[Closed] Is there life on Mars?

Fermi paradox vs Drake equation, take your pick.

But, still, they came?

Let us know if you see any trails of green light...
Rachel

whatever you think, it was a god-awful small affair.

Some of them are already here.....have you seen some of the shit posted on here?

no

we are living in a simulation

Bit of a saddenin bore tbh

I reckon aliens are already here, left Mars millions of years ago. Now though Mars is just a shell.

probably was at one point TBH. which isn't great news for us 😕

Whenever you're dealing with "out there" you get into some incomprehensibly large numbers very quickly. Life as we know it (Jim) requires a very unusual and specific set of criteria to happen, but there's one hell of a lot of planets out there to have a crack at it.

My take is that it's statistically quite likely that there is life elsewhere, perhaps even on many many worlds, but that even if we / they could travel at the speed of light we'll be extinct as a species long before we'd ever make first contact. (Aside from the fact that you'd also have to know where you're going, the idea of just tripping over a civilisation is infinitesimally small.)

what he said there

Out there unable to contact us due to massive distances and the laws of physics

If there are then I hope for their own sake they stay well clear of us.

Considering how many galaxies are visible in the Hubble Deep-Field view, each one with as many or more stars as our own home galaxy, and a great many of those stars having planets, then to even think about suggesting that we're alone is just madness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

[img] [/img]

Most of what you can see are galaxies.

"I reckon aliens are already here, left Mars millions of years ago. "

Royal family? President Elect?

Out there unable to contact us due to massive distances and our current understanding of the laws of physics

FIFY

What I'm curious about is if there are other forms of life are we the first civilisation in the universe or if we're relatively young and there's many more older ones out there actively avoiding us.

I'm a believer. I've read say too much scifi not to.

It'll happen but not until we can travel further and make more noise.

What I'm curious about is if there are other forms of life are we the first civilisation in the universe or if we're relatively young and there's many more older ones out there actively avoiding us.

observable universe is about 13.5 billion years old, earth is about 4.5 billion, we're pretty new. There may be civilisations that are so beyond our understanding we'll never contact them, but it's probs that they're just too far away

Someone (apart from me) once said, 'space is not only queerer than we think, It's queerer than we CAN think'.

I think theyr'e avoiding us cos they've seen this forum & some of the cranks on it!

Keep an eye on the sailors and for god's sake keep them out of the dance halls. It won't end well.

Duh... 🙄

[img] [/img]

NASA seems to think that we'll be finding signs of life within a decade and will have proof within 30 years. Who am I to argue - I believe they mean microbial rather than Spock.

I tend to think that even if intelligent life comparable to our own evolved, or will evolve elsewhere there is probably a good chance we are too late, or too early to ever know about it.

Isn't there a certain arrogance to think that there isn't life on a par with earth, or to expect that we could understand another lfe, which might be far more sophisticated than ours?

is about 13.5 billion years old, earth is about 4.5 billion, we're pretty new. There may be civilisations that are so beyond our understanding we'll never contact them, but it's probs that they're just too far away

NASA seems to think that we'll be finding signs of life within a decade and will have proof within 30 years

Got a link for that?

Given the size of the universe, on probability alone the answer is yes

I doubt we'll ever know for sure. Given the distances involved I don't believe we'll ever have the tech to allow the travel and that probably rings true for any life out there

Oldest 'civilisations' on our planet are barely more than what, 2000 years old, probably not even that.
Depends on how you define a civilisation.

The discovery of [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe ]Goblekli Tepe[/url] and other ancient archeological sites around the world may change your mind.

Of course there are other life forms, take DMT and you can see/converse with them 😉

The balance of probabilities says that there must be life on other planets somewhere. 'Intelligent' life though is much rarer.

If the earth is 4.5 billions years old and the universe 13.5 billion and we've only been able to communicate by radio for 120ish and sent things off the planet for 70 ish it's a tiny window of opportunity for another species to find us - so if another species visited our solar system anytime in our history (the earths not humans) there would only be a 0.000002% chance they would have done so at a time when it's perceivable that they could have discovered any sort of signal coming from our planet. Time is as much of a challenge to finding another intelligent species on another planet as number of planets and solar systems.

It's one of my dreams to wake one day to a news flash that we've communicated with another planet - or better but seemingly unlikely we're visited by one, i really hope to witness something like that in my lifetime. The fact alone that we're not alone in the universe might stop some of the stupid in-fighting that causes so many of our problems.

