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

You mean like the existence of God?

 

It depends if that alien life is lower (but useable), symbiotic, advanced but friendly or harmful to us. Reaction depends (IMO) upon levels of intelligence and power.

 

Since the odds of actual contact are slim to none unless they visit us, most of your examples don't apply. While it's possible we can eventually detect life on another planet through spectrum analysis, there is no way of knowing if their level of development.

 

You ever watch the series ancient aliens? It has been showing on History channel 2. Quite interesting. I can see where the ancients if visited by someone from space, call them ET's, would think they are gods.

Now as to the Hebrew god, he can't be proven or dis-proven. He either is taken on faith or he is not. Now if you are asking me if I believe in this god, I think it is possible for him to exist. I suppose the deeply religious would say I don't as I do not worship him, those who do not believe in god, atheist if you will, probably would say I am crazy to even think he may exist.

But I am open to possibilities, all possibilities. I believe there is life out there among the stars. What kind of life, I haven't the foggiest. But life could have all sorts of different forms or no form at all. They may even be based on different elements besides carbon and/or than what we have on earth or even unknown elements.

There maybe intelligence life that has visited earth many moons ago, but decided our species are like ants or bacteria and not worth the bother of returning or paying us any attention. We won't know about life among the stars until we do. When that will be, no one knows.

 

No, but I'm old enough to have read all of the Erich von Däniken books when they first came out and watched shows like "In Search Of". Fascinating at the time, but like the "miracles of the Bible" why don't we see anything more recent?

Could extraterrestrials have visited us in the past? Perhaps, but if so, why didn't they stay?

 

Perhaps if they visited us, they decided we were not worth the trouble. I like In search of too, hosted by Leonard Limoy, Mr. Spock himself. I totally forgot all about that series. It was fascinating.

As to miracles of the bible, who knows?

 

There's also the problem of life actually discovering and using radio. Just because we did doesn't mean another fairly intelligent species on another world will get around to it.

 

True, but it's reasonable to think some would.

 

"Miracles", IMO, fall under Arthur C. Clarkes comment "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Still I'd sooner accept previous ancient, highly-technical human civilizations than visiting aliens who never returned nor left evidence of their visitation. Modern mankind has been around for about 200,000 years. Our current written history only goes about 10,000 years. Lots of time to sneak in another entire civilization like ours, have it collapse into the stone age and start over.

 

One need also take time into consideration, if a civilization came about in the last billion years or so....then developed radio after a couple thousand, how long before they move onto a more advanced form of technology and then how long before they completely abandon the older technology and stop listening.

I give it a less than 1/1,000,000 probability.

 

First of all the distances involved and being able to direct powerful enough recievers to pickup a Radio Signal and distinguish it from Background Radiation is like finding a needle in a infinite number of haystacks.

As far as whether or not Intelliegent Spacefaring Life exists besides Humans....that question has been answered.

And the answer is not no.

AboveAlpha

 

We need to accept that "intelligent" life forms are nearly as ubiquitous as gods, and not restrict ourselves to a parochial perspective.

 

I think most educated people think that this vast universe has other life in it. The odds perhaps stand in favor of that as well. If earth contains the only life in the universe, then this planet is a very special place indeed.

Personally I feel as if the universe is here for life to arise, and that is its purpose. But I also feel that the universe doesn't exist without consciousness, so take that into consideration. No consciousness, no universe.

 

It's actually Proxima Centauri which is the closest of the group of three which include Alpha Centauri A and B. But I quibble and at those colossal distances it really doesn't matter...also if you travelled at the speed of light (an impossibility but for the sake of argument...) the effects of time dilation would mean that, if you were able to return, the Earth would have aged exponentially whereas you would have not. Or something like that.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

 

I read von Daniken too. I also read that he admitted he made most of it up...

http://michaelsheiser.com/PaleoBabble/2013/04/chariots-frauds-real-erich-von-daniken/

 

I was reading about that possibility of another entire ancient civilization. One that perhaps gave rise to the legend of Atlantis or Atland as the article called it. First about the map of Antarctica

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198001/piri.reis.and.the.hapgood.hypotheses.htm

and the the sea king people

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/199503/who.were.the.sea.people.htm

Strange what one will find surfing the internet. Yes, I believe it is entirely possible for a very ancient civilization to have existed way before mankind started keeping records. But I also keep the possibility of ancient aliens visiting this planet in mankind's early years and hence the legend of god and gods. The possibility exists, it is probably up to each individual to put their own percentage of belief on these subjects.

 

Since Drake wrote his famous equation to calculate the number of civilizations existing in the galaxy, we have seen several of the parameters of the equation becoming well more positive than Drake imagined.

For example today we know that almost all the common stars have planets and that this is not rare even about binary systems [a fact considered impossible until some decades ago]. Furthermore we are beginning to discover extrasolar planets similar to our Earth.

But the problem is that we should be in the temporal window of technological existence of these alien civilizations.
[If on a planet orbiting around a star at 30 light years from our sun there is a civilization able to receive electromagnetic waves, they probably have noted our planet which issues an enormous mass of electromagnetic waves, but if on the same planet there is a civilization in its Middle Ages, simply they cannot receive our signals, so we don't exist for them].

 

I did mention it earlier....I've heard the time dilation explanation I have problems with believing it, but since I don't have the scientific credentials to question it I have to go along with it....

 

von daniken was complete fraud, an expert of nothing...I recall seeing chariots of the gods when I was a young archeology student, even then I knew it was complete BS but my gulible friends and family bought into it...

 

and when you consider complex life on planet like ours has about a billion year window for existence and of that billion years we've been around for 160-200k yrs and of that about 100 yrs of radio...two intelligent species living within resonable proximity in the same time span is very remote...

 

There is an other factor which affects the final statistical probability: the life span of a technological civilization.

From when we begun to use radio transmission to when we were able to destroy ourselves using nuclear weapons there has been well less than a century ... Since we cannot rely on survival statistics, we cannot exclude that our civilization is surviving even too much to the beginning of the "nuclear age".

Nuclear self destruction is a tremendous potential limit for the duration of a technological civilization and this could mean that in our galaxy there could be thousands of planets which have hosted advanced civilizations ... but unfortunately they have destroyed themselves using their nukes ...

 

No doubt since most of it is pretty sketchy like the UFO books.

 

Given the distances and tech involved, if aliens did visit, why don't they still continue to make a presence?

Ancient civilizations are very interesting and, through laser mapping and satellite tech, we may find more of them. Atlantis is a big mystery. One theory puts it on the island of Thera which blew itself apart with a volcanic explosion around 2000BC.

 

Yeah, there are so many theories about Atlantis and Thera plus the Minoan civilization are probably two at the top of the list. I do not believe Atlantis is in the Atlantic, back in those days the Pillars of Hercules wasn't Gibraltar. In my way of thinking it had to be in the Mediterranean Sea area or there about. Not in South America or Bimini or some Island off Africa.

I read a book a few years ago that advanced the theory that the city of Troy might have been Atlantis as it was a lot closer to the sea then. Another theory advance by Ballard was it was originally located between Cyprus and Lebanon. Ballard supposedly is going to return to that area to do some underwater mapping.

 

Who knows at this point?

To me, one of the most intriguing thoughts is that Homo Sapiens Sapiens around for about 200,000 years, coexisting with Homo Neanderthalensis and other branches. The fact we came from tribes to space travel in 10,000 years makes me wonder why it wasn't done before. Why now? Why not 50,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago?