Is there life elsewhere in the Universe??

Forums › Off topic › Is there life elsewhere in the Universe??

1 | ... | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | ... | 16

376 posts

Ultimate Geek

#996464 28-Feb-2014 15:16

bazzer:
KiwiTim: However, the problem starts when you go back to the point of origin; the first self-replicating cell. Any biologist will tell you that there is a huge amount of molecular machinery working in concert involved in self-replication. Without the ability to self-replicate there can be no natural selection, there can be no evolution. The ability to self-replicate had to be there at the start. That the complex molecular machinery required for self-replication could form 'de novo' by chance occurrence is a probability, but in real terms the size of this probability is quite absurd, and of little value in the real world ( a larger probability might be that there is a planet in the universe with seas of lemonade and continents made of toffee; we all know this is quite absurd) . So we are left with a big question mark. Did this first self-replicating cell form by some natural process that we currently know nothing of, or did something with intelligence make it? Since modern humans are yet to create life in the lab via random processes ( Craig Venter has reconstructed life, but he used information from living organisms and human intelligence to do it ), it is highly unlikely that life started spontaneously without some kind of directing intelligence (this is quite uncomfortable for some human ears, but from what we can see of this world it is more probable than life forming 'de novo').

This argument is a fallacy. Just if the probability of an event occurring is zero that does not mean that event can not or will not occur. When we're talking about the (infinite or near enough?) universe, it almost certainly would happen.

There probably is a planet with seas of lemonade and continents of toffee. Why is that so absurd?

Using that logic, then you must concede that somewhere in the universe there must be a planet where life was started by an intelligent agent; the universe is infinite so all things are possible (lemonade seas and toffee based land forms), including multiple intelligent agents starting life on some planet like ours. We get absolutely no where using this kind of logic.

We need to focus on what we know from chemistry and biology, and build our theories from there.

bazzer

3438 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#996466 28-Feb-2014 15:18

Klipspringer:
KiwiNZ: Until we have all the answers there is no room for mocking or disdain that Dawkins is said to show. When and only when the answers are indisputable that debate can be closed but ridicule denied. True science should allow
all theories and all thought until that time, if not, then we would not have Darwins, Galileos, Einsteins thoughts and theories.

Speaking about thought ...

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."

Thats a quote from CJ Lewis, the author of Chronicles of Nadia. A has been atheist. :-)

CJ Lewis? Or CS Lewis?

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#996474 28-Feb-2014 15:23

KiwiNZ: Until we have all the answers there is no room for mocking or disdain that Dawkins is said to show. When and only when the answers are indisputable that debate can be closed but ridicule denied. True science should allow
all theories and all thought until that time, if not, then we would not have Darwins, Galileos, Einsteins thoughts and theories.

"Mocking or disdain" is an attribution given by someone who had a sacred cow shot.
He managed to express his disagreement, vehemently and in public, with noted evolutionists, yet not be subject to such accusation, and to remain friends.
It's almost impossible to criticize theistic ideology in any scientific discussion without being accused of "mocking or disdain".
A "God" hypothesis based on no evidence at all, and with no probability of there ever being any evidence to support it, should probably best be ignored.
But as I said before, these beliefs almost always come with an agenda, that agenda is almost always historically resulting in "reason" to suppress the freedom of others, and quite frankly, a bit of mocking and disdain pales into insignificance compared to those evils. Good on him I say.
I have an agenda too - I'm very thankful to be living in one of the most secular states on earth, and to enjoy the huge privileges afforded by the freedoms imparted by the almost complete ousting of god-bothering authoritarian religious organisations from government. There's still a way to go - but I'm hopeful we'll get there.

Klipspringer

2385 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#996475 28-Feb-2014 15:24

KiwiNZ: What stops many from accepting there maybe life out there in infinity and beyond?

The belief that we are still the centre of the universe.

I'm all for believing that the possibility exists. But I like evidence before I just take on the "follow the heard" mentality.

As for this thread. The possibilty exists that there could be other life in the universe. But where we are in this space of time, the answer is inconclusive. You cant prove a negative. You can't proove that something does NOT exist. Its like trying to proove that there are no ants in your backyard, you can however prove that there are some. The answer is therefore inconclusive until its been proven different. Until then though, there can be no correct, incorrect comments, opinions or theories abnout it.

