Life Should be Common in the Universe, physicists say

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Nightshift, Mar 10, 2014.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    faith noun \ˈfāth\
    : strong belief or trust in someone or something:

    I mean it in the above sense....and of course, the examples I gave are valid....the bus could be late....I could have kicked the bucket.....Newton's laws of gravity are not 100% certain, as with any scientific theory.....

    We accept knowledge as per what text books may tell us.....we stand on the shoulders of giants, accepting what they told us and maybe extrapolating their findings further.
    If we didn't have faith [as I have outlined] all our days would be spent investigating curcumstances, doing our own experiments, always making observations before we dare set one foot after the other.

    As someone else mentioned, I think some confuse everyday faith and the stigma of the word itself, to imply a belief in some magical deity. That is not necessarily so.
     
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  3. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    Though some definitions drop the issue of proof (evidence), proof is what differentiates science from religion.
     
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  5. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Most certainly!
     
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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    No you didn't. You had tentative trust based on previous experience. It's not the same thing as religious faith. It's an equivocation fallacy. The religious use of the word is different than the common usage. Religious faith is absolute unshakable belief in the absence of evidence, and even in light of contrary evidence.
     
  8. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Of course it isn't religious faith...I already said that.
    The tentative trust you speak of is the everyday experience of having faith.
    I think you are splitting hairs.
     
  9. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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  10. Sorcerer Put a Spell on you Registered Senior Member

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    Rubbish. The sun has been rising for 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so or many billions of years more. That covers my lifetime and yours which is all we know, so you're wrong: we're talking about our lives not the distant future.

    If you don't know what mean streets mean then go look it up. No one gets mugged where I live so I know I won't be mugged. I'm not ignorant, I just have a good idea about risk management, unlike you. And don't descend into insults to try and make your invalid point.

    People don't have trust or faith in anything very much. Here in France it's quite normal to get a second opinion when consulting your doctor, and as a matter of fact my partner died of cancer which the GP failed to spot. Horsemeat scandal anyone? Banks go bust in case you didn't notice, and so do companies. Now who's ignorant, simple and naive? I was a financial controller for 20 years and I've seen more scams than you've had hot dinners, so clear off with your pompous arrogant nonsense. I think you need to back and find your brains, more slowly.

    Let me expand on this. People don't trust or have faith in, in no particular order, politicians, bankers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, plumbers or most anyone else. They expect to get screwed and very often they do. If you don't know that you really are naive.
     
  11. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    and grocers, and car mechanics, and TV stores and the next door neighbour and each other in general.

    I fail to see how any of this invalidates faith in the way that we are discussing.

    Have you ever asked a stranger in any town for directions to somewhere?
    You probably will take notice of him/her because they are locals, correct?
    Or ask a bus driver how long to the next stop....Isn't that faith?

    I cannot believe we are playing such games of pedant and semantics over one simple five letter word, that some seem to abhore due to connotations to religion. :shrug:
     
  12. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    With reference to my last post...It has been said that this is what drove Fred Hoyle [an Atheist] in not accepting the BB theory.....it predicted a beginning, which Hoyle saw as a possible reason for a creator. :shrug:
    A good example of baggage and agendas misleading an otherwise great man.
     
  13. Sorcerer Put a Spell on you Registered Senior Member

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    I'm making the point that people don't have trust or faith - and that's nothing to do with religious faith - they make informed decisions based on experience and knowledge. Let me give you an example. Someone says they know a great restaurant. Do you go there? You think about the person making the recomendation and decide: do they know anything about food? Do they go to restaurants? Are they low-life idiots? Then you decide.

    Directions: yes, probably, but if you have a map that would be better.

    Bus drivers are paid and unlikely to lie, so yes, but that's not faith, it's a calculated guess.
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Then please stop conflating the two. The "trust" displayed in science is nothing like religious faith, and it's intellectually dishonest of you to imply so.
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    When you start quoting the dictionary, you lose.
     
  16. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Institutionalized knowledge is static, which means dead. That's the problem with all religions. Once you make anything a religion, you've killed it. In order to be alive, one must not have faith. Faith is literally death. A baby has no faith in anything, and it is the most alive.
     
  17. Balerion Banned Banned

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    Now you're conflating faith, trust, and certainty. You can't seem to stop shooting yourself in the foot, Joe.

    Irony.
     
  18. river

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    Does it really take a physicist declaration , for anybody to use their common sense , to declare that life is common in the Universe ?

    What has the Human intellect become...

    Are we this stupid , idiotic , brain dead ...... Are we ?

    I'm not
     
  19. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    The term faith is belief in that which cannot be seen. Faith is required for things that are outside direct sensory experience, but which can be inferred within the mind/imagination, by other sources of indirect evidence. The religious might infer God by miracles. The scientific method is more about direct evidence the eyes can see, so we can all see the same things without the imagination. Faith is a charisma, that bridges the gap between the inferred world of what might be, and the seen world of what is, by motivating discovery and exploration until the data appears.

    The semantical problem is atheism went political and defined faith as religious and therefore something negative that needs to be avoided. When the same term/actions comes back to bite them, within science, they make use of the dual standard to say this is different. Science needs to remain neutral and not biased by the religion of atheism. \

    As far as life elsewhere in the universe, show us one data point the eyes can see. I have no problem with faith since it is the front end of all innovation and new ideas.
     
