Does Life Exist Elsewhere Besides Earth?

[BlueStar]

I guess there are no gender for aliens if it happens they exist, which means... sadly... no sex.

I can't believe in the immensity of the universe that we're the only form of living creatures. Someone millions of light-years away from earth, at some time could be discovered, awaiting for human infinite technology... those aliens watching our capabilities going beyond the universe's limits.

However, I just hope humans won't have to corrupt the entire universe in order to fulfill their ambitions, which perhaps are growing too far...

[jaxc]

If said Alien was hot and foreign diseases/std's weren't a concern, Then hell yeah!:biggrin:
on a slightly more serious note though, If there is other life out their( I think it's highly probable)we also have to consider things like is said life intelligent(on a human level or greater)or mostly feral? what about concerns for alien pathogens? do the aliens have a religion/spiritual beliefs or are purely logical, are they even friendly? and most importantly, are they hot?:biggrin:

[jaxc]

I do believe that most likely life does exists elsewhere in the universe, but the chances of that life being like us would be very slim indeed, most likely we would encounter a life form like Alien from the film series. Just look at the amazing variety of life we have on this planet alone.

That being said if hunky gay aliens do exist , then beam me up Scotty and probe me at will. :p

Or like something from Neon Genesis: Evagelion...OH! GOD! were all going to get literally mindfucked! Run!:biggrin:

[Borg69]

I have another "out there" theory... Earth has certainly had numerous UFO sightings. But what IF faster than light speed isn't possible? How to explain the UFO's ? My theory is Mars and/or the astroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that might have been a planet was inhabited. In a "Krypton" like theme, only a few aliens were able to get on life boat sleeper ships and have been existing on these ships stuck within our Solar system, but in my same "fish out of water" theory unable to live on earth.

[MikeW]

I have another "out there" theory... Earth has certainly had numerous UFO sightings. But what IF faster than light speed isn't possible? How to explain the UFO's ? My theory is Mars and/or the astroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that might have been a planet was inhabited. In a "Krypton" like theme, only a few aliens were able to get on life boat sleeper ships and have been existing on these ships stuck within our Solar system, but in my same "fish out of water" theory unable to live on earth.

The prevailing theory regarding the asteroid belt is that it was never a planet. Cf., wiki:

"In 1802, shortly after discovering Pallas, Heinrich Olbers suggested to William Herschel that Ceres and Pallas were fragments of a much larger planet that once occupied the Mars–Jupiter region, this planet having suffered an internal explosion or a cometary impact many million years before.[26] Over time, however, this hypothesis has fallen from favor. The large amount of energy that would have been required to destroy a planet, combined with the belt's low combined mass, which is only about 4% of the mass of the Earth's Moon,[1] do not support the hypothesis. Further, the significant chemical differences between the asteroids are difficult to explain if they come from the same planet.[27] Today, most scientists accept that, rather than fragmenting from a progenitor planet, the asteroids never formed a planet at all."

As I indicated in my introductory post on this forum, I consider myself to be "from another planet". Physically born here and thoroughly assimilated, from my earliest years I've had 'experiences' that seem to indicate a connection with 'something' beyond 'earth' as we understand it. Later experiences, especially with psilocybin and DMT, seemed to validate this perception. Of course it could be an active childhood imagination later fueled by hallucinogens.

The problem is the intensity of the "visions" produced by the ingestion of naturally occurring indole alkaloids, specifically the naturally occurring serotonergic psychedelics, suggests (at the very least) there may be a form of trans-species psychology that is considerably broader than that proposed between vertebrates.

In other words, what is interesting about this is that chemicals found in completely *different* species from ourselves have profound affects within our neurological systems, producing not only heightened sensory awareness (at low dosages) but (in more 'heroic' dosages) "images" and "visions" that are commonly described as "celestial" (Cf., Psychedelic experience: Level 5.):

Users commonly report:

1. Being clearly thrust into outer-space at extreme speed.
2. Being thrust into an expansive void-like alternate dimension consisting of bright colorful fast moving kaleidoscopic environments, dynamic pulsating colored beams, as well as complex three-dimensional geometric, mathematical, and linguistic patterns made of light.
3. Continually traveling at great speeds, while watching patterns fly by morph, open, and reveal more complex patterns within.
4. Encountering different types of living beings and superintelligent body-less entities at the same time as 1, 2, and 3. These reports include contact with free-floating entities made of light resembling giant spheres, humanoids, multiple types of unrecognizable insects, human-sized praying mantises, elves, cephalopods, complex robotic machines, and plants.
5. Intelligent beings attempting to communicate with users via visual linguistics, mathematics, morphing colored diamonds of different textures (flesh, gold, liquid metal, colored light).

