The Plausibility of Alien Life

That would be unknown until one can truly define the difference between natural and supernatural or if there is a grey area between them that appears to be both.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969

Those differences are already defined. Online Dictionary; supernatural: Both one and two appear to apply to your OP proposition.Online Dictionary; natural: Your OP does not appear to limit what may be possible to what is considered supernatural.Perhaps if science were not so reluctant to research relative to anything even remotely applicable to the definition of supernatural or that which is beyond the definition of natural, our knowledge of the universe would be expanded.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

As well, re: December 2008 issue of Discovery Magazine's article, “A Universe Built for Us” (pp. 52-58):Discovery Magazine, one of the most widely read naturalistic science journals featured an article by Tim Fogler who said that our our universe “seems inexplicably well designed for life” (52).Tim Fogler, author of the article, cited the fact that the laws of physics are fine-tuned to emerge and sustain life, having properties which “are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and”in this universe, anyway”life as we know it would not exist” (52).“Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. .....," says Fogler.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

I'd accuse you of quote mining, but you haven't read the original article, I presume? It looks like you have just taken it from Sean McDowell who writes

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title of one of the main articles should sum it up: “A Universe Built for Us” (pp. 52-58). Discover is one of the most widely read popular-level science magazines. And like the vast majority of science journals and magazines, it is decidedly naturalistic. Nevertheless, the article went on to describe how our cosmos “seems inexplicably well designed for life” (52).

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Which looks uncannily like He also writes:

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The reason Tim Fogler, the author of the article, concluded the universe appears designed is because of how exquisitely the laws of physics are fine-tuned for the emergence and sustenance of life. Fogler says the properties of the universe “are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and”in this universe, anyway”life as we know it would not exist” (52).

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Which looks a lot like Buz - when you are essentially copying someone else's blog entry as closely as you have (with token changes) it would be polite to at least cite it. The biggest clue is that both Sean McDowell and you uncannily spell Tim Folger's name as Tim Fogler. What do you know - I'm using point mutations to ascertain common ancestry Anyway, here is the article, the full quote reads: The rest of the article is Tim Folger trying to explain the multiverse theory to a lay audience.Discover magazine isn't really a journal by the way - you should have kept Sean McDowell's wording of 'popular-level science magazines' since that is actually accurate. It's a fairly balanced article that explains the ideas, the different flavours, the philosophical problems with it and the like.Edited by Modulous, : reworded a sentence to make more sense.

bluescat48 writes:

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If such life was advanced, far beyond our own, the yes it would be plausible that alien life could travel to our earth.

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Do you agree or not and why?

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"Could"? Yes, insofar as there is a physical way to have it happen."Plausible"? No, for reasons of space, time, and materials.Space is huge. It would take an extremely long time to cross it. Pioneer 10 took 36 years to go only 90 AU. Voyager 1 is going faster, it's the fastest thing we've ever made (17 km/s), but 30 years to go 108 AU is still slow. That's only 5.7e-5 lightyears per year. Just to reach Alpha Centauri (which Voyager 1 is not headed toward) would take more than 70,000 years.If a living being is going to make the journey, it is going to have to be able to survive what will likely be hundreds of not thousands of years to reach its destination. Somehow, it will need to be provided energy to maintain its biology as well as physical materials to sustain the physical body. As we know from thermodynamics, there is no way to perfectly recycle such energy and materials.And of course, there is the issue of slowing down. You can use gravity assists from the sun and other large bodies to get your speed up. Slowing down is another matter entirely. A lot of your energy stores are going to be needed to get you to stay near your target. Atmospheric braking would probably burn the craft up given the speeds it is going at so it would need an internal braking mechanism.Thus, they'll need to bring stocks with them...which will overwhelmingly increase the payload which will overwhelmingly increase the energy requirements. As soon as they get far enough away from their home star, they won't be able to rely upon sunlight to power their biology or technology. They will have to rely upon other sources such as chemical and/or nuclear, which means they're going to have to be more efficient than any known process if they hope to sustain it for the time required to cross the distance.By the time they arrive, the beings who show up will not be the ones who left. Let's assume that they could reach massive speeds. Even so, it would be the equivalent of asking the people of the 15th Century to embark upon a mission that won't produce any results for 500 years...and nobody left behind will ever learn the fate of the mission...and nobody on the mission will ever see home again.Now, I could envision a planet putting together every single resource it had upon building a device that might be able to do it (though I'm having a hard time with the mass/energy curve: The very material you bring along to power the system increases the power load required...there'd have to be some interesting gravity assists along the way in order to conserve that power for maintenance rather than motion.) But that is hardly "plausible."The only reason I could see to send a living being is if you were leaving your home for good.Now, there are some life forms that can go into suspended animation. So far, all the ones we know of are extremely simple forms. If we assume that somehow a way to keep large, multi-celluar life viable yet not active were discovered, a lot of the energy requirements would be lowered, but then you still have the problem of the vast time scales involved: Nobody who sends the people off will be alive by the time they arrive, if they return it will have been generations that have passed.This isn't to say that attempted communications with other worlds isn't of any worth. It's that trying to go there is so impractical as to be highly implausible to have ever happened. We didn't deliberately send Pioneer 10 towards Aldebaran. It's just a coincidence. That, I think, would be the most likely way we would come across a physical object created by an extaterrestrial species: Some sort of probe that due to a coincidence of geometry had it wander by this direction.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