Oldest 'civilisations' on our planet are barely more than what, 2000 years old, probably not even that.
Depends on how you define a civilisation.

There was civilisation before the Romans

Given the distances involved I don't believe we'll ever have the tech to allow the travel and that probably rings true for any life out there

My Dad never believed humans would ever go into space when he was a boy.

If there is life out there are we sure we'd want to meet it? Let's look at our typical assessment of aliens...

Independence Day - here to knacker your planet and kill you
Aliens - we will grow our babies in you
Predator - we will hunt you for sport
Star Trek - Borg, Romulans, Klingons etc.
The Day The Earth Stood Still - giant robot big hole in Earth
V - wierd murderous lizards stealing our bodies
Mars Attacks - We come in peace - zzzaappp - ack ack ack!
Hitchhikers - Vogon poetry
War of the Worlds - savage martians,not heard of Beecham's.
Starship Troopers - more bugs than Australia

It's not like we're an especially pleasant species is it?

Lister in Red Dwarf..."What if we're an interplanetary disease. Don't go near earth it's got human beings"

HHGTTG

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space"

If there is life out there are we sure we'd want to meet it?

there's a theory that goes, "there's loads of life out there, but there's also a super predatory civilisation, and everyone else knows to STFU".

However say you had a machine that could fire off the another planet and replicate itself, and in (say) 500 years send off two more machines to do the same, it would "only" take a little under 4 millions years or so to colonise the entire galaxy, so it makes the "super predator species" theory fall over a bit...

well ADventure Time went to Mars today and thats probably the best TVshow there is right now

[img] [/img]

anyway Id check with Sarcastic Rover, hes got the knizzle

https://twitter.com/SarcasticRover?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

esselgruntfuttock - Member
Given the distances involved I don't believe we'll ever have the tech to allow the travel and that probably rings true for any life out there
My Dad never believed humans would ever go into space when he was a boy.

True.

But

The moon = 238,900 miles from earth

Closest star apart from our sun, Alpha Centauri = 25,000,000,000,000 miles from earth

We'll destroy ourselves long before we ever invent the tech even if it is possible

but what if all life needs is stability?

then it dies of boredom.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

We'll destroy ourselves long before we ever invent the tech even if it is possible

Of course it's possible. I've seen it in the films, duurrr. 🙄

There is absolutely, definitely intelligent life out there all over the universe, developing all the time. Has to be, 100% certain, there's nothing particularly special about humanity.

Either:
1. It's intelligent enough not to want to get involved with a bunch of nasty little bald apes who mostly still think guns are really neat, or
2. Intelligent life only ever lasts a few millennia before it discovers really big explosions and reduces itself into a fine radioactive dust.

Famously Carl Sagan said:

[i][b]"The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth."[/b][/i]

To me it seems statistically incredibly unlikely that we are the only life out there. If it happened once it can happen again - even if it is unlikely, we are the proof that the probability isn't zero. It might only be billion-to-1 odds, but there are billions of billions possible chances.

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html

Either:

Or 3. The depressing option: it turns out faster-than-light travel really isn't possible no matter how advanced you get, so the distances are just too vast and we'll never get to meet intelligent aliens. 🙁

If all life was to evolve, then decimate itself, then Shirley life would have to start over again from nothing on each planet that life was born on. So, there are plenty of dead planets, plenty of merging planets, so maybe there is a finite number of "species" that the universe can cope with.

I understand our theory of distance in the universe, what makes me question our theory is we're only looking at it from our perspective. Similarly that of "life" because we see life as Organic, doesn't mean to say other life is too.

Fascinating subject.

When we achieve warp drive we'll know

Highly likely there is life - even within our solar system. However Intelligent life evolving might not be as common. Intelligent life on Earth has only evolved due to the high number of mass extinction events due to meteor stakes, mega-volcano's etc. Apparently 99.9% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. It is mass extinction events that mix things up regarding life on earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs that gave mammals a slither of a chance at taking hold. If the dinosaurs had not been made extinct in a mass extinction event (or at least finished off if you believe they were in decline anyway) then it may have been many more millions of years before mammals managed to take hold if at all. And the particular branch of mammals that evolved to the species of ape that we've evolved from might never have happened. Intelligence is just our particular method of surviving and competing, just because life happens doesn't necessarily means it has to lead to intelligent life. The dinosaurs roamed the earth far longer than we have and they never evolved into intelligent species, but in a fraction of the time mammals have managed to.

