distant exoplanet "may have life".

[Farplace]

This from the BBC news website today: BBC News - A distant Earth-like exoplanet 'could have life'
What do people think about the posibility of life (of any sort) on other planets?

[nytecam]

Originally Posted by Farplace

This from the BBC news website today: BBC News - A distant Earth-like exoplanet 'could have life'
What do people think about the posibility of life (of any sort) on other planets?

Yes - I saw the BBC News item last night hoping they'd mention the parent star's name but they didn't - it's a faint star Gliese 581 in Libra and currently lost in evening twilight.

The planet was discovered two years ago and well known to the science community by now so not sure why it made public news this week - probably the drip-drip release to keep funding projects.

Yes - life's good here and elsewhere in the universe but don't expect the intelligent creatures, if any, to look human - Startrek is done on the cheap with headmasks And humanity will need other home planets in the future if it is to survive long-long-longterm

[STYRBJORN]

I regard the existence of life elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy, let alone the other 4x10^9 galaxies, as a given. Intelligent life? Fermi's paradox - if they're out there why haven't we heard from them? - takes some defeating.

Ric

[John_M]

Originally Posted by STYRBJORN

I regard the existence of life elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy, let alone the other 4x10^9 galaxies, as a given. Intelligent life? Fermi's paradox - if they're out there why haven't we heard from them? - takes some defeating.

Ric

I'd be surprised if there wasn't life out there somewhere, but maybe they're waiting to hear from us first.
It's quite difficult to conceive of intelligent life that isn't similar to life on Earth, but it's quite possible that there is intelligent life that just isn't interested in anything outside their own planet, or maybe they are, but the distances involved preclude any kind of contact.

[STYRBJORN]

Good points all John but . . . (There's always a but!).

There is a good case to be made that curiosity about the outside world is an essential ingredient of "intelligence".

They should have heard us by now. We have been blasting out high power RF for 60 years at least; we have doubled the radio brightness of our star! OK, that fails under your distance criterion but (!)

SETI has been running for nearly 50 years, listening, not for messages to us, but for non-random patterns in RF at a range of frequencies. Not a peep, not a bleep. Random radiation from all sorts of phenomena, cosmic background radiation, unexpected effects by the bowlful, but no evidence at all of deliberate modulation. Remember that SETI is pulling in data from sources on the order of 10^6 light years distant, and that such data is by definition 10^6 years old. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but so far we have no evidence for exo-intelligence within the last million years.

I am playing Devil's advocate here, of course. I passionately want
there to be intelligence "out there", and that is good reason to demand the highest standards of proof.

Ric

[John_M]

I agree with everything you say; I'm kind of playing devils advocate too. I think it's probable that there's intelligent life somewhere out there, but would we recognise that it's intelligent? Would we even recognise it as being alive?
The only life we know of is carbon based, but there are other possibilities.
How do we define 'life'? For that matter, how do we define 'intelligence'? I know there was at least one thread recently on that very subject.
I don't see why an intelligent organism requires to abide by our definitions; they could be entirely uninterested in us while still being aware of our EM noise. Maybe they're actively avoiding us. (Apart from the ones that land in the Nevada desert to acquire research specimens...)

[STYRBJORN]

Then there's the really depressing solution to Fermi. We blithely assume that intelligence is A Good Thing for species survival. Life has existed on Earth for C3.7x10^9 years. The currently accepted best date for the emergence of Modern Man, Homo sapiens sapiens, is 150,000 +/- 5000 BP. We could rather easily destroy ourselves, by environment destruction or warfare, within a further few centuries. Perhaps intelligent life just plain gets too damn' clever for its own good. The great reptiles lasted 1.85x10^6yrs without intelligence. We aren't looking very impressive so far.

Ric