Is there intelligent life in the universe?

[JirinPanthosa]

Are you thinking about the time aspect of relativity or something else?

Special relativity, yes. Time dilation, the inability to cross millions of light years without time slowing down so millions of years pass on your home world.

I don't know what really sparks life, you could have perfect conditions, but how does life really form out of nothing? I don't know, and I don't believe we know right now, and I'm very open to a possibility that we're totally unique.

We do have proof that under conditions of primordial life, the basic amino acids and phospholipids that make up carbon based life form. So we have very good reason to think any planet with those conditions will at least form bacterial life.

 

[RandyS]

On the one hand, I live here so, yes.

On the other hand, I live here so, no.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

To quote the Monty Python song

Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth

 

[Smellmet]

What I mean is I feel it's very similar to religious faith, how without any proof at all I see so many people feeling so absolutely certain alien life must exist

The proof I need is that we exist. Surely there's literally billions of planets near enough to a star to harbour conditions of life.

 

[Gary Mitchell]

On the one hand, I live here so, yes.

On the other hand, I live here so, no.

You seem a bit conflicted.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

It seems extremely likely to me that bacterial life is common in the universe.

Intelligent life? (Defining intelligence as the capacity for abstract reasoning, not as moral intelligence as other members joked). I don’t accept the argument that there must be intelligent life because the number of stars like ours is just that huge. That is making lots of assumptions about the probability of intelligent life developing.

For all we know, you don’t just need planets similar to ours. You may also need a large number of changes over time that nearly wipe out all life but not quite. So we get continuous cycles of near-apocalypse to force adaptation, followed by a period of calm long enough to reach a new equilibrium. So you have to figure in the odds of a billion year streak of destructive but not absolutely destructive cosmic events.

What are the real odds of a billion year streak of getting hit by enough asteroids to kill all the big dumb things without quite killing all the tiny smart things? And no other gravity wells passing close enough to mess up our orbit?