@proto

i disagree with the fact that animals have a concept of peace and war. Do animals sack a city for loot, massacre innocent women and children simply because they follow a different religion,attack a nation tosecure natural resources, crucify slaves who rise up to take their freedom(im talking about the roman slave rebellion here in case anyone is interested)?just because there is violence in the animal world, indeed in some animals themselves does not mean they have even the remotest concept of peace or war. Even though when these things do happen we ascribe the animal name to the perpetrators, its still not the same thing.anyway other than that right on with your post in my opinion aliens are not special just different.

PS btw Cthulhu mean anything to anybody? i think its relevent to this thread.

EDIT: lol just looked at the op againand ya despite my rants i almost want a war with an alien race cause it could very well force us to jumpstart our space program again. Anybody read Through the Looking Glass by John Ringo, god i love rednecks with heavy weapons.  

Try tens of billions of galaxies (current estimates are in the range of 80 to 125 billion galaxies in the observable universe) and an average of roughly 400 billion stars in the typical galaxy.

There is intelligent life out there. Its absolutely undeniable. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of earths beaches. Shear probability means there must be.

Also recent computer models have been made to simulate solar sytem formation. These models show that planets will not only collect enough water to sustain life but they will also be within the habbital zone. Some models show Earth is even a bit dry.

We are NOT alone.

Odds are sooooo tooooo great against this simple statement that proving otherwise is infinitely impossible;

Frank Drake formula.

Gliese 581, barely 20LYs away from us.

Milky Way conditions multiplied exponentially throughout THIS Universe.

Nothing religious, or scientific about it.

It's even beyond our current means to even affirm Intelligent Life Form(s) is -- somehow -- unique to Earth.

I doubt contact is possible though; distance, humanity "physical" barriers. The only reasonable obstacle to this logic is coincidental evolutions (refer to Drake's L factor) of more than one sentient specie or where they are.

I assume that if we meet some kinda alien race in the near future it will end really badly for us.

If the aliens are about as advanced as we are, its going to lead to fear from both sides. which will probably end up leading to some kinda war that will end with one of us dead and the other mostly dead.

If your aliens are way more advanced thatn us, that i see a few possibilities. the best being that they are ultra benelovent and try to help us out. going by human history and the number of times a more advanced civilization came into contact with a less advanced and instead conqured them, i'd say the odds of our aliends helping us are pretty small.

If they wont help us hopefully they'll just ignore us. thas probably the most likely positive scenario.

Negative scenarios would be that they view us as a form of livestock, much in the same way we veiw cows. if they don't harvest us for some kind of resource, or mine the planet to a point where it wont support life, maybe they will use us as slaves.

Maybe if we're lucky they put us in alien versions of zoos.

worst case, they veiw us as an infestation and hit us with the planetary version of raid.

*facepalm* Killforcash. I should've clarified. Animals have a fight or flight response, and some animals obviously coexist peacefully with other animals, do they not? I was using the terms War and Peace, as a very general and broad term. Not a literal definition.

When we find life it will be bacteria - not intelligent life, imo.

And as mentioned above, where does the bible state their is no life outside Earth?

soasertsus, I DO think aliens exist. haha.  I didn't understand exactly what Darth was pertaining to. Whether it was me, topic, above poster, or what.

Here's an answer (if you "agree" with my earlier objective comment) then...

Send a message that they can decipher and essentially states;

By the time you receive this communication, we will already be on our way to your location.

There is definately life off this planet. No doubt about it. The universe is just to big for us to be alone. The bad news? There is absolutely no way in hell that we'll be able to communicate with them, trade with them, or for us to even be able to tell they're alive.

You see, people who search for alian life all have an underlying bias. They all believe that this new life will be at least somewhat like us. Enough for us to learn their language, trade with them, all of that. Bulllcrap. Think about it. Every single living thing, from viruses to humans, all rely on DNA to survive. But why do we assume alien life will use this method? Everyone seems to think they'll be somewhat humanoid, or at least something we can understand (like giant insects or giant squids). But the fact is we more than likely can't imagine what they are. Sure, maybe some more outside the box people can imagine living crysals or something like that, but even that is horribly inside the box when you think more than likely this living being has evolved in completely different cirucumstances from us for just as long as we have. Everything on Earth started out as one base organism, and they probably did too. Maybe they even started out as the same organism. But then you throw in a few billions years or so of completely different circumstances of evolution, and there you go. Something we cannot, and will not ever understand.

I always laugh when I see people say that the discovery of alien life will be the death-knell of Christianity.  It only makes Theism more attractive, not less.  You see, while water is integral to life, not all planets with water are habitable.  (at least by complex life; bacteria are probably all over the place.)  The probability of a planet coming into existence without any outside Intelligence directing it, and being able to support life any more complex than that found in Domain Archaea, is approximately 1/1000000000000000000000000000000000000000.  And that's a conservative estimate, by the way.  Meaning that it's unlikely enough for it to happen once.  That it would happen twice?  That is statistically impossible. 

