 Originally Posted by hellsing
eh, i doubt it. i had this argument with a friend during a long car ride the other day. we both agreed that ufo's are bollocks, but he still thinks any possible life would be remotely like us because its made of the same stuff, i just pointed out that a rocks made out of the same stuff at the most basic level. There probably is life out there, but it is alien, evolved in a completely different environment, so the odds of something humanoid flying a machine is incredibly unlikely. I think science fiction and religious notions of higher power has us expecting this hyper evolved figures in gleaming space crafts when theres life out there that we might not even recognize as life. or vice versa, for all we know we might be a bigger fluke than we realize, music, language, machinery, for all we know the very things we take as stable facts of our existence might be totally alien in concept and simple reality to another life from from across the universe.
The odds of any other life is quite likely i think, the odds of it having to have needed to evolve beyond a basic animal to something using tools is much, much more unlikely. maybe there was and they died out, maybe were the first, who knows?
I've done a lot reading into the philosophical, biological and scientific sides of "astrobiology" and, really, the range of serious logical arguments, problems and theories is far more complex than I ever imagine before.
I'd recommend having a look at this article, which is basically a very fascinating thought experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
I'm of the persuasion that, since the universe is mind-blowingly larger than we can comprehend, even if life is extremely rare then there should still be millions and millions of worlds on which life has evolved. Of this vast number, I'd expect that there are or have been at least a handful of space-faring races that are roughly analogous to our own (not because there is anything special about the bipedal form, but simply due to chance and statistics - if you let a million monkeys each play with a Rubick's cube for long enough, at least one will solve the puzzle by sheer accident). I'm not talking about alien babes with pointy ears, pink flying saucers and silver space bikinis, I just mean creatures with sentience, individual will and an understanding of science and mathematics.
That said, I have doubts that we will ever contact them, even if they are out there:
1) Because they're probably spread out too much - we're talking millions and millions of light years
2) Because they may have come and gone billions of years before we evolved
3) If they are still around, they may see no benefit in contacting belligerent, warlike young races who largely cannot tolerate different world-views even within their own species but continue to blast radio signals into space and advertise their presence to all and sundry
It's also worth noting that, in nature, when two species compete for one ecological niche or habitat, one is almost always exterminated. Biological life, by definition, fights for survival and resources. It would appear to be in the natural evolutionary order of things that two intelligent planetary species would very likely become hostile to one another. The logical upshot of this is that space-faring life with experience of inter-species contact should naturally be aggressive or otherwise highly successful colonisers, because non-aggressive species would not survive the initial competition for resources.
Also my initial point concerning resource-consuming hives of space-locusts does not necessarily imply intelligent life. Just because a species has the ability to travel through space does not necessarily make it intelligent, not by our conception of intelligent, anyway.
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