*Blink* You did not just say that did you?People used to think flight was impossible. People never even imagined supersonic speeds. And even then, people imagined flight would be like people flapping their wings to fly more like birds.I am reminded of a science fiction novel I read some years ago. The novel was written before records were invented. The title and author escapes me for now. The author's vision of the future was that in the future if you ever wanted to listen to music you'd just turn on what we would perceive to be a primitive version of the radio. The characters explained that there were always people playing music and transmitting the music as a service to society. Recording the music and play it back later never even occured to this author.I'm pretty sure if a technologically advance race decides to embark on interstellar travel they'd do it with much more efficient ways than what our current science would allow us. What you just said is little better than how people during Kristofer Kalumbus's period would describe intercontinental travel in the future.

That's right. And to me this gradual everlasting human progress is a hint that we might be possibly be dealing with a set up job. There are so many possibilities to extract vast amounts of energy, we just have to find the way to do it. If you are maintaining a somewhat neutral position, you cannot but wonder Why. Why are we so incredibly lucky in this random universe?Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.Edited by Agobot, : No reason given.

Your admonishment is well taken, Modulous. In retrospect I agree that I used enough similar or exact words, other than Folger's quotes, for my own message to credit the source.Thanks for citing the Discovery article link. The following exerpt cites what appears to be some significant cosmological compatibility to life:

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Plausibility of alien life (alien being natural life outside of earth). Well, there are different forms of life to be considered.In the Contingent life on earth, there is bacteria, viruses, fungus, plants and animals then you have substantially intelligent life, like humans. When you look at the area of space that humans have been able to observe, per say, observing the surface with satellites and telescopes, you understand the scope of possibility is thinning from the widest range of life, like bacteria, to the obviously more fortuitous intelligent life.In our solar system, we consider earths early biosphere may have played a part in harboring functioning organized life. That would give earths current biosphere, which sustains life, credible consideration for elemental requirements for life to exist on other planets. Water, solid ground and nitrogen/oxygen based atmosphere are fundamental prerequisites for a supposed "necessary environment" for morphogenesis or even life sustaining. We associate life with organic conventions which lead us to seek out similar environs to earth.Without venturing too far from the neighborhood, In our solar system we find water, an important factor, on a few moons, and other planets with ice in them like Mars and ice based Pluto. Three Figures in our solar system are candidates for prime qualifications.Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's largest moon Titan. These are considered for having solid ground, ice or ice polar caps and dense modestly temperate atmospheres. see; BBC - 404: Not Found Also considering some fundamental factors to the ingredients of life. As I had said before, we are accustomed to all life being carbon based and organic. These rules may vary some with different planetary benefactors. For instance, a nitrogen based article of life may not require water to be created or sustained. It may not require solid ground or even a sustained atmosphere. We observe Earth's ordinances, but they may not be absolute.Finally, I believe when pondering how plausible life in the universe is, you have to view the the plausibility of simple life first, as that would be the vindication. after that, the question of intelligent life, if they don't encounter us first, would be certitude. But to place intelligent life first is perpetual.

Um, not intending to steer us off topic, but the universe is anything but random. As a matter of fact, some of us "old schoolers" believe that there is no such thing as random. Chaotic might be a better word to describe things.Anyway, it kinda ticks me off everytime I see very smart people telling people about the impossibility/impracticality of interstellar travel. All their reasons are purely 20th/21st century science and technology. To loosely quote a science fiction character whose name I can't think of right now, there are a million ways we can travel vast distances in space without using the humongous amounts of energy predicted by current science, and most of them we can't even think of. To stamp our feet down and declare that it is simly impossible or impractical for humans to travel to lightyears away using our current level of technology is, I think, extremely arrogant. Again, the people of Kristofer Kolumbus' time never imagind there'd be 747's karrying hundrids of peepel halph wai around the worald in less than 2 days.

