Are we talking about life or intelligent life? I don't want to answer your post in the wrong way?
Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space
- Thread starter timtonruben359
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Are we talking about life or intelligent life? I don't want to answer your post in the wrong way?
Life. The closest thing to life we've ever found outside of the Earth are amino acids and there are several orders of complexity separating these from actual life.
Intelligent life is of course even more unlikely.
We are already learning that life thrives here, in the most unexpected places.
http://www.universetoday.com/97540/finding-life-in-all-the-unlikely-unexpected-places/
There is life, and intelligent life in the universe. Will we ever find it? Who knows? But "absence of evidence" isn't "evidence of absence".
We simply don't have the data to draw a conclusion like that. There are probably two other worlds in our collection of 8 we can closely examine which might, possibly, support life as we understand the term. Venus is extremely difficult to study properly but we've certainly not ruled out the possibility life got a start there before the planet went all Year of Hell. Or indeed that something still survives. It's looking increasingly likely, meanwhile, that Mars had liquid water at some point. Everywhere on Earth you find liquid water, you find life.
And this is only thinking about types of life which resemble those we are familiar with.
The sample size we can properly examine is simply far too small to draw a sweeping conclusion like 'life is an extremely rare phenomenon'. It may be that life is almost a foregone conclusion given the right chemical conditions. We just don't know.
That doesn't prove anything.
We're talking about life emerging from inorganic matter not about how it spreads. These are two very different things.
Life is so rare a phenomenon that it's likely that intelligent life if there is any at all is distant billions of light years from here and we'll never know about it.
So you're saying, in the entire universe, that this is the only place with organic matter? Boggles the mind that anyone can think that. Sorry.
I don't know. The problem is that the EMERGENCE of life needs conditions that are so fine tuned that there are unlikely to be found elsewhere. Do you realize that life on Earth could almost go extinct if a single meteor fell on it? A meteor billions of times smaller than the Earth itself!
Exactly.
I am saying it's a distinct possibility.
No. Human life could go extinct. There is a variety to life here that you don't seem to understand.
Based on what? You keep making these sweeping statements without anything to back them up. What evidence do you have that the conditions for abiogenesis are extremely unlikely or indeed finely tuned? We're not even sure that it occurred only once on Earth, let alone anywhere else. If you were arguing that the appearance of complex multicellular life is extremely unlikely, you'd have some backup evidence because of the apparently insurmountable need for mitochondria, but we simply can't say that life itself didn't start multiple times right here in our own backyard and it simply wasn't preserved in the fossil record.
We may not know exactly HOW rare life is but we already know that it's very rare. And the chances of finding it in this solar system are almost inexistent.
https://www.google.com/#q=number+of+stars+in+milky+way
Think about those numbers before making any sweeping generalizations.
No. We don't. We know nothing of the kind. We've been exploring for forty years and set down on the Moon and Mars. We haven't scratched the surface.
Heck, we're still exploring this planet and making new discoveries.
No, we don't, that's our whole point. The place we've looked the most, Earth, seems to be abso-fucking-completely chock full of it in all its environments, even in places conventional wisdom says it shouldn't be. We've even demonstrated life can survive in the vacuum of space making interplanetary seeding a possibility.
The place we've looked at the next most, Mars, has a lot of tell tale signs that life may have once existed there too, and we haven't ruled out it still existing. We've explored a tiny fraction of its surface.
And we haven't gone anywhere else for longer than a passing photograph, in the cosmic sense.
Do you know how long a strand of DNA is necessary to produce even the simplest of organisms ( I am not counting viruses as they need other life to even exist)?
Life didn't spring from nothing immediately to the DNA for a currently extant organism, that's a creationist argument.
Do you realize just how big our galaxy alone is?