And even once we have a habitable planet, there is no guarantee that it will have life!  There are a little over two hundred proteins necessary for life in the simplest bacterial cells.  Each of these has approximately the complexity of a Rubik's Cube.  It has been calculated that it would take a blind man 1.6 trillion years to solve a single Rubik's Cube.  So we once again find ourselves faced with the statistical impossibility of the wind and rain solving 200 Rubik's Cubes during the lifetime of a single star.  Once again, it is impossible that it happened once.  To have happened twice is all the more impossible, barring a directing Intelligence.

Meh, I'm more amused by the distinctions people make on what kind of life we'll find.  What does it matter whether we'll find intelligent life or not?  It's not as if intelligent life exists on this one...

Unless alien forms do not use carbon and water as a solvent as their base biochemistry, we can assume some similarities between alien life and terrestial life, at least at a cellular level.

Wikipedia has this fascinating article about hypothetical biochemistries, definitely worth a read.

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

Assuming of course, you're right about both life on other planets and about religions.

You're being too optimistic here. Very likely, we'll argue about it for a year, send out some radio signals that will take many thousands of years to reach their destination, and then after the novely wears off go back to our regular way of doing things.

And Galileo considered himself a Christian. Roman Catholic. The opposition to him was more church politics than "religion vs science." He didn't become an atheist AFAIK.

It'll likely start with them putting it under a microscope and exhibiting extreme skepticism. Some may end up "shocked," others will simply modify their beliefs. In addition, many may not be affected at all: Not all religions (or even denominations within a religion) take a hard stance against ET life.

Sure it's deniable. One of the best arguments against life is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which claims that the probabilities against life appearing are far greater than the probabilities for appearing. Apply one of the cosmological equations, and you get a totally different result.

Problem is, we don't have a way to test any equation for validity. They're just wild guesses. The equation only hold up to logic insofar as it is valid. Unfortunately, there is no way to confirm its soundness.

validity = whether or not it has any contradictions

soundness = whether or not it reflects realiy

Logic may be valid but unsound by having premises that do not reflect reality.

For example, we have no way of knowing what f_ℓ is in Drake's equation. In fact, that and all of the remaining terms are nothing but wild guesses. If it happens to be an extremely low number, like 10^-100, that itself could render life improbable enough to be pretty much impossible.

So right now the idea of alien life is totally outside the reach of science. I'm not saying it's true or false, just that our current science is simply not capable of saying anything about it.

If the aliens are advanced as we are, if they are to launch a rocket today it will take about 18000 years to travel one light year. The nearest star (other than the Sun) is 4.2 light years away. You do the math.

It's very likely that (assuming other life exists) that if we are to be able to discover other aliens, it will not have any immediate effects.

For one thing, there is currently no faster than light communications and/or travel. Which will make it essentially one way communications. They are unlikely to even know we can hear them.  And it's likely to stay that way for many thousands of years.

The science behind "faster than light" is pretty grim.  Even the best theories are leaning towards "this is probably gonna end up being impossible, even for the most super advanced beings."

. . . and that's just the theoretical "is it even possible?" stuff. If you go from there to "is it feasible?" stuff it gets even worse.

So detection is one thing - but communication and trade are totally different. I think it's extremely unlikely we will be able to establich communication and/or trade soon after detection.

life outside of earth exists, the chances for atleast 1 other lifeform to exist (bacterial or intelligent) is closer to infinite then one can comprehend

just a curious thought:

some peopel insist that they have seen aliens.. some... rare cases even believe they have been abducted by aliens and even more rare cases of people that imply to have a alien husband and children somewhere out there in the universe

(lol)

now i dont wanna spoil the fun of aliens visiting earth... cuase y  i to agree that would be something...

but why would an alien species intend to visit earth?

would they spend countless years traveling through space to reach earth.. (which is olmost completely filled with idiots)

would that be, to say hello?   to trade with us?  perhaps  to abduct a few idiots... marry them and have chilren...

no,  i strongly doubt that they'd have any reason to come here in the first place,

maybe to destroy us?  build mini-deathstars to destroy our planet

our lovely earth  dominated by super-evolved monkey's (let's atleast keep SOME pride in that)

why spend resources on destroying something like that?

and we havent even started taking lightspeed in account..... (no im not talking about startrek)  im talknig about .. ofc the speed of light  the universe is huge,  jargantuos   and it's expanding...  getting even more jarguantuos..os..ish.. like..

how would they even be able to know we existed? if they'd use a giant telescope to look at earth  all they'd see is earth milions of years ago (or probably even an empty spot becuase earth wasn't created by the time the light they are looking at reached them)

though jsut to be sure.. what if they found us by accident?

just looking back at our own history

When Europe finaly discoverred the western continent, now known as the Canada,USA, and South America

what happend back there?

they found the native inhabitants there.  i have no idea what happened exactly, but i do know that it ended in war, why? Europe's technology was more advanced, it thought itself to be more important, smarter, better

just like the slave-trading in africa,  they looked different, apeared primitive compared to themselves and becuase of that they were considered slaves...goods

i sure hope we're never to be discovered by some alien race.  not before we have the means to communicate/defend ourselves...

so all together

we're not alone,  the chance = just so big for life to be created out there.. somewhere...)

chance of aliens finding us = around nil

chance of aliens visiting us = even smaller....

if aliens would ever visit us in your lifetime, then pray they come in peace, becuase we wouldnt have anything to say about our existance...  this compared to human behaviour in the past