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That's funny. Tag Ross talking about aliens.
I'm sure life exists elsewhere in the universe. From the size of the universe it is quite likely. However it is unlikely that alien life has sentience, intelligence, cooperation skills and resources to contact earth. Especially when you consider how many stars and planets are out there. Well who knows, I think that maybe one day the earth could be visited by alien jellyfish or something that might immediately die from difference in pressure and atmospheric conditions.
Almost certainly; there are more habitable planets in our galaxy than there are people on Earth, and almost ten times more galaxies in the (observable) universe than there are habitable planets in the Milky Way, so... somewhere in the neighborhood of one quintillion habitable planets in the observable universe, if we assume that the Milky Way has an average number of them.
Almost certainly not.
That's a toss-up, and is more a question about humans than aliens.
No, despite how the people running any given country seem to live in an entirely different fucking world.
Probably friendly. A civilization surviving long enough to develop space travel would indicate that it's probably not chock-full of violent fuckups.
They would have to be anaerobic, able to survive without any pressure except for gravitational and radiation pressure, and be able to withstand incredible cold coupled with an immense amount of radiation - all at the same time. This seems unlikely.
It's really difficult to say anything about aliens because there's so much we don't know. We assume they'll be just like us, mentally and physically. They might not even be matter-based in the way we think of it; they could be made of quarks instead of atoms, or something completely different that we don't know about. Hell, we may have already encountered them without even knowing.
If Darwin was right, then I think the most likely form of life in the universe would either be amoral individualist beings, or hiveminds. I think it's actually very rare to have beings like us. Even rarer to have any degree of intelligence. In fact, I think the most likely form of life in space would be something that evolved in space. Something like a Waterbear.
If Darwin was right, then I think the most likely form of life in the universe would either be amoral individualist beings, or hiveminds. I think it's actually very rare to have beings like us. Even rarer to have any degree of intelligence. In fact, I think the most likely form of life in space would be something that evolved in space. Something like a Waterbear.
what the fuck are you talking about, that doesn't make any goddamn sense
For real though, physically speaking it's pretty fair to assume they're made of fucking baryonic matter.
Why would being amoral and individualistic make an organism better able to survive? Literally all of the best things that humans have ever done are a result of going "you know, working together and agreeing not to be shitty does a lot for us", and acting on that.
I can't argue with you if your only argument amounts to "Nuh-uh!"
I wasn't even trying to argue. You'll notice that I used the word "could" not as one of those weasel words, but just to bullshit about what might be. You have this really weird habit of taking everything I say as some kind of personal affront. The only times where you say "nah, that's probably not true" instead of "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING IDIOT" are when I liked one of your posts just before. You should remind me to do that next time, or maybe I should just go through and like all your posts like Ibix did for Polly.
That isn't what I meant. If you read past the one part that you quoted, I said that life like human beings would be rarer, not that our nature is inferior. I think it's very miraculous that we have what we have, and I don't think it is all that likely to evolve. We've had non-hivemind life say "let's work together" for a very short time, but amoral individualism has been the standard for millions of years.
Although, now that I think about it, I was wrong. That's actually not true, because almost all life seems to work together. You have herds, wolf packs, flocks etcetera in the animal kingdom, and god knows how many kinds of bacteria colonies or mycelial networks. Hell, sexual reproduction wouldn't even be an option without cooperation.
So thank you, Tirin. Thank you for helping me get closer to the truth. You are truly a kind person.
I laughed more than I should at that. I don't know why but I suppose it's because this is one of the last places I expected to see that old Katawa Shoujo meme. I should replay that VN sometime when I don't have a backlog of things to do. So aliens, yeah. They probably exist. Unlikely we will get contacted by them in this lifetime, and even if they do contact us, there is little chance we would be able to communicate in any way.
If you're gonna go "Fuck it, ANYTHING could happen!" as the premise of your post, don't be a bitch when it gets shut down. If you want a more in-depth argument, here's one:
What the hell do you mean by "made of quarks instead of atoms"? Because if that refers to them being composed of quarks lumped together, then either they are made of atoms - quarks, after all, being subcomponents of atoms - or these quark arrangements would be way, way, way too unstable to hope to exist for longer than even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, let alone long enough for life to develop unless it occurred entirely through good fortune within that near-infinitely tiny window of time. If you're gonna get all speculative, it helps to have a speculation more credible than "one day, electromagnetic waves could just turn into different colors of marshmallows and rain from the heavens (and also everywhere)".
Either way, I'm not gonna give you some half-baked "that's probably wrong" because you don't want to feel bad, when your starting point doesn't make any sense at all within the bounds of any scientific advancement humans have ever made.
Checkmate, atheists.
Normally I don't correct things like this but this mistake is so common.
nunally >>>>>>> lilly
If aliens find us, they might consider us animals and not care about our lives / kill us all in the process of mining/civilizing/etc. our planet(s). That's the main thing that scares me about aliens. I personally think humans often undervalue the lives and intellectual/emotional capabilities of animals because they're radically different from us, so same could potentially happen to us (or we might do the same to aliens if we find them).
But maybe Walrus that is the way of things. The strong dominate the weak, the cunning trick the dull, and superior being act like superior beings. So yes humans look down on animals the same way that I'm sure aliens will look down on us. Which is why I hope dearly that we do not meet any aliens until we can at least master space flight because holy fuck will we look like backwoods inbred retards compared to any species that can traverse space with relative ease.
I've gotta say, it seems pretty silly to think that spacefaring aliens would, after observing us carefully, assume we're roughly on the intellectual level of animals. Unless they constantly erase their history or something, which seems pretty totally irrational, I think it's fair to assume that they'll be able to compare us to something in their own history. I mean, if humans travelled to a planet and saw aliens building pyramids or something, we wouldn't assume that they're non-sapient, just that they're stupid compared to us - but that would probably just mean they got their start a few thousand years late.
If they developed in a way that gave them spacefaring technology, odds are they got electricity somewhere. It seems like a pretty basic thing to look at some alien race producing and controlling the flow of electricity across hundreds of miles and go "Yeah, probably sapient", and I don't know why you would expect any spacefaring species not to consider the possibility of intelligent extraplanetary life.