How does the existence of life outside of Earth disprove the existence of "only one God"? We already have many people with many different systems of belief in a higher power, adding one more "people" wouldn't change too much in that belief system. As I said, it would adjust. Christianity would say that God loves all his creations, including the aliens. Or, perhaps the crazies would say that aliens are harbingers of the apocalypse. Islam would do exactly the same thing, in different ways. That's the whole concept of an omnipotent "God", it's meant to cover all life, not just life we know about.Abedeus said:
I'm not sure you took the same science classes that I did....Xrysthos said:
I know, I know. I was simply using Mass Effect 2 as an example to show that even though the chances of life occuring is pretty much a technical impossibility, at least life as we see it here on Earth today, our knowledge of the exoplanets, and our knowledge about life and where it came from, is somewhat limited. As far as statistics go, chances of life occuring are very small, and we might very well be the only planet in the solar system where such an event has unfolded, but I like to think that there is someone else out there, be it microbes or humanoids. And I might have worded myself poorly, but what the entire "1 suitable planet for life in 1 of 3 solar systems" thing was exclusively a ME2 reference, simply to put things into perspective in a "you've played Mass Effect, and you know how few planets are suitable for life, and even this is an unlikely/impossible scenario" kind of a way. To the best of my knowledge, exoplanet scans so far (don't ask about how they've discovered this - light radiated from planets containing information on the planet's chemistry, perhaps) have only revealed 2 planets that maintain Earth-like conditions, and the who's-who in astro-science were quick to say that even though the conditions might be right, chances for life were minimal. Life is however not definitely exclusive to planets with "Earth like conditions" - just look at the varieties in climate and atmosphere conditions life has endured on our own planet on a geological time scale.Scabadus said:I'm not sure you took the same science classes that I did....Xrysthos said:
Sorry, couldn't resist
Anyway, to the OP, I feel the same way about extra terrestrial life. I can't remember which one, but in one of Richard Dawkins' books he attempts to give a probability for life evolving on Earth within our timeframe. He uses the least probable numbers avalible to him, and then compares it to the (estimated) number of planets in our galaxy. Assuming that any planet is as likely as another to support life (i.e. Venus or Pluto are as likely to have "Life, Jim, but not as we know it" - apologies to trekkies if I got the quote wrong - ) then the estimated number of planets with life was something like 3000, mabey 300.
As for the physical properties of this life, given that we have a full periodic table and that every phenominon we can detect uses a standard set of atoms or derivatives thereof (ions, isotopes) I think it is a fairly safe bet that such a set of 'building blocks' is consistant across our galaxy and indeed the universe. Any other life would have to be capable of replicating itself on a molecular chemistry level before evolving to higher life, so i think it would have to have a structure based around a 'code' such as DNA, but I believe the chances that the molecular structure of this 'code', the psycical structure of the aliens cell and tissue equivelent and the aliens' shape will be very different to humans'.
Whether we will ever be able to communicate with any aliens we meet is another story, however given the amount of ways a modern science lab can send and recieve energy I think we have at least a chance. An interesting side note would be if Mass Effect had a point with the "Cypher", I'm no linguist but it's possible that there is a shared, cultural ability to understand language, and we wouldn't have to particular "Cypher" of this species. We will only have to wait, and hope to one day be able to see.