People report beings/entities manipulating what the user can see and view, propelling the user in different directions at disorienting speeds, forcing the user to view both macro and microscopic scale objects including: planetary systems, galaxies, quasars, natural environments, space habitats, technological utopias, neurons, DNA, mitochondria, trilobites, cephalopods, bryozoa and artificial self-replicating machines.[4]
... Most DMT users (scroll down to my post dated October 28,2012) report feeling psychologically uninhibited, clear headed while experiencing peak effects, and able to maintain the ability to think and reason in the above circumstances.[5]

All the above have led some researchers to speculate (and it is just speculation) that there may not only be a direct relationship between the evolution of hominid consciousness and the dietary ingestion of hallucinogenic plants (PDF), but that the 'plants' (such as psilocybin) represent a 'higher' form of (potentially interstellar) consciousness. [It helps to keep in mind that a "mushroom" is only the seeding flower; the real fungi 'plant' is the mycelial networks . One of, if not the largest organisms on the planet, spans 2,200 acres and is believed to be over 2,400 years old.]

To be continued...

[Bowyn Aerrow]

Is there life out there? Yes, and I suspect that any world that falls in the Goldilocks Zone may have simple organisms (microbial life).

I am not, however, going to pin much hope on complex life forms, and even less hope on intelligent tool using life forms.

Why? Because the earth has an unusual feature that took a pretty precise incident to create and that is our rather large moon.

Mars is a virtual moonless world. Sure it has two minor rocky chunks orbiting it, but they are minor and they do not produce much in the way of tides. While there is evidence of historic geological/tectonic activity on Mars, it is a rather well held belief that Mars is cooler to cold on the inside, thus no longer producing geologic activity to maintain its atmospheric density.

Venus also has a geological active history - very active, however we are not detecting signs of current activity. And Venus, nearly the same size of earth, has no large moon to knead its core and keep it active.

The converse to being a rocky planet with a large moon (might as well call the Earth Moon system a binary planet), is to be a rocky planet, or moon in the right orbit of a monster gas giant. Io is clearly very active, and there have been plumes detected on other moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

If either of their parent planets orbited in the Goldilocks Zones of Sol I suspect that all of that activity would have sparked complex lifeforms, and perhaps even the long term stability needed to spark tool using intelligent life.

Our moon does much to keep earth habitable, from kneading the mantel and core to keep it all nice and warm for continual geological activity, thus pumping new gases and water from inside to the outside, to stabilizing the axial tilt preventing massive wobble which would lead to climate change being a constant.

Tides are important to many variants of life in the ocean. The tidal pools are where the real action exists.

The Impact Theory of how the moon came to be may actually be the spark for life. While planets may condense from debris, perhaps a major impact event is needed to stir up the crustal material to get the right portions of material into the newly formed oceans that leads to the creation of life chemistry.

Mars has the clear evidence of water activity, plenty of erosion and even dried dead sea basins. What we have no clear evidence of is life, even microbial life. Perhaps our tools just have yet to locate it, or perhaps Mars without a moon meant lots of water, but no life since no tide existed to stir the primordial Martian Seas to get those initial amino acids to form which is the first step in an unknown process that leads from inanimate chemicals to life.

So how important is the moon in this life process? We need to determine that now. Sure we have located thousands of planets around other stars - thus giving us a good idea that planet formation is not an anomaly, but is a common event for stars.


On intelligent tool using life. I suspect that Mom Nature has a very minor number of patterns it can draw from for an efficient biological machine that has sufficient energy to dedicate to a complex brain.

Tool using requires depth perception. Depth Perception comes to us from our hunting heritage. Herbivores prefer wider range of viewing (to see predators coming) thus give up depth perception. Most likely they are unlikely candidates for tool using.

One needs a way to manipulate materials to make tools. Through the geologic history we see that hands are common. Dinosaurs were often bipedal with their upper arms ending in crude hands. Squirrels and raccoons have hands with crude opposable thumbs allowing them to manipulate stuff. Many species between the dinosaurs and modern animals have settled on this handy (pardon the pun) adaptation.

Bipedal motion is the most energy efficient, allowing for the hands to be free. I seriously doubt that a 6 limb large creature, say four legs and two arms is going to be energy efficient enough to support a large brain.

I think we will discover that the bipedal form is the most common for intelligent tool using/civilization building life-forms. If they look like us its most likely simply a matter of nature solving the same set of problems with the most efficient design possible.

The eyes are so important that we have to pretty much expect any other civilization building intelligent species to have a history of meat eating and hunting. Either as omnivore or carnivore. Its a safe bet that omnivorous behaviors are going to win out, since this diet allows for a larger population of individuals to exist in a smaller territory.

Which means territorial disputes, a small talent for killing, thus war...

So assuming we have lots of planets with the right sized companion body for tides, and life evolved, the situation is going to lead most likely to bipeds who love to kill as much as we do.

The 20th century was a crucial era for humanity as humans reached a point where their small talent for war produced a powerful weapon which even know posies the single most greatest threat to our continued existence as a species. War is most likely going to be how humans bite it.

