I have to agree with the professor that it is unlikely that there is sentient life out there. On the extremely rare occasion that we find life it will most likely be single cell organisms.
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We haven't yet risen up out of our ‘likely to nuke ourselves into oblivion any day now’ stage, and may well never reach the ‘the stars are our playground’ stage.
Heck, if the physics don't work out correctly there really isn't a ‘the stars are our playground’ stage.
Imagine also there may be a cosmic ‘booby trap’ waiting in Physics - you are the fist person in your intelligent tool using culture to discover the ‘Ygzog’ principle - unfortunately discovery of this principle released enough energy to reduce your planet to a cinder. Ooops.
Hmmmmmmm.....
Depends on what one means by LIFE.
Look up in the sky on a clear night. Every point of light you see is LIFE. Stars are the source of life. Without them, NO LIFE.
If one wants proof, then imagine what would happen to every form of life on Earth if the SUN were to go cold and dark.
Perhaps the ‘design’ of the Universe is on such a large scale to keep one TYPE of LIFE from encountering another. It is likely, given the huge differences in the FORM, that all we would do is try to destroy each other.
Whomever ‘designed’ the Universe was a pretty smart ‘chap’, and must have known EVERYTHING at the beginning.
I forgot who said it, but the gist was “Either we are alone, or we are not. Either way, it’s pretty amazing”
I don’t get this. Have scientists proven how life began? I think if they have we would not be speculating if there could be life on other planets. Just because a planet has the building blocks of life doesn’t explain how they’ve assembled themselves into life.
I mean if that we the case, wouldn’t houses and computers build themselves if their pieces were scattered about?
Yeah, I thought not.
Things developed the way they did here because of the resources that were available here and the conditions that existed during the ages.
Ample supplies of both water and land, average temp stable enough that the entire planet does not turn into a glacier or a desert, availability of chemicals (i.e. we live on Oxygen but our atmosphere is more than 70% Nitrogen), a moon which controls the tides in a reasonably orderly fashion.
Just because a planet exists which is approximately 93,000,000 miles from a sun like ours does not mean life must exist there. Those are only the first of many, many requirements for life to grow. If you believe in evolution, these were the things that, over millions and billions of years, enabled life to take hold and not die off.
Odds say there is sentient life somewhere else in the universe. Whole civilizaitons could have grown and died off over the billions of years of the universe. Odds also say any such life is so far away from us that we may never find them.
Looking for an Earth sized planet around a Sol sized sun is a good start but it’s no guarantee of success.
Much speculation has been bandied about over the conditions necessary for life to arise. If no one knows what those conditions are then no one can say whether conditions somewhere else are suitable for life to begin.
It’s one thing to study an engine that is already running and quite another to figure how to build and start it up.
Well, first we have to find life elsewhere. Otherwise, this is just an interesting discussion.
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Evolution doesn’t lead to complex life forms: evolution leads to well-adapted life forms.First off, I am not sure it means anything. It is simply redefining "evolution" as "adaptation".
Living things adapt to the varying dynamics of external and internal drivers within an ecological system. Just as a designer evolves his designs as the system and it's purpose and needs are understood, as the practical realities impacting the designed thing are discovered, living things also evolve within their wide-abilities as built in by their Creator. And sometimes, rarely, our Creator, the Everpresent, reaches right in and modifies the designed artifact. At all times the design reflects the intent and creations of the Designer.