Hey, if you can figure out a way to exceed the speed of light, I'm all ears (or eyes). Sure people scoffed at human flight or lunar landings, but the state of the art in physics may be a bit trickier.Perhaps you may be looking at the problem of interstellar flight from the wrong direction. If the human lifespan can be extended into thousands of years, what is a little trip to Altair that only takes a few hundred in the overall scheme of things? After all, one could get the latest in movies and music (as the speed of light permits) would be available for entertainment. Perhaps to spice things up, there could be a still, a few seeds of that killer BC/Amsterdam weed or psylocibin spores. Now the sexual selection may be a bit tight with only a few thousand to choose from, but I am sure one can match their standards to the environment as people have done throughout history.Now I understand that there may be objections to this scenario as many fundamentalists who believe the 1950s are the ideal would prefer to send out an all-male crew to explore the universe but I am afraid that during several hundred years of spaceflight some may get bored with just dancing backwards.More to the point, I would find it very surprising if life does not exist within Europa, Ganymede, and now even Mars considering the environments where life manages to thrive here on earth. Just need to dig down under the surface.Edited by anglagard, : correct a mispelling

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Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis BaconThe more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza

The zero-zero drive... That's easy. All we have to do is overcome the hayflick limit... Can I have some of what you're smoking? I laugh at the idea of having anything but an all-male crew to explore the universe. You and I both know that a woman isn't capable of the higher brain functions needed to make sound decisions and all that good stuff. All she's good for on a spaceship is to distract the men from doing their job correctly. Franklie, I'm not ass obtimistik as u r. Aphterall, G-d never sayd anythyng in the bybel uhbout lyfe on oder blanets.

There is another important signature to be seen by aliens. Our atmosphere contains a relatively large amount of oxygen. This is indicative of life, because without the constant replenishment of oxygen by plants, it would vanish very quickly from the atmosphere. Oxygen has been in our atmosphere in conspicuous amounts ever since photosynthesis evolved, I expect the aliens any minute now.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Taz responds to me:

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People used to think flight was impossible. People never even imagined supersonic speeds. And even then, people imagined flight would be like people flapping their wings to fly more like birds.

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That's not the same thing. The amount of energy required to get a mass moving that quickly is decidedly non-linear. That's why nothing with mass can move at the speed of light: It would require an infinite amount of energy. Efficiency is one thing, but Scotty was right: You kinna change the laws o' physics.I don't doubt that technology will advance to allow greater efficiency. I suspect that a fusion reactor could conceivably be developed. But reactionless drives are the stuff of science fiction. Ion drives don't require as much fuel as chemical drives, but they have much smaller thrust in return and are also limited by the power required to generate the fields to a sufficient level to get that thrust.This is why I say I can conceive of it being done: Your spaceship is the size of a small asteroid and gets consumed in the process, but I certainly don't say it's physically impossible. I say it is emminently impractical.

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What you just said is little better than how people during Kristofer Kalumbus's period would describe intercontinental travel in the future.

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Ahem. Nobody said Columbus's trip was impossible. They said it was silly because the Earth was bigger than Columbus was saying it was. Nobody was saying the earth was flat. The Earth was known to be round from the time of at least Aristarchus. Instead, they were questioning his claim about the size.Columbus had a bad map and some bad math and made a calculation of the size of the Earth that had it about the size of Mars, if I recall correctly. And if the Earth is the size of Mars, then indeed it is a shorter distance to sail west from Spain in order to reach China than it is to go around Africa, assuming the Eurasian/African continental mass is as it is and you extract all the extra surface area from the American continents. But, Earth is much bigger than what Columbus calculated it to be and even though he found land where he said he would, it wasn't the right land. He got very lucky that the American continents were there otherwise he and his crew would have perished in the middle of a vast ocean.The universe is so large that the cost of sending a biological organism across the distances is impractical.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Buzsaw writes:

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The following exerpt cites what appears to be some significant cosmological compatibility to life

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Your quote-mine assumes that there are no interdependencies. Why assume that given the nature of physics, protons could be anything else?Once again, you are applying significance to the Anthropic Principle: Of course we live in a universe that can support our existence. Where else could we possibly exist?I've been through this before, and so far nobody has ever answered:Suppose you have a standard deck of 52 cards.What is the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades?
What is the probability of drawing an Ace?
What is the probability of drawing a Spade?
What is the probability of drawing a black card?
What is the probability of drawing a card?You are confusing the probability of the first with the probability of the last. If things were different, then we'd be different. Another comment I make that nobody ever responds to:A parent and child are walking along when the child asks, "Why is the sky blue?""Well," says the parent, "If it were green then we would ask, 'Why is the sky green?'"To claim significance out of the fact that we live in a universe that can support our existence is to claim that the sky is blue specifically to allow us to ask the question, in English, "Why is the sky blue?" The sky is whatever color it is and we adapted to it.The universe is however it is and existence within it adapted to it.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.