There could be many millions of planets and moons out there with life, but if the solar systems they have formed within are not as violent as ours has been with less mass extinction events occurring on those planets, then it might not or ever evolve into intelligent life. And even then the significant difficulty is communicating with them. The chances are we'll never know or get to meet them.

Highly likely there is life - even within our solar system.

Wut?

rOcKeTdOg - Member
When we achieve warp drive we'll know

I am not scientist however even if we do build a warp drive, surely there's enough crap floating about in the universe that you'll accidentally **** into a meteor or asteroid along the way

Accidentally ****ing into a meteor would be some achievement.

Well over the course of at least 23 million miles you're bound to hit something and who knows what's out there that we can't or haven't seen

Edit: and I know a meteor is technically in a planets atmosphere but generally, there's a ton of crap out there

People have mentioned the problems of massive distance, and that of massive time spans, already… I'll just add that both of these suggest that not only is the chance of life existing somewhere else, at some time, extremely high, but also that the chances of us ever being in the same place, at the same time, are as good as impossible; we can only hope to detect evidence that life once existed somewhere far away… and likewise that others might detect that we were here, long after we gave gone. Send out (more) capsules telling others we were here…

Life in Mars? Great song. I'd be shocked if there ever has been. Lovely to believe otherwise.

Unlikely on Mars but surely there's other life out there?

Excellent read from Wait but why?

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

That suggests that there’s a potentially-habitable Earth-like planet orbiting at least 1% of the total stars in the universe—a total of 100 billion billion Earth-like planets.

So there are 100 Earth-like planets for every grain of sand in the world. Think about that next time you’re on the beach.

kelvin - Member
People have mentioned the problems of massive distance, and that of massive time spans, already… I'll just add that both of these suggest that not only is the chance of life existing somewhere else, at some time, extremely high,, but also that the chances of us ever being in the same place, at the same time, are as good as impossible; we can only hope to detect evidence that life once existed somewhere far away… and likewise that others might detect that we were here, long after we gave gone. Send out (more) capsules telling others we were here…

POSTED 1 MINUTE AGO # REPORT-POST

Yip

Not sure where the closest habitable zone planet is but even with warp drive engines etc, the time it would take is unimaginable. Maybe over a long enough time line human kind expands across the the universe planet by planet, but the notion of us launching a ship from earth and reaching another habited planet is just far too unlikely for me. The distances and time involved cannot be reconciled in my head. It's on a scale that pretty much no one can fathom apart from the Brian Cox's of the world and I'm sure he's already said forget about finding life.

It's out there but we'll never know for sure. That makes me sad 🙁

Life on Mars? Dunno, but if it involves being in close quarters with Jessica Chastain for an extended period of time, I'm prepared to go look.

Cougar - Moderator

Wut?

There's water on Mars, it seems that it's occasionally liquid, so things like bacteria are possible...

But Europa is where it's all about...

Another thing that gets talked about is other intelligences going post-biological and ending up residing in fairly small quantum computers, where they do advanced mathematics and do not concern themselves with the physical universe very much.

SETI becomes a search for something the size of a chest freezer which is incredibly introverted, has nothing to talk to us about and needs to be somewhere nice and cold and quiet to prevent its processors overheating.

SETI becomes a search for something the size of a chest freezer which is incredibly introverted, has nothing to talk to us about and needs to be somewhere nice and cold and quiet to prevent its processors overheating.

You've just identified a member of my Admin team...

[quote=big_n_daft ] Oldest 'civilisations' on our planet are barely more than what, 2000 years old, probably not even that.
Depends on how you define a civilisation.
There was civilisation before the Romans

Quite a good Kurzgesagt ep on this subject suggesting maybe the year should be 12017.

where they do advanced mathematics and do not concern themselves with the physical universe very much.

where they do advanced mathematics and do not concern themselves with the physical universe very much.

We have them here. They're called actuaries.

But Europa is where it's all about.

And we've just voted to leave, brilliant, just brilliant.

Isn't there a certain arrogance to think that there isn't life on a par with earth, or to expect that we could understand another lfe, which might be far more sophisticated than ours?

This is similar to the way I like to think about life - many different forms, some of which we could easily overlook as being lifeless or not even register as existing. Some of the SF has explored these weirder forms - existing on a purely mental level, as an example. Or gaseous or intelligent electromagnetic photon based beings from some slightly off-kilter phase shifted plane of existence.

Yeah, that's right - it's Monday morning and I've already blazed one...

