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We better pray there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth *slam*.

Pretty sure life exists on other planets, God created the heavens...... And I think, if all the amazing life here on earth is anything to go by, then space in its infinate vastness will be as teaming with amazing life and other stuff as this earth is.

Will I see it and find out for sure...... Definitely some day.....:-)

welshhoppo wrote:
Because Religious people will watch as their entire creationist theory falls to the ground.


And non religious people will fall to the ground as they realise religious creationism was right all along.

The existence of extraterrestrial life would neither prove of disprove creationism. If the Rare Earth hypothesis is indeed correct (even though we would never know for absolute certainty if was) and life on Earth is indeed unique, that doesn't prove that a god is responsible for life. If there is extraterrestrial life, that also doesn't "disprove" creationism (facts and logic already do that) either. For instance, the Catholic Church's official stance is a belief in theistic evolution (biological evolution is real but was set in motion by God) and has declared that the existence of extraterrestrial life is not in conflict with faith because there is no limit on God's creative freedom.

Fluxator wrote:
Guys, please don't use the word believe. It implies there's no logic or reasoning involved. Why do you think people believe in God and not think God exists?

The current models we study in cognitive science/philosophy of mind pretty much always present knowledge in a probabilistic form. The most basic functional neuronal structure we know of, the perceptron, works more or less that way.

So the knowledge that the sky is blue is, in effect, the very strong beleif that the sky is blue. It seems very counter-intuitive, and the first time my teacher introduced me to that notion, it was really hard to swallow, but there's a whole serie of problems that can't be solved without it.

Linguistic analysis is interesting when it comes to epistemology, but you have to be careful, as it is easy to take colloquial specificities for a proof of an argument's integrity.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ScootyPuffJunior wrote:
For instance, the Catholic Church's official stance is a belief in theistic evolution (biological evolution is real but was set in motion by God) and has declared that the existence of extraterrestrial life is not in conflict with faith because there is no limit on God's creative freedom.

There's few things more satisfying than arguing with a militant atheist who maintains that the Church denies the validity of the Big Bang theory or evolution.

 Kovnik Obama wrote:
There's few things more satisfying than arguing with a militant atheist who maintains that the Church denies the validity of the Big Bang theory or evolution.

There's few things more satisfying than arguing with a militant theist who creates a straw man argument and pretends that "liberal" creationists are the only creationists.

(Notice that the context here is "religion", not "the Catholic Church", and there are plenty of religions with claims about how the world was created that would be utterly demolished by the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere. Well, even more utterly demolished than they already have been.)

While the implications on religion regarding the discovery of alien life is an interesting (and inevitable) tangent---keep it polite and topical--rather than just an argument over the existence of God.

Lets hope they turn up soon and kindly donate the secret of immortality, efficent space travel and clean energy

 Mr Morden wrote:
...and clean energy

Clean energy is like Soylent Green... it's soooo good, but it's really covering a much, MUCH darker secret

Give me the other two and I don't care that much

Eh if such a thing happened (unlikely imo but fun to think about) I would hope for 2 things, awesome space travel and hot alien chicks

Is there life on other worlds in the universe? Given the size on the universe and the length of time it’s been around I’d say it’s almost inevitable it either exists right now or has at some point. In fact it’s probably happened many times.

Is this life intelligent? Well this is less likely, but still very probable. Even if the ratio of non intelligent to intelligent life is millions to one I still think it’s very likely to have happened on other worlds than this one.

Will we ever make contact with such life? Possible, but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it. In universal terms we have existed in only the blink of an eye and can only sent signals a tiny distance.

Have Aliens ever visited us in the past, built the pyramids and regularly abducted and ‘probed’ people? Not a chance in hell.

I think i have two entirely different mindsets about alien life that is advanced enough to contact us.

On one hand, I subscribe to the idea that any civilization advanced enough to travel the stars has evolved their ethics accordingly. Otherwise they would have never survived past the point of society that we are at right now. Either you become a "Starfleet/Star Wars age" race, or you blow yourselves up through war, in effect.

But......I have another worry that fits with the first point. What if (very likely) there are galactic civilizations who are so old that they are jaded and/or fanatically ignorant towards the "Starfleet" age of their race, and have actually gone backwards morally but kept the advanced technology? I call this the "40K Imperium" era, where they can travel the stars and effect great technological wonders, but are morally debased/ religiously fanatic, or just plain xenophobic to the extreme, and so are dangerous to everyone they meet.

The latter of the two are the ones I am worried about finding us and simply destroying us for our resources.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The latter of the two are the ones I am worried about finding us and simply destroying us for our resources.

Destroying us for our resources makes no sense. The time and energy requirement to haul any meaningful resources across interstellar distances makes it completely pointless, and even if you propose some physics-defying warp drive or whatever the resources on a planet are pretty limited compared to the resources they could harvest from the rest of our solar system while ignoring us entirely.

The real reason to interact with another civilization is to destroy them before they become a threat to you. And for that you don't send interstellar cargo ships to loot and pillage, you just send a swarm of relativistic kinetic weapons to destroy any potentially habitable planets.

Peregrine, the Xul, a species presented as a Superpredator does just that to take us down a peg. Actually they do one better. They toss an asteroid at us from our own belt.

I think its more likely if contact with an alien race happens, they have peaceful intentions, dumb hillbillies who run the government shoot at them (also the regular gun toting hillbillies) they get pissed off and start killing. It's not our problem though, we will be long dead before any contact with aliens occurs, at least IMO

 Peregrine wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The latter of the two are the ones I am worried about finding us and simply destroying us for our resources.

Destroying us for our resources makes no sense. The time and energy requirement to haul any meaningful resources across interstellar distances makes it completely pointless, and even if you propose some physics-defying warp drive or whatever the resources on a planet are pretty limited compared to the resources they could harvest from the rest of our solar system while ignoring us entirely.

The real reason to interact with another civilization is to destroy them before they become a threat to you. And for that you don't send interstellar cargo ships to loot and pillage, you just send a swarm of relativistic kinetic weapons to destroy any potentially habitable planets.

The problem is that any race that can travel such great distances but have devolved morals can likely wipe out a civilization as an after thought. And if they are mining the rest of a solar system, why miss that other planet? Or if you are that advanced, why not kill them all with some simple-for-you method, rather than eliminate any possible extra attention you might have to apply to eliminate the feeble attempts they make to try to thwart you?

Or if they are Dalek-esque religiously xenophobic, they might feel the need to kill us off while strip mining the other planets, just for completeness's sake.

At the very least, they would likely meet us like every advanced human society has met natives after migrating to a new land.

In other words, for every Federation that is likely out there, there are probably Romulans.

Off topic, but has anyone else gotten a hankering to rewatch the X-Files from this thread?

I've always figured that if an alien civilization advanced enough to actually go interstellar, let alone any further distance, exists then they're so far advanced technology-wise that they very well might not recognize us as actual life. Kind of like we don't really pay attention to spiders and ants unless they really annoy us.

I'm not a rocket expert, but I'm almost done with an aerospace engineering degree and have studied a lot about space travel tech in my spare time. The more you learn about it the more you realize how ludicrously hard it is to get any kind of significant space presence out there.

Also, here's a cool page for people who like to speculate on such things: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy.php

If we are really lucky its the Culture

Well if there is aliens life. The Russians aren't ready to fight.
http://rt.com/news/russian-space-troops-aliens-631/

Anyone here read Calculating God by Robert Sawyer?

An alien race in the book has a very good idea to make sure there are no threats to its survival.