  20. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    LOL, I am conflating faith and trust, because that is how those words are defined in the dictionaries.  Your repeated refusal to acknowledge simple and easily verifiable things like word definitions, just speaks to your intellectual enfeeblement.

    The fact is, as I have stated many times in this discussion, we live in an uncertain world. Your repeated refusal to acknowledge that fact too will not and does not change reality. You just by choice or ability or lack thereof are unable to recognize the world around you - not to mention a dictionary. You live in an illusion, a prisoner of your debilitated intellect. And that is something I cannot help you with friend.

    Faith is how the human mind copes with uncertainty. We need faith in ourselves and faith in others. Faith is an integral part of our lives. It we want to succeed, if we want to thrive, we have to have some faith in ourselves as well as others. That is a fact, a pure and simple fact. That doesn’t mean we all need to believe or even want to believe in a God or religion.

    Only if you use words incorrectly, take a walk on the wild side Balerion, open a dictionary.
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2014
  21. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The issue of life elsewhere has been discussed in many Threads during the past 10 or more years.

    In 2-3 or more Threads, I have posted remarks similar to the following.

    The history of the Earth strongly supports the notion that life exists in many other solar systems throughout the universe.

    It also supports the notion that technological cultures are rare.​

    Some of my & others Posts have provided more details. The following is a brief summary.


    Life appeared on Earth almost as soon as conditions were suitable for its existence. I think there is evidence of life existing 3.5 billion years ago. This strongly indicates that life is has occurred in many other solar systems: It is likely anywhere that conditions are suitable for it.

    Technological cultures are undoubtedly rare.​

    The latter of the above statements is suggested by the following.


    The dinosaurs existed for circa 150 million years. The last of them were no closer to developing a technological culture than the first ones. This strongly indicates that such a culture is not an inevitable or even a likely result of evolution.

    The Denisovans & Neandertals showed as much potential as Homo Sapiens, but became extinct before they got past a stone age level of civilization.​

    It is interesting to note that in addition to the potential for the development of a technological culture, there is also the requirement for evolutionary pressure in that direction.

    For example: The octopus seems to have the brain potential for developing technology. However, there is very little pressure for that species to do so. The octopus can move in three dimensions allowing it to find & exploit its food supply. Its suckers are wonderful for grabbing & manipulating prey. There is little pressure for the evolution of technology. The start of such evolution is the use of a naturally occurring tool (Id est: A stick).
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    You neglected to distinguish between the Early Stone Age or Paleolithic Era, and the Late Stone age or Neolithic Era. The Neolithic began 12KYA with the Agricultural Revolution--the invention of the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry.

    [BTW: The word "civilization" means "the building of cities." Neither the Denisovans nor the Neanderthals invented that technology. The first cities were built around 9000BCE. In fact the first permanent settlements for people who were no longer nomadic hunter-gatherers were built at the start of the Neolithic Era (essentially defining that paradigm shift), when H. sapiens was the only surviving human species.

    The pressure for the discovery of agricultural technology was the unreliability of the natural food supply. Nomadic hunter-gatherers were at the mercy of the weather. Years of low rainfall occurred rather often (on the average about one year out of ten, IIRC), and during one of these years people died of starvation. This led inevitably to violent competition among the various small tribes of humans, for their precious hunting and gathering territory.

    In fact, reexamination of ancient fossils with modern instruments has revealed the sad statistic that more than half of adult Paleolithic humans were killed by violence--more than by all other causes combined!

    There was tremendous pressure on these folks to discover or invent technologies that could make the food supply last through a lean year. I'm sure the brainy members of every tribe spent considerable time pondering this issue--while the brawny members were inventing more powerful weapons. This inevitably led to detailed study of the way the food supply is created in nature, and then experimentation with ways to copy nature: planting of seeds, irrigation, protecting (edible) crops from grazing herbivores, then protecting the (edible) herbivores from the carnivores while learning to keep the herds nearby.

    The Mesopotamians figured this out around 10,000BCE. The first cultivated crop was fig trees, the first domesticated animals were probably the goats who were attracted to our garbage piles. The people in India, China, Vietnam, Egypt and several other sites in the Old World got the same idea a bit later. The New World had only recently been populated so they didn't have to fight over food yet, but they eventually cultivated the pepper plant. The Peruvians domesticated the llama, but in North America the largest domesticated animal was the turkey. (You try taming a moose, bison or mountain goat!)

    In regions where cattle were domesticated, it didn't take long for people to realize that dairy farming is a much more efficient use of pasture land than beef farming. Most people became lactose-intolerant in childhood, but they discovered the technology of cheese-making--more resource-efficient than eating the cows' meat but not as efficient as drinking their milk. A few lucky individuals manifested lactase persistence, allowing them to continue drinking milk into adulthood. This was a tremendous advantage--both to the individuals and to their tribe--so they reproduced prolifically and their genes became common. Today there are still vast regions such as northern Europe, where virtually everyone can drink milk, and equally vast places like China where almost no one in the native population can.
     
  23. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    27,543



    And couple that with the uncountable numbers of stars, planets and the probable infinite nature of space/time/Universe, and the odds of ETL of an advanced nature is real.
     

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