Just like the earth was flat theory.

bazzer

3438 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#996476 28-Feb-2014 15:24

KiwiTim:
bazzer:
KiwiTim: However, the problem starts when you go back to the point of origin; the first self-replicating cell. Any biologist will tell you that there is a huge amount of molecular machinery working in concert involved in self-replication. Without the ability to self-replicate there can be no natural selection, there can be no evolution. The ability to self-replicate had to be there at the start. That the complex molecular machinery required for self-replication could form 'de novo' by chance occurrence is a probability, but in real terms the size of this probability is quite absurd, and of little value in the real world ( a larger probability might be that there is a planet in the universe with seas of lemonade and continents made of toffee; we all know this is quite absurd) . So we are left with a big question mark. Did this first self-replicating cell form by some natural process that we currently know nothing of, or did something with intelligence make it? Since modern humans are yet to create life in the lab via random processes ( Craig Venter has reconstructed life, but he used information from living organisms and human intelligence to do it ), it is highly unlikely that life started spontaneously without some kind of directing intelligence (this is quite uncomfortable for some human ears, but from what we can see of this world it is more probable than life forming 'de novo').

This argument is a fallacy. Just if the probability of an event occurring is zero that does not mean that event can not or will not occur. When we're talking about the (infinite or near enough?) universe, it almost certainly would happen.

There probably is a planet with seas of lemonade and continents of toffee. Why is that so absurd?

Using that logic, then you must concede that somewhere in the universe there must be a planet where life was started by an intelligent agent; the universe is infinite so all things are possible (lemonade seas and toffee based land forms), including multiple intelligent agents starting life on some planet like ours. We get absolutely no where using this kind of logic.

We need to focus on what we know from chemistry and biology, and build our theories from there.

Definitely, in the same way as scientists here try to create life in their labs. Of course somewhere there's a planet where life was started by another agent, that's obvious. Is it our planet? Is it our God? The probably of that is 0, but it could still be us. There's no way for me to know that for sure, but I don't mind.

Klipspringer

2385 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#996477 28-Feb-2014 15:24

bazzer:

CJ Lewis? Or CS Lewis?

CS, thanks for the correction.

Edit: CJ was a reggae singer LOL

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#996480 28-Feb-2014 15:28

KiwiTim:
bazzer:
KiwiTim: However, the problem starts when you go back to the point of origin; the first self-replicating cell. Any biologist will tell you that there is a huge amount of molecular machinery working in concert involved in self-replication. Without the ability to self-replicate there can be no natural selection, there can be no evolution. The ability to self-replicate had to be there at the start. That the complex molecular machinery required for self-replication could form 'de novo' by chance occurrence is a probability, but in real terms the size of this probability is quite absurd, and of little value in the real world ( a larger probability might be that there is a planet in the universe with seas of lemonade and continents made of toffee; we all know this is quite absurd) . So we are left with a big question mark. Did this first self-replicating cell form by some natural process that we currently know nothing of, or did something with intelligence make it? Since modern humans are yet to create life in the lab via random processes ( Craig Venter has reconstructed life, but he used information from living organisms and human intelligence to do it ), it is highly unlikely that life started spontaneously without some kind of directing intelligence (this is quite uncomfortable for some human ears, but from what we can see of this world it is more probable than life forming 'de novo').

This argument is a fallacy. Just if the probability of an event occurring is zero that does not mean that event can not or will not occur. When we're talking about the (infinite or near enough?) universe, it almost certainly would happen.

There probably is a planet with seas of lemonade and continents of toffee. Why is that so absurd?

Using that logic, then you must concede that somewhere in the universe there must be a planet where life was started by an intelligent agent; the universe is infinite so all things are possible (lemonade seas and toffee based land forms), including multiple intelligent agents starting life on some planet like ours. We get absolutely no where using this kind of logic.

We need to focus on what we know from chemistry and biology, and build our theories from there.

Yes. Inanimate pre life substances are Carbon based. Biological substances are also carbon based. Water, heat, electricity, methane, etc, chemical reactions to create carbon substances that are biologcal are just that, chemical reactions. Primordial Soup. I subscribe to that hypothesis. Its science, and I don';t buy the hypothesis that a life subtances just happened. Nothing just happens, however I qualify that by the science that exists that we dont know of.

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

MikeB4

18435 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

#996483 28-Feb-2014 15:38

I do not hold with the God theory.

