Does anyone seriously believe there is not intelligent life...

[Andrew Karpinski]

Does anyone seriously believe there is not intelligent life on other planets? Out yourselves!

[hmkpoker]

*requisite "there's no intelligent life on THIS planet" joke*

[Stu Pidasso]

[ QUOTE ]
Does anyone seriously believe there is not intelligent life on other planets? Out yourselves!

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I wouldn't go so far as to say I believe there is no other intelligent life out there....lets just say I would not be "floored" if it were some how discovered there wasn't.

Stu

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

I'm still not 100% sure there's intelligent life on earth. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[RJT]

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I'm still not 100% sure there's intelligent life on earth. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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Exactly what I was gonna say.

[tomdemaine]

God made man in his image to rule his kingdom on earth. Why would he bother with other life forms?

[CallMeIshmael]

[ QUOTE ]
Does anyone seriously believe there is not intelligent life on other planets? Out yourselves!

[/ QUOTE ]



To be honest, I havent put enough thought into it to really have a solid opinion.

The arugment "the universe is big, and we know intelligent life got there once (lets just assume we're intelligent) so it must have happened elsewhere" sounds nice, but in fact it might be kind of lazy.


Now, lets use an example to illustrate my point courtesy of my man jason_t.


Lets take a shakesperean sonnet. Say it has 600 characters. Lets assume we have a monkey and a typewriter. This type writer has 28 characters, 26 letters a space and a line return. Lets assume we have the monkey type up a 600 character block, and if he got that sonnet we picked, he's done. Otherwise he trys again. Well, there are 28^600 different 600 character length blocks of of text.

28^600 ~ 27^600 = (3^3)^600 = 3^1800 = (3^2)^900 ~ 10^900.

If we assume our monkey can type 100 characters a minute, it means he takes 6 minutes per "sonnet." This means 10 an hour, 240 a day and 87600 a year. Lets just assume 87600 ~ 10^5. So, this monkey makes 10^5 blocks per year. This means that each monkey takes on average 10^895 years to give us the sonnet we want. Now, there are 10^80 electrons in the universe. So, lets give the monkeys the benefit of the doubt, and assume that there are 10^80 monkeys. That means there are 10^85 character blocks created each year.
With that many blocks per year, we can expect to wait about 10^815 years before one of our electron-monkeys gives us our sonnet.

10^815 / (20 billion years, the large estimate of universe age) = 5*10^813.


Now Im aware this is a flawed analogy, in that evoltuion has feedback where this doesnt.

But, I think its great at illustrating that even when working in ABSURDLY huge space (10^80 monkey-electrons) certain events with a non-0 probability can still have an essentially 0 probability of occuring.



Basically, I think the argument "big univserse, we know intelligent life can develop, therefore it has to have developed many times" is lazy, since it assumes that the relation between the probability of intelligent life developing and the size of the universe is setup so that its true, if you see what I mean.

Estimating the probability of intelligent life evolving seems rather difficult to do, given that we cant really say what conditions are necessary for intelligent life to evolve.

[aeest400]

So your reply to the "lazy" argument is that if intelligent life is really, really, really, really improbable, then it might not exist elsewhere? (The universe is pretty big--in fact, it's everything, and there is more everything there than most folks realize--though, unfortunately, less than some believe). So far we're about 1/9 for planets we are aware of in terms of intelligent life. That's not a bad start for an inductive argument. Also, Stanley Miller's primordial soup chem experiments showed that it's not likely that hard to get the evolutionary ball rolling. Based on this, I'd say it is about 1000x more likely that intelligent life exists than god does. [Ok, the last sentence is just for fun--I'm probably underestimating the prob. of other intelligent life in relation to the probability of god existing].

[Andrew Karpinski]

Let's look at how big the universe really is. I think it is a relatively safe assumption, given current astronomical knowledge, that the milky way has around one hundred billion stars. In my opinion this is an overly cautious estimate. We have discovered over 100 planets out of our solar system already, so while we do not have any idea what % of these stars have planets around them, or really any idea how many of these stars have the possibility of sustaining life, I think that it's pretty safe to say atleast one out of a thousand of these stars have planets around them (and in my opinion it is much, much higher). This leaves one hundred million stars with planets in our galaxy alone. And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Now, while not every planet is capable of sustaining life (surely our solar system proves that), we should note how hardy life is on Earth. It is found on the ocean floors, in harsh deserts and unforgiving anartica. If even one in a million of these planets can sustain life, that still leaves us with one hundred planets sustaining life in our galaxy. And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Now, in my opinion, this is far too pessimistic. I think it is much more likely that the universe and our galaxy is teeming with life. But I think it absolutely absurd that intelligent life doesn't exist elsewhere.

[allisfulloflove]

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I'd say it is about 1000x more likely that intelligent life exists than god does. [Ok, the last sentence is just for fun--I'm probably underestimating the prob. of other intelligent life in relation to the probability of god existing].

[/ QUOTE ]

"God" can mean a lot of different things, and by some definitions, god does exist. If you're referring to the traditional Christian "god," then it is infinitely more likely that intelligent life exists elsewhere than "god" does.