient.. we're getting into far-out stuff here, anyway), then they might find organic life worth of study but not of contact. It would be like trying to talk to an amoeba. There would be no frame of time scale, no frame of.. much of anything really. Just logic concepts, math, that kind of thing.

 

Yes.

Just because we can’t see it in our current technological state doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. I know I read somewhere that as our forms of communication change, we will again become radio silent in the cosmos. Some species hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us on the technology front likely would have little trouble hiding themselves from our rudimentary tech.

 

I still want to hear from that no voter. I want the other side of the argument

 

This article says hell yes life...

https://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html

 

Simulations confirm the possibility of the existence of surface water on Gliese 581g if it exists. The parent star Gliese 581 is an old, slowly rotating M-class dwarf with unusually low flare activity so it its planets are more likely to retain their atmospheres and less subject to being blasted with UV and other ionising radiation. I would expect that most if not all of its planets are tidally locked, however. Its metallicity is half that of the Sun, so while being less, it's not that dissimilar.

Were I a working astrophysicist, I'd be loathe to bet my reputation on an estimate of 100% probability of Gliese 521g harbouring life given that we have yet to find evidence of life elsewhere than on Earth. We don't really have a firm grasp of the necessary conditions that allowed abiogenesis to happen on this planet. We have theories but no experiments have reproduced the processes other than to turn up various essential precursor chemicals. I suspect Steven Vogt is correct but that most life out there is prokaryotic in nature. There seems to be a fundamental probabilistic hurdle against the occurrence of eukaryotic life.

 

That would be me...eternal pessimist. Besides--there has to be a first. We may be it.

LIGO may be a good alien spacecraft detector--if it's the aliens from ID4
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-team-physicists-ligo-giant-alien.html
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.02065.pdf

Avi’s take
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/afterthoughts-on-the-second-uap-senate-hearing-7ceeacb1caf8

Ugh
https://lifeinjonestown.substack.com/p/that-blahhh-feeling
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/navy-fighter-pilot-said-saw-29781183


Can Spheres Fly?
https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/can-spheres-fly

 

So you think that we might be the first civilization?
Can you elaborate on this idea?

 

Here's one version of the basic idea summarised in a paper by Alexander Berezin:

[1803.08425] "First in, last out" solution to the Fermi Paradox (arxiv.org)

I tend to prefer the Great Filter hypothesis as applied to the transition from unicellular to multicellular lifeforms.

Great Filter - Wikipedia

 

I always think a sufficient level of technology or technology with the potential to run out of control is a great filter type

 

That's really the same as the tragedy of the commons argument I linked as well as being on the list of potential Great Filter events. There's also no reason why there shouldn't be more than one filter.