Posted on 11/15/2005 6:45:01 PM PST by KevinDavis
Ever wondered how life began and whether there is life on other planets? You're not alone, but the curiosity rarely turns into a career.
The UW astrobiology program gives hope to would-be professional stargazers. Astrobiology -- the study of life in the universe -- looks for scientific answers to questions like "How did life begin on this planet?" and "Are we alone in the universe?" The field builds on knowledge across several disciplines.
UW biology professor Peter Ward and UW astronomy professor Donald Brownlee believe discovering intelligent aliens on other planets is unlikely. In Rare Earth, a book the two co-authored, they say the conditions needed for complex life are so narrow that microbial life may be common, but complicated life in the universe is likely rare.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedaily.washington.edu ...
Neither can the Pythagorean Theorem, and neither claims to.
You must have a comment, Mr Triple Gaussian Shift.
Agreed.
But I have yet to see where it conflicts with the Bibles view of people.
Bit o' the non sequitur there...
But....what are the statistical probabilities that in just five billion years inert elements could spontaniously come to very simple life and by random mutation in a precise sequence evolve into the unbelieveably complex organism which is a human being. Not only do these precise mutations have to occur but they have to survive and reporduce. Since the world is a harsh place it is reasonable to presume that these incredbily precise mutations often have to occur several times before they survive and reproduce in sufficient numbers to further the evolutionary chain. Not only that, but much of whatever progress the evolutionary process had achieved was destroyed about halfway in the earth's life by the comet which wiped out the dinosaurs. I have read where the probability of this occuring is also 10 to the 200 or 300th power. I'm no statistician but that figure sounds immenently believable to me.
Rare Earth:
Why Complex Life is Uncommon
in the Universe
by Peter Douglas Ward
and Donald Brownlee
You earthlings are fools. MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
The Life and Death of Planet Earth:
How the New Science of Astrobiology
Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World
by Peter Douglas Ward
and Donald Brownlee
a related(and possible pingworthy) topic:
Welsh university offers extraterrestrial degree
AFP/Yahoo | Wed Sep 28,12:27 PM ET
Posted on 09/29/2005 8:20:03 AM PDT by martin_fierro
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1493546/posts
"Intelligent" Life.. Not stated in the headline.. Just "life"..
Big Difference..
While Intelligent Life may be very difficult to find, life may not be...
In fact, the simpler the life form, the easier to find..
As complexity rises, so will the rarity of such discovery..
As for suitable environments for life, there may very well be a number of such, each with it's own range of life conditions..
A crystalline life form may be possible, but only in a limited environmental range dictated by say, liquid hydrocarbons, like methane... and only within those temperature ranges where methane exists as a liquid..
Likewise, a more earth-freindly liquid water environment might encourage life, but due to high gravity and lack of land mass, the life may be aquatic, and surviving under extremely high atmospheric pressures, and under visual conditions that would mean nothing to human explorers..
Vision as we employ it may be a totally "alien" concept, with something akin to sonar being far more suitable..
Whether we would even be able to contact such life and have any sort of meaningful intercourse (dialogue) is questionable..
How does one converse with a being that uses none of our conventional means of communication??
Or a being that lives in an environment that requires a completely different set of rules for such concepts as engineering, community, authority, religion, morality?
Do they even have concepts or sciences that parrallel ours?
As it were, the philosophical discussions would be fascinating, to say the least..
There is almost certainly no other life elsewhere in the universe. .... The aliens ought to be everywhere unless we are arrogant enough to believe we are the first life form created.
It sounds like you (arrogantly?) believe we are the first life form created. I'm not so sure about that for a number of reasons:
1. The universe is an awfully big place.
2. Not all life may be intelligent or sufficiently motivated to be technically advanced. There may be only a few civilizations.
3. Faster than light travel may really not be possible, slowing the advance of any race..
4. Civilizatios may die for all kinds of reasons (social, cosmic, self-destruction). I think the jury is still out on the human race.
5. Advanced civilizations may quickly evolve into another form (see my earlier post).
6. They know we're here, but they want to let us develop without interference. Not sure I buy this one, however, any race advanced enough for interstellar travel probably doesn't need whatever meager resources Earth has.
7. Maybe they have been here, we just don't know it yet. Lots of Sci-Fi & psuedo sci-fi books sugest that Aliens had something to do with human evolution.
>>>>Evolution cannot explain the creation of life
>>Neither can the Pythagorean Theorem, and neither claims to.
I never said it did.
>>>Either these two guys truly believe their theory...or they are some of the stupidest academics to come down the pike.<<<
Prove them wrong and maybe you can sell a few books.
There's just too much we don't know about this sort of thing to make statements like that. I suspect that fifty years ago, most biologists would have confidently predicted that no complex animal life could exist next to a magma vent on the sea floor.
The book is full of insights that have been made possible only in the past 100 years. One of them has to do with the cycle of the ice ages; the fact that much of the history of this planet has been one of inhospitable ice. Civilization has arisen during what appears to be a brief interregnum of worldwide ice ages, pockmarked by other catastrophes that very nearly destroyed all mankind before they could gain a toehold. Geneticists have proved that all men and women are descendants of a handful of survivors that very nearly were killed off when some disaster, likely the eruption of a super volcano, occurred just several hundred centuries ago. The balance of hard forces and fickle fortuities that have enabled highly intelligent life to arise and flourish during this eyeblink in time has been so exquisitely precise that it beggars imagination.
It is an excellent read. I commend it to you.
Of course, the dinosaurs' progress was abruptly halted 65 million years ago. Yet their surviving lineage (class Aves) today has demonstrated tool-using behavior, and certain species demonstrate a remarkable language ability, learning hundreds of words and even showing evidence of understanding the meaning of some words.
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