Do you think Aliens Exist?

I love when DNA based primates 'think outside the box' when considering the possibilities for self-organizing systems.

'We considered silicon, we covered the bases.'

LOL

Interestingly, a NASA found a life form on earth, that while still carbon based has arsenic instead of phosophorous.

http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

Note how the NASA people are talking about the implications of this.

Also a nice overview of some of the other possibilities - still working in the organic chem type family - is found here....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry

And from the conclusion of

we find the delightful term, summing up a great deal of my argument - terracentricity!!!! bolded below. (this also shows I am hardly lecturing academia, which is a pretty diverse 'thing')

And all of this is still within the 'box' of organic systems based on chemicals like DNA, RNA etc. For all we know there are a number of other kinds of self-organizing systems can develop and evolve.

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Gustav.

 

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I'm not so sure you two are actually in any relevant disagreement with eachother, but you manage to fight anway ...

 

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Oh, but its fun to fight with Gustav. We fought or really he fought me and I was sneaky weird with him till he started 'laughing'. I mean, what would life be without a good rough and tumble with Gustav.

But I have to pace myself, take breaks.

I think we do disagree though. I am a woo woo.

 

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You are? I didn't know that, and wouldn't think so.

 

Oh, OK. Anyway, I am certainly not going to try to demonstrate that Gustav and I disagree here. That would be even funnier than having a disagreement over nothing. And I was wrong to imply that life would not be worth living without having a fight with Gustav. It can be a positive part of life, but one can have a great life without this experience.

Though I would hesitate to say what the probabilities are.

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indeed. "guessing" is an entirely respectable and scientific endeavor

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@Gustav --

Who said that? I just said that, given the size of the universe it is more likely that life will appear in other galaxies than it is that they will in ours. If each galaxy is fundamentally the same in both physical laws and composition then each galaxy should have an equal likelihood of producing life. Even if you place the odds of abiogenesis at less than astronomical, it is still almost infinitely more likely that life will appear in other galaxies merely because there are "billions and billions" of them.

Of course, even if you make the best possible assumption that there is other life in our galaxy, it's still almost infinitely unlikely that those species are visiting us due to the physical problems such a trip would entail. Navigation would be a bitch, you can't exactly just push a button and navigate your way half way across a galaxy, what with gravity wells and all of the other dangers out there. Beyond that, unless you're going to postulate that they magically conquered the LS barrier it would take them, at best, decades to get here and centuries to get back(such a mission would be, in effect, a suicide mission), and then they'd also have no way to communicate their findings(or the status of the conquest) with their home.

And if you're going to postulate that they can magically travel faster than light(ignoring all of the difficulties with that, such as the problem of sufficient energy), then you might as well save a step and just say that god teleported them here. In fact, you could save another step and just say that they are god.

As long as we're just pulling this sort of shit out of our asses, then why don't we just say that distance is completely illusory and that we can go anywhere with nothing but the power of our minds to propel us? Or how about that everything is an illusion and that we are gods ourselves inventing the world around us moment by moment?

 

cross post
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?p=2856096#post2856096

 

Sometimes I wonder why people don't just realize that the Universe is Extremely Huge. There are numerous parts that we have not been able to see yet from here. Let alone travel. Are we alone in this galaxy? Most likely yes. Are we alone in the universe. I feel confident when I say No.