I am unconvinced as to Big Bang Theory but there is compelling evidence.

As for life in some form elsewhere? yes, logic and maths would say yes. If it happened here it why not else where, we just may not recognise it. The life that exist here developed and evolved given the unique set of circumstances that exist on this planet. There are life forms on Earth that live in acid, in very cold and hot conditions, in next to zero light and under extreme pressures, yet it developed. Now on another world the circumstance may be very different and the life forms there maybe so alien and outside our known parameters that we would not recognise it as life.

MikeB4

18435 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

#996486 28-Feb-2014 15:41

tdgeek:
KiwiTim:
bazzer:
KiwiTim: However, the problem starts when you go back to the point of origin; the first self-replicating cell. Any biologist will tell you that there is a huge amount of molecular machinery working in concert involved in self-replication. Without the ability to self-replicate there can be no natural selection, there can be no evolution. The ability to self-replicate had to be there at the start. That the complex molecular machinery required for self-replication could form 'de novo' by chance occurrence is a probability, but in real terms the size of this probability is quite absurd, and of little value in the real world ( a larger probability might be that there is a planet in the universe with seas of lemonade and continents made of toffee; we all know this is quite absurd) . So we are left with a big question mark. Did this first self-replicating cell form by some natural process that we currently know nothing of, or did something with intelligence make it? Since modern humans are yet to create life in the lab via random processes ( Craig Venter has reconstructed life, but he used information from living organisms and human intelligence to do it ), it is highly unlikely that life started spontaneously without some kind of directing intelligence (this is quite uncomfortable for some human ears, but from what we can see of this world it is more probable than life forming 'de novo').

This argument is a fallacy. Just if the probability of an event occurring is zero that does not mean that event can not or will not occur. When we're talking about the (infinite or near enough?) universe, it almost certainly would happen.

There probably is a planet with seas of lemonade and continents of toffee. Why is that so absurd?

Using that logic, then you must concede that somewhere in the universe there must be a planet where life was started by an intelligent agent; the universe is infinite so all things are possible (lemonade seas and toffee based land forms), including multiple intelligent agents starting life on some planet like ours. We get absolutely no where using this kind of logic.

We need to focus on what we know from chemistry and biology, and build our theories from there.

Yes. Inanimate pre life substances are Carbon based. Biological substances are also carbon based. Water, heat, electricity, methane, etc, chemical reactions to create carbon substances that are biologcal are just that, chemical reactions. Primordial Soup. I subscribe to that hypothesis. Its science, and I don';t buy the hypothesis that a life subtances just happened. Nothing just happens, however I qualify that by the science that exists that we dont know of.

Nothing just happens, true. But the Universe is a giant petri dish in which chemical and energy reactions occur, so what happens has cause and an affect.

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#996492 28-Feb-2014 15:55

KiwiNZ:
tdgeek:
KiwiTim:
bazzer:
KiwiTim: However, the problem starts when you go back to the point of origin; the first self-replicating cell. Any biologist will tell you that there is a huge amount of molecular machinery working in concert involved in self-replication. Without the ability to self-replicate there can be no natural selection, there can be no evolution. The ability to self-replicate had to be there at the start. That the complex molecular machinery required for self-replication could form 'de novo' by chance occurrence is a probability, but in real terms the size of this probability is quite absurd, and of little value in the real world ( a larger probability might be that there is a planet in the universe with seas of lemonade and continents made of toffee; we all know this is quite absurd) . So we are left with a big question mark. Did this first self-replicating cell form by some natural process that we currently know nothing of, or did something with intelligence make it? Since modern humans are yet to create life in the lab via random processes ( Craig Venter has reconstructed life, but he used information from living organisms and human intelligence to do it ), it is highly unlikely that life started spontaneously without some kind of directing intelligence (this is quite uncomfortable for some human ears, but from what we can see of this world it is more probable than life forming 'de novo').

This argument is a fallacy. Just if the probability of an event occurring is zero that does not mean that event can not or will not occur. When we're talking about the (infinite or near enough?) universe, it almost certainly would happen.

There probably is a planet with seas of lemonade and continents of toffee. Why is that so absurd?

Using that logic, then you must concede that somewhere in the universe there must be a planet where life was started by an intelligent agent; the universe is infinite so all things are possible (lemonade seas and toffee based land forms), including multiple intelligent agents starting life on some planet like ours. We get absolutely no where using this kind of logic.

