Closer to discovering aliens?

[Sylar]

NASA announced today that they've discovered a new solar system containing 7 Earth-size planets, at least 3 are believe to be capable of having oceans. The temeratures on the planets and the liquid water make it possible for them to home life.

Do you think we're getting closer to discovering alien life in the universe, or is that still in the distant future?

 

[Judge]

Good question.

I'd think the possibility of discovering intelligent life will always go up whenever a planetary body is discovered that has the potential to support life as we know it.

But that's just it. What if there is life out there but not as "we know it", scientifically speaking? The problem remains that our science is just that- ours. Not "theirs". A benchmark reflecting what we don't know as much as for what we do know.

Reminds me of the film I recently saw. "Arrival". Definitely not forms of life as we perceive. Nor the manner in which they communicated. Our ignorance could have proven to be quite costly under such circumstances.

 

[Gary DuBois]

NASA announced today that they've discovered a new solar system containing 7 Earth-size planets, at least 3 are believe to be capable of having oceans. The temeratures on the planets and the liquid water make it possible for them to home life.

Do you think we're getting closer to discovering alien life in the universe, or is that still in the distant future?

aliens aren,t real and they don,t exist and never will !

 

[NeoPhile]

We'll discover proof of life on other planets when we discover proof of life on other planets. These planets are in the Goldilocks zone. It means there could be life on these planets, not that there is life on these planets. A lot has to go right in order for a planet to have life. The arisal of life is not as easy as "Just add water". The planet has to have an atmosphere (Mars does not have an atmosphere. That means they have days in which the temperature is over 175 degrees Fahrenheit, and nights in which it's under -200 degrees. This is not conducive to the arisal of life.) It needs to have water because while whatever life we encounter will be vastly different from us, water is unique amongst compounds because of the way things dissolve in it, and that's required for life. There would also need to be Carbon. Carbon is unique amonst the elements in its ability to form compounds with any other element, which means it forms very complex compounds necessary for life to arise. It would need one moon (really, probably only one. It two moons might not work) in order to keep the axis of the planet from wobbling too much, which would cause very chaotic season. It would also need some protection from meteors and comets smashing into it. Jupiter and Saturn, big planets further out in our solar system, do that for us. Both those planets were struck a lot by comets while life was arising on Earth, and if we had been bombarded too much by comets and meteors, it's unlikely that life would have arisen. The planet would need to be the right size. It would need to be big enough to produce enough electromagnetic energy to sustain life, but not a gas giant either. Also, the solar system needs to be in the right place in the galaxy. If it's too close to the center of the galaxy, there's too much electromagnetic energy from other stars. If it's too far out, then there's not enough electromagnetic energy.
That all being said, I think it's very probable that there's life on other planets. It's likely that there are 100 billion galaxies, and that each of those galaxies has 100 billion stars, and that each of those stars have eight planets. That means it's likely that there are 80 sextillion planets in the universe. (80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets.) If the chances for a planet to be able to be able allow the arisal of life are 1 in one billion and the chances of the actual arisal of life given that are 1 in 1 million, then it's likely that there are 80 billion planets that have some sort of life, microbial or otherwise.

 

[gregmcph]

Finding a Star like that gives people a place to focus on. Point you radio receivers and so forth hard at that Star and see what you can pick up.

My opinion is that life is really difficult. It took Billions of years, half the timespan of life on Earth to go up from single cell life.
Those planets might be just soaking in simple green slime.

Or, they might have zoomed through our brief time playing with things like radio waves and be communicating in ways we can't imagine.

Catching Them at a time in their history that could communicate with us is pretty tough.

 

[watersprite]

The discovery of the 7 planets is wonderful and if it turns out they have some sort of earth-like atmospheres, all the more exciting.

I wonder if we would consider aliens to still be alien if "they" are our only known neighbors.

 

[AGXStarseed]

Here's an article from NASA about it: Hubble Makes First Atmospheric Study of Earth-Sized Exoplanets

 

[qwerty]

I read about this this morning . Fantastic.
I really want to have the experience of communication with an alien. Imagine how much our science and spiritual life would expand if in communication with an entirely new species of around the same advancement. It would be like the boom of consciousness in the renaissance when cultural ideas met.

 

[Sylar]

aliens aren,t real and they don,t exist and never will !

