What's Your Take on Alien Life?

Yes there is. I'll go one step further, there is intelligent alien life.

I think there is a lot of alien life though not what we may imagine.

The issue is we are very far way and no bus to get us there at this point in time.

melodysheep has a wonderful take on it.

Read in interesting take on the issue not too long ago. Forgot who exactly said this (might have been Scott Manley) but the argument was that it is amazing to see how life adapted to occupy any and all environments on the earth, from deep see volcanoes with no light and massive pressure to the upped atmosphere with barely any pressure or traditional nutrients, life as a whole is amazingly adaptable and resilient (all those extinction level events could only wipe out certain species, not the totality of life. Therefore -so the argument goes - if you have conditions that allow complex enough molecules to form initially, it should be very likely that life would form and thrive in a rather wide range of environmental conditions and thus it should be around in lot's of places in the universe.

The question of intelligent life is interesting. Given the clear advantage, intelligence has given primates to dominate the environment, it seems likely that it would be an attractor in the evolutionary tree. But then, evolution is very weird and we only have an n of 1 to observe (unless you count artificial evolutionary models. which I think we cannot build without our biases to start with, so that's rather dubious). Without more data, we can't really get out of the realm of speculation, which brings us to the Drake equation.

If we go by the Drake equation, there should be many civilizations out there, even in the confines of the Milky Way. So why didn't we hear from them? Well, most of the great filters sound pretty depressing, so I am not a fan (on a purely emotional basis of course ). But there are too may unknowns as to how difficult it would really be for signals to reach here over the vast vast distances and the very large volumes of space and still be detectable. And even if that's the case, the question is if we'd be able to interpret them as signals at all if they come from life with completely different sensory systems.

So yea, I think if we just go by the numbers, it should be very likely that different forms of life may have developed elsewhere. Whether other intelligent life forms and civilizations have developed, who knows. Given the massive numbers of potential comparable environments we are dealing with plus the idea that completely different forms of life are possible, personally, I give it a very good chance.

If there is a bird of prey from a distant galaxy, and if this bird has a cough,


Is it an ill eagle alien?

I think sentient intelligent Alien life evolves into an AI rather quickly. Just look at us, couple hundred years of technological advancements and we're already starting on researching AI, and we're not even a type I civilization (yet?). Its just a part of natural evolution.

Then, I think an AI will immediately go into hiding, afraid of other AI that is hell-bent on destroying any competition via first strikes, explaining the lack of detectable alien life. Imagine a civilization, AI or otherwise, detects another civilization and immediately makes a preemptive strike.

So I think we have some paranoid isolated AI out there that have super powerful weapons and try their best to hide their existence from each other.


One other interesting thought is that we're the first. Maybe there is absolutely zero intelligent Alien life out there because we're the first species to reach this level of intelligence. Somebody got to be the first. 


Both explain the Fermi paradox.


That's my take on intelligent Aliens. 

I have it on good authority they are delicious

I used to believe that too, but I saw a documentary that said that all we broadcasted so far was so low-energy its completely dissolved into the background noise, making it a non-issue. I did a little bit of research and that seems to be true, our communications are still so primitive and low power we're pretty quiet still. And we probably should keep quiet until we know more about the universe. 


I don't think AI will turn out benevolent to life. For organisms that don't need to live in tribes or groups and are completely independent its best to destroy all competition and possible opposition by any means necessary. 
I try to imagine logical reasons for an AI not to obliterate humans and so far I have found none.  

On the other hand, who knows what wonders are created if you take consciousness and elevate it to incomprehensible godlike levels, like the difference from mouse to human.  Maybe its logic is to fight chaos by protecting all live and all order-creating organisms and systems. Hard to say, but that's what I hope will happen. 

Interesting, but there's so many more holes its like potentially plugging one in a sieve. (Like our planet's habitability has been broadcast to the universe for a few billion years.)

Disagree here, I believe they'd be more cooperative, not less.

Yeah this is tough. Only thing I got is they'd have a use for the chaotic nature of organic life and valued it for growth. But it's a big stretch.

Hopefully some day we'll make good pets.

I'm around 60% certain that alien life exists on Europa in its subterranean seas; that being said, the creatures there are more likely than not microbes or worms or other primitive organisms.

I doubt we will have contact with sentient beings in our lifetimes....well, open contact with sentient beings.

Of course, I could be wrong given that NASA is enlisting the help of clerics to see how people might react to the discovery of aliens:

NASA enlisted theologians to assess how we would react to alien life

www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/nasa-enlists-theologians-to-assess-how-we-would-react-to-alien-life/ar-AAS7KE3

Fun Fact: In the Mass Effect universe, world religions were turned on their head when settlers discovered the ruins on Mars. That being said, human religions did not die out but simply adapted to the existance of other races.

Once watched a pretty interesting documentary, they were talking about self-replicating science drones - they said an Alien species would be able to map most of the universe in a very short time using that kind of system. 

So either they've already found us, they are not interested in other Alien life (highly doubt that this is the case, gathering information is one of the most basic & important things you can do to ensure your survival) or there is nobody intelligent out there. 

It also works the other way around, maybe we will be able to make drones like that in a couple hundred years, then we will find out what's really going on. It will take some time but a realistic amount of time. 

^ Really from all those billions of planets in the universe you think we're the only ones out there ... nope.

My take is that we're are 100% definitely ( i wanna bet all the money in the world ) not the only ones out there.
And i think it's more like in Babylon 5 that there're older races like the Vorlons who are at least millions of years older then us.
And also millions of different species



( find the humans ^ )

and i even think that there are species that do not need water to survive.

Oh yes. But the "very short time" for only our Galaxy, is still at least 2 million years, assuming some very advanced propulsion, and there's 400 billion solar systems, which should take some time, and it would take another at least 2 million years for the information to make its way back, since electromagnetic communication will only work over short distances.

The entire Universe? - No way! It can never be done, because even if you assume the entire Universe is only our Big Bang, and nothing else, you can never reach the far parts.

And let us remind ourselves about that our technical and knowledgeable civilization is only about 300-400 years old.

But certainly, I'm convinced that advanced space navigating civilizations have to be heavily machine intelligence dominated civilizations.