We've only got a handful of million years before the sun explodes, so you'd all better start thinking positively about moving house.

Life out there, probably / highly likely.

Chances of contacting or getting evidence of intelligent alien life within the lifetime of the human race - virtually zero.

The number of planets in the universe is estimated to be vast, but only a fraction of those are likely to be in a habitable zone and even then just being in the right place doesn't mean they have the conditions and water, plus such planets also need to have a fluke of an iron core that rotates in the right manner to generate a magnetic field that protects the planet from harmful radiation. Getting water and the right stuff to 'spark' life may require an impact from a comet or something (so the theory goes for life on Earth).

Still, statistically out of trillions of trillions of planets there's a chance of a good fair few meeting the conditions, maybe even millions. They'll all be way beyond our reach.

But then there's time also. We exist in a tiny spec on the timeline of the history of the universe and will likely die out in a million years or less, which is not very much time in the total scale of things. Other planets with intelligent life may have had that life been and gone, or they are not due to exist for millions of years yet. Besides that, if these places are millions, billions of light years away, that life could exist now but we wouldn't know about it until the human race is extinct in a million or so years.

Then there's the question of chance of intelligent life actually making it beyond stone age intelligence and technology, enough to start exploring space and sending signals out there, and what chance is there that they'd even go down the same technical route as us?

We will never know anyway. I see it as slim chance I'll ever get to see a person land on Mars before I die and I'm in my 40s. The intention is there but it's a massive undertaking. Way more involved and dangerous than sending someone to the moon (and some would have you believe that never happened anyway).

Life in Mars? Great song. I'd be shocked if there ever has been.

Curious, why "shocked"?

NASA certainly still seem to think that it is possible, the current Mars Exploration Program is based around "Seek Signs of Life":
http://mars.nasa.gov/programmissions/overview/

One interesting aspect of all this is, if we found life on Mars or another planet, even just primitive bacteria, how would the world react?
I'd like to think positively, but history suggests there would be a large number of deniers and people crying religious heresy. 🙁

they could travel at the speed of light we'll be extinct as a species long before we'd ever make first contact.

But what if they knew how to contract space?

I like the fermi paradox stuff, or rather all the explanations of it. But I think my favourite is the Iain Banks one- his sprawling contactophile space civilisation the Culture use Earth as the control group and just watch us with grim fascination. "We could stop all this" "But should we?"

I can't remember who else it was, maybe Poul Anderson, that suggested our whole assumption that we'd pick up radio comms etc was false- that basically radiation leakage and beacons and satellites with "here we are" aall make us look like noisy 8 year olds going PAY ATTENTION TO ME, and any responsible aliens will leave us alone til we shut the hell up and we're ready to act like proper evolved monkeys. And actually, since then this has been kind of foreshadowed in our changing attitudes to light pollution.

(one of the counters to that is that Nasty Aliens would see it as a lure but then if you have the capacity to cross interstellar space and earth-like planets are reasonably common, why would they bother invading a populated one? Even for a superpower it'd be a pain in the arse and a general waste of resources)

If the laws of nature are universal and Evolution through Natural Selection holds true on other worlds where life might be present then it doesn't naturally follow that you would end up with intelligent life.

Brainy Bald Apes is not the preferred end state of evolution on the Earth or anywhere else. You and I are not "more evolved" then a dog, a fish or a tree. Natural Selection is about an organism fitness to reproduce in its environment it cares no a jot about whether you are good at the Times crossword or not.

Life might be quite common, abundant even, but intelligent life is probably very rare indeed.

The trouble is though we only have one example of life and that's us. Despite the massive diversity of life on earth every organism - as far as we can tell has a common ancestor. Life happened once and then carried on unbroken to us and everything else living today

A sample of one makes comparisons pretty difficult. So if we can find ANY life in the Solar System even if its just [s]Nigel Farage[/s] microbial scum then potential that is another tree of life we can examine and compare to our own.

It would be the most significant scientific discovery of all time.

So is there life out there? I think we have about an evens chance of finding basic life in our solar system.

I think intelligent life though is probably very rare. Rare enough that discovering it (or it discovering us) is probably highly unlikely.

I'd love to be proved wrong though!

This always melts my brain

Voyager 1 is currently travelling just over 17 kilometers every second

In a year it'll travel 520 million kilometers

In about 40,000 years it'll come within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445

Based on its current speed, the means it would still be 15,140,000,000,000 kilometers away from that star

Nanoo nanoo, everyone.

Couldn't there be a species/planet that lives on liquid nitrogen or something?

