I know a lady who is 100% convinced she was abducted by praying mantis looking aliens. (Or she is straight up lying which would be out of character)
She also believes a lot of conspiracy theories like pizza gate.
Really nice lady to be honest. But.. yeah. That's odd.
Say you think the chances of intelligent life away from Earth are really, really remote. Say it's a billion to one...
There are around 300 billion stars in our galaxy. Based on what we've learned in the last few years, about half of stars have some sort of exoplanet. The Kepler programme established an estimate of 50billion planets in the galaxy. Being cautious and using that as our estimate, about 1% of those planets are believed to be in the habitable 'goldilocks' zone, so there are maybe 500 million habitable planets in our galaxy alone.
It's estimated that there are maybe a trillion galaxies so, assuming our galaxy is typical, there's 500million times 1 trillion potentially habitable planets in the universe. My calculator won't work that out. Can anyone help? For the record, if life's a billion-to-one shot, this means there's an awful lot of life out there.
So why haven't we found it?
Our galaxy is 200,000 light years in diameter. That means that a civilization has to develop to travel around its own planet, neighboring planets, solar system and neighboring solar systems before being able master travelling at (or near) the speed of light and then traveling for up to 200,000 years at the speed of light in order to get to us. The fuelling, food resources and technology needed to move that distance at that speed, show up on our doorstep and then have the restraint not to do a big reveal but instead to intimately probe some local 'enthusiasts' and shine bright lights on people while messing with their car stereos is even more unlikely than life existing in the first place.
Real Mathematician wrote:
I. Rex wrote:
If you dont believe in alien life then you dont understand statistics very well and/or how big the universe is...
This ^ is absolute nonsense.
Show me your simpleton logic that leads to alien life. Here, let me guess, you'll start with the Drake Equation.
Go for it! I can't wait to see your unbelievably naive nonsense.
Calm your silly ass down. First of all, allow me to educate you that the Drake Equation is ONLY about intelligent alien life capable of communicating with us. Not "alien life". A real mathematician would know that. And I love how you conveniently ignore my point about Venus looking like it may have life on it. The very next planet to us... Dont you realize what that would mean about the odds of life in space if we find that our closest neighbor has life as well?
And anyway, several people have already laid out the obvious nature of the statistics involved since you posted this. Billions of stars in our galaxy and trillions of galaxies in the universe and 14 billion years to develop something. Even if intelligent life is as unlikely as winning the lottery every single day for a year by the sheer numbers involved there still would be plenty of it out there over the course of the history of the current universe. It may be too far away to interact with but it ether exists or has existed. Prove me wrong.
Seems like the most intelligent people responding believe that there must be alien life out there somewhere, just not here. I thought that this thread would deteriorate and bring out the nuts. I was wrong. The one thing I hadn't heard about were those Utah claims.
Why haven't we found alien life? We can't even find the final resting spot of MH370, D.B. Cooper, or a respectable presidential candidate. And all those things should be on our planet. How do you expect us to find anything in such a vast expanse as interstellar space?
Brigade wrote:
My family members are not nut jobs (one was the President of a major US aerospace firm) and several of us have seen things that may have been either alien spacecraft or experimental military aircraft not yet publicly known. So I'm intrigued, but not convinced. At the age of 40, I myself finally saw something that may have been. This object didn't move in ways that our aircraft do. I just couldn't think of any explanation for its movement except something totally unknown to me.
My dad was a VP at one of the larger aerospace firms. He has gone to several of the top secret military bases where the UFO claims come out. He also worked from and met Robert Bigelow and even met him at Skinwalker Ranch. He is extremely underwhelmed by all the UFO conspiracies. He said all of the secret things he's seen at those bases were not much of a secret. He believes there is absolutely alien life in the universe but does not see any evidence the US government is hiding alien aircraft of contact with alien life.
The one that gets me is the Tic Toc incident. Com. Fravor seems very believable and we do not have an explanation for that. Also if you watch the Lex Freidman podcast on that incident the way the craft operates supports the way theoretical physicists believe a more advanced form of technology would. At the end of the day, I think the US government doctoring that incident for whatever reason seems to be the most likely explanation. But I'm more open to the idea than I was a few years ago.
I think one of the things that makes it hard is you get a lot of Chariot of the Gods or Ancient Aliens type conspiracy theorists who are so clearly nuts that it really makes it difficult for a reasonable person to take the ET theories seriously.
The odds are overwhelming that H. sapiens sapiens, as a species, has never encountered and will never encounter an intelligent extraterrestrial lifeform.
Do I think that such things exist and/or have existed? Certainly. There are more stars out there than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth (true stat btw), and many, many of those stars will have planets. The chances that intelligent life could have developed only on our planet are vanishingly small.