What makes you say that? It always seems like human arrogance to state without any doubt that in an infinite universe, our planet is the only one without life. Even something as simple as single cell organisms or bacteria count as life.

I don't believe in UFOs (in the spaceship sense, anything flying in the air and you can't tell what it is would technically be a UFO) or alien abduction, because if Aliens were intelligent enough to create such advanced technology 1) We'd have most likely to pick up some signs that they exist, and 2) They'd have way better uses for the technology than abduct drunks and hicks in the middle of nowhere.

 

[inabox]

NASA announced today that they've discovered a new solar system containing 7 Earth-size planets, at least 3 are believe to be capable of having oceans. The temeratures on the planets and the liquid water make it possible for them to home life.

Do you think we're getting closer to discovering alien life in the universe, or is that still in the distant future?

I believe that NASA know much more than they say they do. And have done for a long time and they're not the only ones who know. They just give enough official announcements to keep the public happy enough (or quiet enough, to make the public behave placidly and conform).
Let me just reiterate, these are just my opinions and I am fully accepting that everyone is entitled to their opinion.

It does bug me how scientists say that a place cannot be habitable by aliens because it is too hot / too cold / has not the right gases, etc etc. There are creatures on this planet who live in conditions in which we as humans would never be able to live. These creatures and humans are carbon based life forms as all are on planet Earth [someone correct me here if that's not right] and all need presence of the right gases in the right quantities. So if a life form needs an atmosphere made up of different elements, it will thrive in completely different conditions, have a body made of different materials, and may well die in our environment. How can we say what is a "habitable" planet? My opinion is that this is a very closed-minded view by thinking that everything everywhere must be exactly like Earth because that's what works for us.

 

[Sylar]

It does bug me how scientists say that a place cannot be habitable by aliens because it is too hot / too cold / has not the right gases, etc etc. There are creatures on this planet who live in conditions in which we as humans would never be able to live. These creatures and humans are carbon based life forms as all are on planet Earth [someone correct me here if that's not right] and all need presence of the right gases in the right quantities. So if a life form needs an atmosphere made up of different elements, it will thrive in completely different conditions, have a body made of different materials, and may well die in our environment. How can we say what is a "habitable" planet? My opinion is that this is a very closed-minded view by thinking that everything everywhere must be exactly like Earth because that's what works for us.

That always irked me a little too, just look at how varied life on this planet is and had been. We have creatures in the depths of the sea where the pressure is so strong it would completely destroy us. During different periods where dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the atmosphere was so different we wouldn't have been able to survive. I agree that when they say a planet can't sustain life, they mean it can't sustain ours or anything else that lives on this planet after billions of years of evolution to adapt to live on this planet.

Life on another planet could exist and have a form of life we couldn't imagine because it's adapted to live on that planet, and it would be impossible for it to survive on this planet. NeoPhile posted a good scientific explanation about why people think that way but I still think it comes from a strictly Human way of thinking and how we've come to understand life based on our planet.

The universe is never ending, we don't know everything and it's entirely possible that a lot of our theories are wrong in the grand scheme of things, they just happen to work for us so we take it as fact.

 

[Mr Allen]

It's life Jim but not as we know it.

I'm fully open to being proven wrong, but personally I don't think there's anything out there, not in the sense of intelligent life anyway.

 

[Alcyon]

Funnily enough, I read this article a couple of days before this topic was posted,

5 Insane Theories About Why We Haven't Discovered Alien Life

Aside from the lurid headline, it's pretty good. The fifth point, that alien life would be too alien, already mentioned here, is what comes to my mind first when I think about this. We not only can not communicate with species on this planet that are close relatives, we could not not even recognise that they were close relatives until fairly recently.

 

[Mr Allen]

Most "sightings" of "Alien Spaceships" and stuff like the Loch Ness Monster occur late at night after the Pubs chuck out, go figure

 

[AGXStarseed]

Most "sightings" of "Alien Spaceships" and stuff like the Loch Ness Monster occur late at night after the Pubs chuck out, go figure

Makes me think of a story I read where a man claimed to have seen a UFO and also stated that when he woke up, his clocks were all different to everyone else and so thought he'd been abducted.
Turns out what he saw was a helicopter and the reason his clocks were different was because he'd forgot to change them due to daylight savings.