If life is discovered on other planets......

If life is discovered on other planets, what effect, if any, will the discovery have on the human race? Will it be welcomed or feared? Obviously even if only primitive life is discovered, it lends credible proof that more advanced life is out there too.

 

It will make religious people look a bit silly.

 

the closet star to earth is alpha centauri at around 44 trillion miles...if you traveled the speed of light it would take you almost 45 years to get there..so if you were 25 leaving earth you would be a 70 year old man getting there..and dont expect to to be alive after the return trip....

 

It's about 4.5 light years away so that, at the speed of light, it'd take you 4.5 years to get there (not counting acceleration and deceleration time). The Time Dilation rule would make it seem less to those on board.

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I think most would adapt. "God's will" and all that. Of course, we could take a tip from Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" if aliens had pointy ears, horns and tails.

 

Why exactly?

 

Personally I would be glad for the discovery and only after a while I would think to eventual religious implications ...

I wouldn't be so surprised to find out that God didn't limit its creation of life to this planet [and I wouldn't be so surprised to meet other intelligence species around, to say all].

 

People fear what they do not understand. You think this would be any different? Once accepted you will quickly see missionaries launching into space. I think there would be an explosion of religious furrer.

 

Many would have to drop back and regroup just as they did when Galileo proved the Earth wasn't the center of the Solar System. They would have to come to grips with the idea that, while God created man, God also created other intelligent creatures so that Adam wasn't, necessarily, the "first" man or intelligent creature.

Speaking of which, the Creationists will have a bit of a problem reconciling the proof of life other than on Earth too.


OTOH, let's say we never, ever find life. We'd keep looking, but what if we didn't? Wouldn't that also have an effect on our religious beliefs? I know Atheists would never "give up the faith", but it would certainly be disconcerting to them.

IIRC, there was a SF book along those lines, but I never read it myself. Something about interstellar Earth travelers going planet to planet and finding nothing. I thought it was "The Silent Universe" but Google didn't come up with anything on that.

It's also in line with the Fermi Paradox:
http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/fermi-paradox


BTW, how many besides myself used their personal computers for the SETI project number crunching?

 

Will it be welcomed or feared? - Yes and yes.

Obviously even if only primitive life is discovered, it lends credible proof that more advanced life is out there too. - It's probably out there somewhere, though given the vastness of space, both spatially and temporally, we're just not at all likely ever to encounter it.

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To convert alien bacteria? It would give the religious something to think about, to be sure, though I'm sure they'll settle on the notion that God has created life on other worlds as well as here.

 

Gods creations don't stop at earth.

 

Not really. Adam could easily still have been the first intelligent creature God created, simply was not the only one.

I always laugh at atheists who hold on to the thought of their imaginary green men from Alpha Centauri, but deny the existence of a deity due to lack of "evidence".

I don't see why. God may very well of created other life forms. But as I said, I doubt it.

This would probably be a bigger blow to them than the alternative would be to creationists. If life spawns as easily as they claim, one would most certainly expect life to be on a large number of habitable planets. It would be far harder for atheists to explain the non-existence of life, IMO, than it would be for creationists to explain the existence of such life.

 

Not encounter given present tech due to the distances, but we should at least be able to detect signs of intelligent life as SETI has been attempting to do.

http://www.seti.org/

 

Really, how so? Possibly some fundamentalists would have egg on their faces, but generally speaking I really don't think that "religious people" would be effected much. Hindu's, for example, already accept other worldly life. I doubt Buddhists even have an opinion. (that's a lot of religious people). Most religious people that I know accept that what science has discovered regarding most sciences, although not perfect, is pretty much the way it is.

 

Which means, if life is discovered, the Creationists and other Biblical literalists will have to have a change of attitude....or they can just declare it's Satan's work.

 

People that want there to be advanced civilizations out there are (*)(*)(*)(*)ing morons.

 

Very true, even if the life discovered in in the form of a bacteria. I am of the opinion as large as the Universe is that we, here on earth can't be the only life in it.

 

The odds are pretty good that you are correct, however, since there is no evidence despite years of looking, it's mostly a philosophical idea.

 

Want? The odds are pretty good, IF there are other civilizations in our galaxy, that'd we'll be the Clampetts to their Druckers since we're located in a younger backwaterish section of the galaxy. Ergo, whether we like it or not, they will probably be more advanced.

 

Even that is difficult given the distances in space and time.. It takes so long for radio signals to traverse the distances across galaxies, and so much longer still to travel between galaxies, and of course there's the problem of signal fidelity over such distances as well.

I for one am not surprised that SETI has yet to pick up anything reliable.

 

This comment is short sighted, and borders on insulting. Given that available writings and teachings of most religions were written centuries ago, prior to their being any thoughts of life on other worlds, as well as the earth not being flat. Many if not most people who believe in a higher power would open their eyes to the miracles of the universe. Not all of course... but there will be many

 

Across galaxies, yes, but across the stars not so much. There are 3496 stars within about 75 light years of Earth. If only 1% had life, that's about 35 stars. Since all of those stars are about the same age as ours, we'd expect that some of them would have the a similar level of development. Some higher, some lesser. Since radio/television waves travel at the speed of light and since we've been transmitting signals for over 100 years, it seems we should have detected something from those closer stars. It's not like SETI hasn't calculated the odds or doesn't know the most likely candidates for life.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html

(1 Parsec = 3.26163344 light years)

 

100 years is not so long

 

In the scheme of galactic history, you are correct. How many of 3500 stars do you expect to have life on them? Of those, given all the stars are nearly the same age of ours, would have civilizations approximating our own, +1000 years?

 

slight math problem here...
Alpha centuri is 4.37 light years away, if you traveled at the speed of light it would take?????....4.37 years not 45yrs..and if I recall that Einstein/time/light speed thingy you can make the entire trip and not age, but everyone you knew and your great grand kids will be dead when you return...and Proxima Centuri is actually the closet star at 4.2 light years....

 

I'll accept that. But the way I look at it, the absents of something up to this point in time does not prove it doesn't exist.