It is possible that there are a lot of planets out there that civilizations were spawned. It is also very possible that most of those planets are either radioactive cinders, or are well on their way to becoming such - or perhaps those species found new and improved ways to wipe themselves out.

It is my contention that in order for a species to attain the economic and social level of cooperation necessary to leave its planet and exploit its own solar system, it has to put a lot of its hunter/predator behaviors to the side. Humans are at that point were they are learning cooperation. However this is under the threat of nuclear war.

Any species that cooperates and unifies to the point where they can master the energies needed to span vast distances of space most likely went through its colonial expansion phase on its own planet with the same results humans have seen, historically the more technological advanced culture wipes out the more primitive ones.

The UN and several nations have made resolutions that if we find a primitive culture here on earth we will not interfere. We are learning from history. If mankind reaches for the stars it most likely will have something along the lines of a Prime Directive where non-interference in 'pre-warp' civilizations will exist. Considering that NASA scientists have started figuring out how to make Warp Drive Work....

I seriously doubt that any interstellar space traveling ET is going to contact us. Perhaps observe us and keep a relatively close eye on how we develop, but interact, contact, or even hint that they exist? Most likely no.

They most likely will look very similar to us, humanoid in shape. Granted they most likely will spawn from other lines, cats, dogs, lizards - but the general two arms, two legs, one head, two eyes, etc will exist.

They will most likely share many commonalities with humans in their general way of thinking, experiencing same emotions humans do, having found that pretty narrow band of social interaction that allows complex civilization.

But I fear that interstellar space traveling civilizations may be the rarest form of civilization out there.

[MikeW]

Continued…

The movie "" comes the closest to anything I've seen to describing my 'sense' of what I might call 'my home world'. I don't mean that as a planetary system filled with 10' blue people riding Diehorses and Banshees, but, rather, the way they interconnected with the vast array of species on the planet through neural networks. The invention of the internet has externalized our own 'neural network' to something that is arguably the largest wonder of the world ever created: It spans the entire planet and is developing at an exponential pace. However, our species, especially in the form of archaic shamanic rituals, have been engaging in trans-spetial communications with what some have called 'The Gaian Mind' throughout human history.

It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet, that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind - call it Gaia, call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it God Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be experientially verified through psychedelics. Now this is not, in Milton's wonderful phrase "The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" - it doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale, it's planetary in scale. There is some kind of disincarnate intelligence. It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.-- Terence McKenna, , (2.5 hr youtube audio).

I generally agree with McKenna that contemporary human beings have lost their connection with the (call it what you will) 'planetary consciousness' and, in doing so, have lost their connection with and access to an 'interstellar consciousness' -- that is a 'civilization' that is ancient beyond reckoning. For millennia heretofore our development has been influenced (directly and indirectly) by this intelligence and it is only relatively recently that we (most of us, anyway) have lost contact with them. Assuming there is any sanity to what I'm saying at all, the reasons for our species having 'fallen into history' remains somewhat of a mystery. I speculate that it has to do with a necessary evolutionary step; the need for an advancing species to see and experience itself as 'separate from' the matrix of 'ecological mind' within which it arises, so that it can (hopefully) then consciously and intentionally--with fully developed free will--chose to re-immerse itself, eventually emerging as responsible members of the intergalactic community. Other 'fanciful' speculations include the possibility that this sort of 'sleep of history' is is parallel with the dual emergence mediated by free will of all being.

Whatever the case may be, in a world view like this, there is no question that our galaxy, indeed the universe itself, is teaming with life and mind, has been for a very, very long time and probably will continue to be for longer than our solar system will be around.

I like to point out that all human history goes back to mythology. WIthin that coding of human experience, our origins are almost always mythological. We've been telling one another stories about our 'ancient ancestors' and where they came from, who created them and so on, around campfires beneath the broad, star-filled sky, for as long as we've been telling stories. From this angle 'truth' may be far stranger than any of the fictions that have come down to us, or that we've cooked up in our imaginations.

Are we being 'visited' by 'extraterrestrials'? Wouldn't surprise me one bit but I think if you're going to entertain those kinds of ideas you need to open up to the possibility that what UFOs are may be something far 'weirder' than mere 'space ships'. After all, when you think about it, anything that we experience takes place within the realm of the mind itself. If it should turn out that there is mind beyond the individual 'ego' mind, a mind that is trans-spetial, potentially planetary and even interstellar, then there's no reason to assume it can't be equally trans-spatial, trans-temporal and trans-dimensional.

[matty7]

were still finding new life forms on earth and there's the majority below sea that still hasn't been explored - you must have your head in the sand to say we are unique in the universe, our puny brains cant even comprehend the vastness of space with billions of planets just like ours,

[ETOTE]

I would so do a hot alien.

[JimmyEcho]

Now I just saw an episode where captain Kirk beemed down and do this PURPLE bitch