Kevin's Watch

What do you think? Is there other life forms out there? I think that there can be no doubt of it.

Oh yeah. What a colossal waste of space if there weren't.

I think there must be.... of one form or another...

I've never met any, but can't imagine why there wouldn't be.

in a word.... Yes.

Yep. Absolutely. I just hope one of those worlds has the Land.

LOL... Me too

There's life Jim, but not as we know it.....

what, you talkin' to me?

Infelice wrote:There's life Jim, but not as we know it.....

I love that song!

Hierachy wrote:what, you talkin' to me?

Huh?

don't worry, it seems you missed the joke...

I knew it was a joke, it just... well.... wasn't the best. But much better than mine I'd wager

It doesn't really matter if there is or if there isn't since we'll never come in contact with anything sentient anyway.

I read an interesting book called "the Forever War" where this guy gets in a spaceship that goes lightspeed or faster or was he in suspended animation. Don't remember. Anyway, he comes back to earth hundreds of years latter & almost every on the planet is homosexual because it was a natural way of dealing with over population.

But I digress. Even if a nearby star had life on it, it might take us 100,000 years to go visit that life. Technology is a wonderful thing, but there are limits. I mean, I've seen VCRs, microwaves, CDs, and ever so much more come into play, but I still can't will myself to fly even if I tried really hard. There are limits to what we can do. The sound barrier wasn't really a limit as much as it was a goal. The light barrier is beyond us & I just don't buy all the hokey science fiction warp drive, folding space garbage. Like Covenant says, "that's too easy".

Sure, but I keep breaking mirrors every time I try to get to it.

Yep, i posted something along those lines on another thread, Even the closest star is just too far away

you never know....

its just silly to think that were the only beings in the whole universe...if we exist, why not others

I recently bought a picture called Hubble Deep Field. They took a section of the sky, then a section within that, then a section within that, until the portion of the sky they were studying was the size of a grain of sand held against the sky at arms-length, and did a 100-hour exposure of it. And they found 1,500 galaxies!!! The picture fills me with awe. I can't imagine how many grains of sand at arms-length it takes to cover the sky, but the number of galaxies we're talking about is beyond comprehension, and each has billions of stars. I can't much imagine being the only life anywhere.

This must be the Ultra Deep Field picture you're referring to, Fist. I saw a report about it on the Discovery Channel last month. It's the deepest that the Hubble Telescope has ever peered into the universe. Astronomers joke that the UDF is what happens when the Hubble holds a staring contest with infinity. Apparently the UDF image reaches 13 billion years into the past. Since current estimates place the age of the universe around 13.7 billion years, the UDF is knocking on the doorstep of the earliest era of time after the Big Bang. What really excites astronomers is that at the very limit of its resolution, the UDF reveals faint reddish blobs that they believe are images of some of the very first galaxies forming. Astronomers consider this a major breakthrough, because this is the first time that the earliest "infant" galaxies have ever been captured on film.

I like to think there is life on other planets. Maybe the more compelling question is: is there intelligent life on other planets?

Two clues hint that a long time is needed for advanced civilizations to arise. One: in the one example that we know (humankind), the evolution of intelligence took billions of years. Two: no extraterrestrials have contacted us. If advanced civilizations could develop in a short time, then we should have expected some signals from them by now, considering the head start they had. But we haven't heard anything. So maybe any other civilizations out there with an Earth-like biology are roughly at the same stage of technological development as humans. Maybe they are just taking their first steps beyond their planet, as we are now. Maybe they are also wrestling with their own capacity for self-destruction, as we are.

And maybe, they have already destroyed themselves. Perhaps we are the lone remaining voice of intelligence in the cosmos. That's a bleak thought...will humanity also snuff itself out? It would be sad if there were no evolved beings around to contemplate the cosmos and the miracle of life. But if there's no one around, then there's no one around to feel sadness.