Monday, May 5, 2008

Is there life out there?

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I suppose the real question is, could the life that is out there reach us?

I am fairly certain that most people out there have some belief that in the infinity of space that something else has evolved (or been created).
The following are my thoughts on this issue.
I am positive life exists out there and we are not the fluke accident some people think that life is more common then we think. Even if there is only a 1 in a billion billons chance of life to be on another rock hurtling thru the cosmos, their are more then enough stars, moons, and planetoids, to have many planets with some form of life.
Now, are all these scattered planets flying around in space teaming life? I have to say no. Most likely a vast majority are bacteria, maybe a few with single cell creatures, even fewer with animals, large amounts of foliage , and a rare few with life that can be called sentient.
Why alot of life and such little sentient beings you ask? well my thought is between solar winds stripping away the atmosphere, and comet,asteriod impacts. Along with stars have a varity of life spans and the end of a suns life is rather destructive. This would cut down the chance for life to be around long enough to become self aware and thus sentient.
Now lets say , okay the planet has been good, life went well, and finally their are what could call sentient beings on it. Look at our world for refrence of this, Chances are War, pollution, religious diffrences, over population, famine, and disease are good examples of how life can be snuffed out by its own hand. Just disease alone "Bubonic Plague In five years 25 million people were dead--one-third of Europe's people. Pollution radioactive accidents Chernobyl , Three Mile Island.
Now if life managed to make it thru all this and finally reach space (like we have yea go us!) you have the problem of distance and speed to reach much of anything else beyond your planets moon. Even traveling at the speed of light 670,616,629.4 miles per hour in a vaccum, now lets look at the closest star Alpha Centauri C, GJ 551 it would take 4.24 years to get there at light speed, not bad huh? But considering the size of the known universe the odds of life being in that system is low (but not impossiable) even slimmer if you throw sentient life in there. So you would be romaing the universe for a ver long time even at the speed of light to find something (atleast i think)
What if we heard them first!? Radio, some other kind of wave band discharged out from their world to ours. Well i would think unless they knew we where there the chance of the radio or other wave length/beam of energy hitting earth so it could be recieved is even a smaller chanced of their being sentient life out there someplace again due to the large amount of void your talking about, and even if it hit our world who is to say its in some frequency, or some method of contact that we either havent discovered yet or something we couldnt ever discover cause we lack a certain resource on out world.
Marconi transmitted the first radio waves that contained information in about the year 1895. Those radio waves today would have traveled 111 light years , to reach the closest largest galaxy will take 2.5 million light years (Andromeda), not to mention its believed that once radio signals leave our planet they would be hard to distinguish between background radiation.
So my summary is:
Yes there are planets out there that support basic life bacteria.
Yes there are planets out there that support single cell creatures, animals, and foliage.
Yes there are a very few planets that support sentient beings.
Yes there is a minute chance there are some race out there that have space flight and even
inhabit more then one planet from their space exploration.
Sadly
No i dont think they been probin people abducting people, or mutilating cows and sheep.
The amount of time to travel is just to great. even if they could achieve 2x the speed of light 1.25 million years to come from the closest galaxy is just not beleiveable. and if they where in our own galaxy, (which i doubt) everyone would of seen them flying around , or they would of colonized here as well and either lived with us, or cleansed the planet of us.
No one will ever really know how many sentient lifes came before us, or that will come after us. but i am fairly certain someplace in the universe there will always be some form of life at any time.

2 comments:

Delirious said...

I have to agree with most of what you said. The only way I think life from another planet could get here is if they were, by genetics, markedly more intelligent than us, and were able to come up with faster space travel of some sort. I think that is the most likely possibility. Less likely in my mind would be if they were able to learn some secret we don't know, like worm hole travel or something. The chances of that are very slim. I have to admit though, I have family members who have seen UFOs, and seen them clearly enough to know that they weren't just seeing a mirage or something. I don't know if it was US intelligence or something, but one Great Uncle and his wife saw a craft come and attach it's self to the power line near the power station at the end of town. I was just thinking the other day about a video our family made for fun one summer. We decided to do an Alien video in the style of Blair witch project. We heard that a woman in town had seen a UFO, so went to interview her. While interviewing her, another man came in and told his story. I really need to try to get that up on youtube! :)
Anyway, yes, I agree, there is intelligent life out there. Did you see the movie Contact? I do think that radio waves are a more likely way of communicating with them. Very interesting post JJJ!

Delirious said...

I drove past area 51 this week! The only weird thing I saw was a truck parked beside the road with a radar on top. The radar was going around and around. There was no one in the truck though....doo doo doo doo...