Unlikely.

Water is a very strange and almost unique substance. Its molecules are polarised, with a positive and negative end. So it can dissolve lots and lots of things into ions which float around and can react with each other. It's much better at doing this than most other simple compounds. For life to begin you have to have the right ions making the right compounds, and water is considered essential for this to happen.

With regards carbon - it is likely that extra terrestrial life will be carbon based, because it has the right number of electrons and spaces in its configuration to allow covalent bonding with lots of other carbon atoms and other elements, meaning it's carbon that can create the complex molecules that can reproduce.

So any other life form will probably be carbon based and water drinking.

observable universe is about 13.5 billion years old, earth is about 4.5 billion, we're pretty new.

Careful with those numbers. At first the universe was too hot for anything to happen. Then hydrogen formed, and it took a really long time for enough hydrogen to coalesce into lumps big enough to make stars. But there is still only hydrogen in them. They are making all the other elements we now see inside them. So we have to wait for these stars to be born, burn out and die in supernovae to scatter the heavy elements through the galaxy to then coalesce into new star systems, this time with heavy elements in the clouds that can make rocky planets.

So to have life you need a second generation star. So we are probably one of the first.

There's always some ****er that come along and spoils it for everyone....

I've got loads more. I can demonstrate why it is likely that aliens would look pretty much like us.

Current theories suggest the universe may just go on forever expanding, the stars burn out, everything turns to dust and when entropy has done its work until it's just a universe of spread out particles stretching to infinity, never interacting with each other, with no end of time. Actual existence of stars, planets and life being a tiny blip at the start.

'heat death' - it'll be like a really long rainy afternoon in February...

I can demonstrate why it is likely that aliens would look pretty much like us.

You have my attention... 🙂

Brainy Bald Apes is not the preferred end state of evolution on the Earth or anywhere else. You and I are not "more evolved" then a dog, a fish or a tree. Natural Selection is about an organism fitness to reproduce in its environment it cares no a jot about whether you are good at the Times crossword or not.

Yeah, they may not look like us. But the braininess would surely be the dominant feature

Life out there, probably / highly likely.

Chances of contacting or getting evidence of intelligent alien life within the lifetime of the human race - virtually zero.

+1
I said on a thread a while ago I thought life could be discovered on Europa or something in my lifetime (I'm 46) and I'm sticking by that.

Yeah, they may not look like us. But the braininess would surely be the dominant feature

On Fermi and Drake - I follow the zoo hypothesis. there is plenty of intelligent life out there but they are hiding from us and watching us until we show we are good enough / clever enough to join the intergalactic community.

Or on a more sensible point - given the infinite number of stars there must be intelligent life out there - but all civilisations are so far apart that the energy costs of communicating are too high to do so and the time lag is too great.

So imagine you are a cell, floating about in a primordial soup. Then you become a bunch of cells, and those cells specialise so you have propulsion and digestion. If you have a gut, then you have a mouth, so then you have a front and a back. If you have a front and a back, then given that you already ahve a top and a bottom thanks to gravity, you then have a left and right too. Your front is where your eyes and nose need to be, so that's where the brain ends up evolving because you use your eyes and nose to find food which is what you are interested in - so it's the front by definition cos you'll be moving that way.

Makes sense for your gut to go down the middle so you can get nutrients to all parts of your body, so then you have bilateral symmetry because why would you have three flippery things on one side and two on the other? Now when you crawl out on to the land you're going to evolve legs, and have the same number down each side. It's simpler and more energy efficient to evolve the fewest number of anything you can get away with. You might've evolved an exoskeleton instead of an itnernal one, but that's going to be less flexible so you might need six legs, but if you've evolved an internal skeleton you are flexible enough to get away with four, so you've got four legged beasts with the head at the front and the arse at the other end - cos you don't want to poo in front of you, do you?

Then when you start to get clever and need to manipulate things, so you figure out how to stand on the back two because you need the two nearest your eyes to do stuff. Your tail gets in the way, so it's gone, and your head is now at the top as you are standing up, and you have two arms and two legs. Bingo.

So I reckon aliens will either be insectoid or humanoid.

Mrs M met the "girl with the mousy hair" last year. One or both of them might have been spaced at the time.

...So I reckon aliens will either be insectoid or humanoid...

if we're talking about 'intelligent' aliens, then it's reasonably safe to assume that they'll have gone through an evolutionary stage of using hand tools, and building things, so they'll have hands, so probably not insects...