Is there life on Mars?

Or elsewhere beyond our little blue planet?

Now, the chances are, apparently, a million to one, but…..

I was staring at the stars the other night. Thousands of them visible to the naked eye, millions beyond my vision. Surely it’s foolish to assume that there isn’t life out there? Now, we take the assumption that life needs water, light, air etc, but what if all life needs is stability? Couldn’t there be a species/planet that lives on liquid nitrogen or something?

So, is there anything out there?

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

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… 🙄

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

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

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 Goblekli Tepe 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

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:

“The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”

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. 🙁