We need to focus on what we know from chemistry and biology, and build our theories from there.

Yes. Inanimate pre life substances are Carbon based. Biological substances are also carbon based. Water, heat, electricity, methane, etc, chemical reactions to create carbon substances that are biologcal are just that, chemical reactions. Primordial Soup. I subscribe to that hypothesis. Its science, and I don';t buy the hypothesis that a life subtances just happened. Nothing just happens, however I qualify that by the science that exists that we dont know of.

Nothing just happens, true. But the Universe is a giant petri dish in which chemical and energy reactions occur, so what happens has cause and an affect.

Are the laws of physics the same elsewhere in the Universe? I assume so, apart from new laws we have not discovered yet.

Is the rest of the universe made up of what our known sector is? I assume so as it all came from the Big Bang theory. There are not that many elements, they should exist everywhere, so I feel the criteria to create bilogical carbon based substances from a chemical reaction of existing elements and other factrors (water, electricity) should be the same as it was for Earth.

To me it comes down to what factors does Earth have, that a life supporting planet has? And whats the odds? Low I feel but we are here due to science and biology, and a number of factors met. It can happen elsewhere too, even to the point of sustaning like for millions of years to allow complex organisms, then what we term as intelligent life

JWR

821 posts

Ultimate Geek

#996498 28-Feb-2014 16:23

TwoSeven:
Klipspringer:
joker97:

No new matter can be formed

You wrong there. Matter is formed all the time. If this was not the case the universe would not be expanding.

No-one has proved that the universe is expanding, so you cannot base arguments based on the fact that it is. For the very same reason, no-one has proved that it isn't expanding - and likewise their arguments are not based on fact either.

It is an idea to think of these kind of arguments from both sides as both arguments have a equal merit. Likewise the reliance on light and time being related is also something that often gets challenged - people forget that time really is only relative to a local event - outside of that event horizon, time has a particularly different meaning.

That is not true.

Many observations, over the last century (or so), prove that the Universe is expanding.

The laws of Physics (as we know them) even predict that the Universe must be either expanding or contracting.

Newton could have predicted the expanding Universe. I guess he got caught up in the 10,000 year old Universe idea.

MikeB4

18435 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

#996499 28-Feb-2014 16:24

A problem we have is we only know the very distant past of the universe and a very small snap shot of it, we have no real idea of the present except in our little piece of it, and that is a very small number. So assumptions and calculations are done based on events billions of years ago and trying to fit them into our model. However the reality is the Universe may well be very different to what we now believe. So to look for life in other places in the present is looking back, way back in time. That gives so much scope for so much to be very wrong.

Athlonite

1828 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#996507 28-Feb-2014 16:36

Depends on what your looking for unintelligent single cell lifeforms would no doubt be abundant anywhere that could support life, Now intelligent life beside us (and I use the term intelligent Loosely here) may exist (statistically it should somewhere in the universe) but it may not be what we think it should look like or behave like

tdgeek

29746 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#996510 28-Feb-2014 16:38

Athlonite: Depends on what your looking for unintelligent single cell lifeforms would no doubt be abundant anywhere that could support life, Now intelligent life beside us (and I use the term intelligent Loosely here) may exist (statistically it should somewhere in the universe) but it may not be what we think it should look like or behave like

Yes. Time, lots of time

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#996547 28-Feb-2014 17:28

KiwiNZ: A problem we have is we only know the very distant past of the universe and a very small snap shot of it, we have no real idea of the present except in our little piece of it, and that is a very small number. So assumptions and calculations are done based on events billions of years ago and trying to fit them into our model. However the reality is the Universe may well be very different to what we now believe. So to look for life in other places in the present is looking back, way back in time. That gives so much scope for so much to be very wrong.

In terms of looking for evidence of life in other places, looking in our Milky Way galaxy would be a sensible place to start.
And it that case, despite the scale being immense - it's actually a pretty small spot in the universe. The galaxy is only 120,000 ly or so. 120,000 years is tiny fraction of the period of time that life has existed on Earth.
Within our galaxy there would appear to be over 10 billion candidate stars with "goldilocks zone" planetary systems.
Many are much closer than ~100,000 ly.
Remote sensing for evidence may be difficult - but look how far we've got in the past few decades.

1 | ... | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | ... | 16