Marduk

I'm sure life of some sort exists elsewhere, look at the "Mars rocks" some think have signs of life. Whether intelligent, civilization building life exists depends on so many variables.
Consider Blue Wales, for the sake of argument let’s say they are ten times smarter than humans, so what, they have no arms or legs to build things with and communicate in a totally different way than we do. How would we talk to a bug race or lizard race? Also the Galaxy is old enough that other advanced civilizations may have come and gone already while we were eating Mammoths.
Then there is the possibility that the Galaxy is full of intelligent life and they avoid us like the plague. “Warning! Earth Off Limits! Inhabited by dangerous, paranoid, superstitious, violent talking apes!”

schu

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I think life will be found on other planets, but then we will be the aliens. Arthur C. Clark thinks Mars is a good candidate and it very well could be. I'm pretty sure life will be found on other planets, but intelligent life may be hard to find. In fact I don't even know that we qualify yet!

ishalon

"Alien" doesn't mean earth-visiting big eyed skinny green creatures without mouths who visit earth.

Everyone above me was assuming it.

No, but i didn't say intelligent did i

I'm not sure how old the earth is compared to the other planets, but im fairly good at guessing... so since the earth is a young planet, there's a high chance of sentient life on other, older planets.

[Edited to fix poor attempts at UBB]

[ June 19, 2002: Message edited by: ishalon ]</p>

Radcliffe Emerson

I think aliens might exist, I just don't think they've ever wasted their time to visit earth.

Godless Dave

Which would still be pretty cool.

ishalon

<a href="http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~transhumanism/Fermi.htm" target="_blank">http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~transhumanism/Fermi.htm</a>

That whole page assumes that extraterrestrial life is more technologically advanced than us. It proves that we are not miles behind the universe in technology, at least (almost).

Jayhawker Soule

I'm not at all convinced that it proves much of anything. For example: This seems like bad science and worse logic. It only begins to make sense if you view evolution as goal-seeking.

Marduk

either way, if a species doesn't develop something along the lines of arms and legs, not to mention fingers and thumbs, they won't be building spaceships.

Secular Pinoy

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387987010/" target="_blank">Rare Earth</a> is a book that challenges the belief that complex life is abundant in the Universe. Give it a read. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380711656/" target="_blank">Paradigms Lost</a> provides a summary on the likelihood / unlikelihood of success of the SETI program.

Cretinist

ReasonableDoubt,

The author is being very vague about point 1.2. While he seems to be suggesting it is probable that humanoid apes will evolve into humans-like things because it didn’t take very long for humanoid apes to gives rise to us, the main thrust of the point seems to be that it isn’t an improbable step because it happened so quickly.

This isn’t exactly the same as saying it is likely to happen because it happened quickly for us, just that because it happened so quickly for us, it doesn’t appear to be a difficult step. The author of the article seems to confuse the difficulty of the step with the likelihood of the step happening, which is bad reasoning as you say RD.

However, the evolution of advanced intelligence would seem to me to be a near forced moved in evolution. As developing eyes in a transparent environment will give a creature an huge advantage, so it seems advanced intelligence will give creatures a huge advantage, judging by our own success. Though if that is the case, one wonders why it didn’t develop sooner, so maybe I’m wrong.