Is there life elsewhere in the Universe??

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kiwirock

685 posts

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#1000464 7-Mar-2014 03:40

I think the original question of this thread is unanswerable, or I'd be lying if I tried.

It's quite easy to hazard a guess or try and validate one's own hopes towards what they'd like the answer to be either applying science or religion or any other observation.

But Einstein would know without visiting the whole universe it's impossible to answer yet correctly.

If there is, it wouldn't surprise me. But would we be aware of it if it was depending on what is visible and observable by our modern tools to us?

If there isn't, it wouldn't surprise me either. It would be an awful waste of space but then no other living creature would be wiped out if humans got anywhere near them and their resources :o)

If Darwin's theory of evolution is correct, I don't know if we'd want to find out, because we might be little fish for some big mouths hungry on another planet.

Who knows if the creation version is correct either, or what is and isn't omitted from scripture to humans. We don't live long enough to witness some of the real massive awes the universe has to offer. For all I know, Jesus might be what we call an alien not from some erry ferry mystical magical place, but from another planet that brought life to this one, beyond the expanse.

I could be wrong, but if I mixed up some sterile mass in a blender then blew it up, chance of it creating life I think are zero but that's my own observations, so far. I find most explosions wipe things out, not create. So far humans haven't been able to create a single living thing. Only clone copy or modify so it'd be hard to think it was intelligently created elsewhere.

And since life is only our own personal observation, what is life? As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The rest could simply be a dream we will wake up from one day after we croke. From the creationist point of view, if we're fallen or imperfect and never used to be, how would we know what we were?

But my own wishful thinking, I hope there's life elsewhere in the universe and much more intelligent than us so we have something more to learn from in the future. Could you imagine the real sh&t lag on the celestial-net!! Screw IPv1024.

kiwirock

685 posts

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#1000465 7-Mar-2014 03:58

joker97: Dude if you travel at light speed time stops completely. So you can go however far you want and not grow old and never have to pee or eat.

Perhaps even go back in time.

That's an interesting one.

Because for every action there's an opposite and equal reaction, if you believe Newton was correct.

So technically, you could be described as dead, not alive forever in that state. Peeing and eating were what I thought was part of the definition of being alive and animated where time is slow enough to observe all the changes of cells copying and changing.

So if we were all traveling at the speed of light, we'd probably still die in the same time frame not live forever.

Or life might not simply be possible at the speed of light, or where mass converts in to energy and vice verse. It would be like returning to pre-big-bang.

I don't know if that's even remotely possible, but it's my theory after the speed of light, things change. It's whether you believe it's possible that we missed something in our understanding of the universe. That there's yet still a lot we don't understand about the universe and perhaps the things we think are set in stone, are only our young understanding and observations of the things around us.

That's what makes me in awe of the universe. The unknown. I'd be bored if I knew it all.

TwoSeven

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#1000496 7-Mar-2014 08:14

On a slightly divergent subject - all of the particles in ones body have differing masses - so if one were to travel at the speed of light - not only would a bucket load of energy be required - but the different particles would have their own maximum velocities - I suspect one would be spread out over a very large area :)

Back on track(ish), I was watching that stargazing show on TV the other night - they indicated that they had identified over 1000 odd planets now and had a candidate list for live of about a dozen (I think). Also, a new satellite being built will allow them to calculate the weight of galaxies - which is quite a significant thing.

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Fred99

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#1000535 7-Mar-2014 09:23

JWR:
Fred99: Gravitational effect on light was predicted long before Einstein, and gravitational time dilation might not have otherwise been predicted, but could have been observed - if accurate enough clocks had existed. It's quite reasonable (IMO) to state that light is affected by gravity. Einstein tied this all together, and observation has proved him right.

I am certain that Einstein was the first to predict the way gravity and light affect each other. Also, Einstein was the first to predict that gravity affected time.

Perhaps, other people speculated.. I am not aware of that. But, they didn't predict.

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, made those predictions and is backed by experiment.

Translation of paper calculating defection of light by gravitational force, published in 1801 here. So, that light would be deflected by gravity was not observed, but predicted nonetheless.
It should have also been a logical conclusion that even under the corpuscular theory of light and Newtonian physics, that light itself should have exerted a gravitational force - but I don't know if that was suggested by anybody (I guess it probably was though).

So it's a moot point to claim that Einstein first predicted that gravity and light interact, because under Newtonian physics they were predicted to interact anyway, even if in not allowing for general relativity the calculations don't give an accurate result (which couldn't be tested at the time - if they had been able to be measured, then who knows - someone might have come up with a theory of general relativity before Einstein).

Discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury which couldn't be explained by Newtonian theories of gravity were also observed at least 100 years before Einstein, so you could say that (a direct effect of) general relativity was also "discovered" long before Einstein.

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#1012019 24-Mar-2014 19:04

NASA astronomer finds Earth-sized exoplanet in Goldilock zone of red dwarf star.

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