[Closed] Is there life on Mars?

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...

All very clever Molgrips.
But how do you explain Birkenhead?

BoardinBob - Member
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

No, when we become a warp society the Vulcans will make contact & invite us to join the federation

The level of sci-fi geekery is sadly very low in this thread

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

Well.. insects on our world have exoskeletons, but also no blood, having tubes instead - and it's this that limits their development.

But you could have an exoskeleton and still have blood, couldn't you? In which case you could develop all the other thigns you need to get clever and end up with the front two legs manipulating things. Especially if you came from a planet with low gravity - the weight of a large exoskeleton wouldn't be a problem.

I suppose you could also have evolved from aquatic animals, and have your pectoral fins evolve into manipulators. So like a mermaid 🙂

But how do you explain Birkenhead?

This is explained at the very top of this page, in the first post

So imagine you are a cell, floating about in a primordial soup....

So I reckon aliens will either be insectoid or humanoid.

This is all well and good Molgrips and I wouldn't disagree with it, but the point is intelligent upright beings isn't a necessary consequence of evolution.

If the Chicxulub asteroid had been a near miss instead of a direct hit then its a near certainty that none of us would be here.

The Earth would have carried on as reptile heaven and we would have never descended from the trees (well in all likelyhood we would have never climbed into them in the first place)

BoardinBob - Member
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

Warp is moving space-time rather than moving in space. Travelling without moving (a rather good album, oh and there's that book / film of course 😉 ). So maybe wouldn't necessarily fly into something along the way.

So maybe wouldn't necessarily fly into something along the way.

Pfft! That's what the navigational deflector is for!

but the point is intelligent upright beings isn't a necessary consequence of evolution.

No, its not - but I'm saying that [i]if[/i] you are an intelligent spacefaring being you will probably look quite like us.

I follow your logic moley but I disagree. Having half a dozen tentacles would be better than two hands and one of the things with this imagining of aliens is that we cannot possibly know even all the questions to ask.

I want to meet puppeteers. I am a big SF geek and they are my favourite aliens - from the niven stories or perhaps the dwellers from Ian M Bank - dirgible gas giant intelligences

but tentacles don't really work out of water, and i'm prepared to bet £5 that any intelligent aliens we contact within my lifetime evolved from land animals.

(because i reckon use-of-fire will be an important developmental stage, and underwater fire is tricky at best)