But the speed of light is a practical travel barrier, as much for other species as for us. We humans are likely to be extinct before ever encountering any aliens with similar levels of intelligence. Or any beings from outside our solar system, intelligent or not. We're going to have to try to do a good job with ourselves, and on this one planet.
And FWIW I say all this after having lived in Roswell in the '60s.
Sagan's words seem more appropriate than ever, given what's going on in our society at the moment
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
— Carl Sagan[24][25]
I. Rex wrote:
Even if intelligent life is as unlikely as winning the lottery every single day for a year by the sheer numbers involved there still would be plenty of it out there over the course of the history of the current universe. Prove me wrong
Okay
Estimated number of planets in the universe (according to google) - 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Odds of winning the lottery 365 days in a row (using 1/14,000,000 odds also according to google)
1 out of 21713659467277886437309379707197486184762688047020478719571568239814490615097164802590694276480418079593539659393524449381332564459570124493974240555784897707747852380416379609097985156069496851744632186748505651994523577872545296273093826364752180961885685266686025587078630418818077078899613136353979454116623463829303233473300986283059107060415124075724561079803130772733696885264964783941701653247857476391848116224000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Child
Watch this quick video about the 1994 Ariel School encounter, where 60 school children all claimed to see beings emerge from a craft. The kids, now grown up, all maintain that there is experience is true and no one has recounted the story. One of the interviewers in the video is John Mack, who was a psychiatrist at Harvard as was dead of the psychiatry department. It's pretty compelling.
This. Ofcourse aliens exist in the universe. 10^23 stars and only one planet with life? Silly. People who think we're alone are just arrogant and want to see themselves as special. Probably religious types who have no grasp on the reality of nature.
As to whether they visit and abduct us? Obviously not. Not even a shred of hard evidence for all these thousands of "visitations". And the government couldn't keep a secret that big if it's life depended on it.
It's possible that they have robotic craft somewhere in high earth orbit or further out in the solar system and are monitoring us (as a species not individually..). And if they don't want to be found they won't be easy to find. To get a self sustaining craft here and allow it to repair itself for millions of years will take incredibly advanced technology. So if they are hiding they will be practically invisible in the depths of space.
Charles E. wrote:
WE are aliens who aren't originally from here, so yes.
There is more truth to that than you can ever know
It's a shame this page is busted due to the gigantic number because this is a fun question.
I think, given the exponential nature of our technological development thus far that it's entirely possible there's plenty of intelligent life but we cannot detect them.
EM waves attenuate quite fast, etc so it's unlikely our methods of searching for aliens would yield anything so far -- they're operating on entirely different wavelengths (so to speak).
I'll happily concede that its likely that creatures more intelligent than us have arisen on other planets in the universe at some time. That any of these creatures would devote the time and resources necessary to visit this planet, and then choose to continue to visit repeatedly and just secretly abduct people and never reveal themselves or harvest the planet of its resources when there is clearly technological civilization present seems about as idiotic as anything I can think of.
Definitely believe that there is life somewhere else in the universe. Spaceships and people being abducted?? lol not so much.
Any argument that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe simply because of its size is pure bunk.
Nobody knows the probability that a random star system will create intelligent life. If that probability in one in 10^10, then okay, alien life probably exists. If that probability is one in 10^30, then no, alien life probably does not exist. And there are a lot of random factors that have to be just right for intelligent life to arise.
Nobody has the slightest clue what that probability is (other than very very low). Therefore nobody has the slightest clue whether or not intelligent alien civilizations exist. More than half the posts on this thread are pure BS.
Of course aliens exist. Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40. No human can run that fast.
Bound4Glory wrote:
Any argument that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe simply because of its size is pure bunk.
Nobody knows the probability that a random star system will create intelligent life. If that probability in one in 10^10, then okay, alien life probably exists. If that probability is one in 10^30, then no, alien life probably does not exist. And there are a lot of random factors that have to be just right for intelligent life to arise.
Nobody has the slightest clue what that probability is (other than very very low). Therefore nobody has the slightest clue whether or not intelligent alien civilizations exist. More than half the posts on this thread are pure BS.
On the contrary, given a number of star systems, and a probability of a star system creating intelligent life, one can easily calculate the probability of ONLY one star system creating life.
So far we know of 2.5 x 10^3 star systems in our galaxy, and 2 x 10^12 galaxies in existence, so there's at least 5x10^15 star systems out there. Starting with that, calculate p = probability of life forming in a single star system such that q = probability of only one star system forming life > 1-q, if p exists.
We are Aliens . Anyone who thinks we evolved from single cell ameba is crazy.