Poll: Do you believe in aliens?

[Flaming Narwhal]

I believe that the possibility of alien life is astronomically (pun) large.

I don't think we'll ever encounter them though.
Simply too far away.

Same as this guy.

 

[Deonysus]

Well, since our universe is so freaking large, I find it quite hard to believe that we are the only life forms around, especial now that we even have found other planets that both have water and a supposedly stable atmosphere.
I would also like to point out that, even if we spend a 1 000 years exploring, it's not certain that we will find other beings that have reached an similar level of intelligence as we humans. Thou when we finally find some one else out there, I guess they might have spent an equal amount of time looking for other intelligent beings. Leading to an hopefully peaceful encounter.
Regarding how they may look can be just about bloody anything. It all comes down to what kind of trials they may encounter on their very home planet. And that can be everything from a complete ocean planet to something similar to Dune. Gravity will have an effect, how far away the sun is and what sort of chemical compositions exist on the planet, hell, its oceans may very well be made out of burning acid.

 

[mikespoff]

The incredible improbability of life on Earth dwarfs the number of stars in the universe.

I'd assume that such a wildly unlikely event has not happened again.

Then you might want to recheck your numbers. Current cosmological view of the universe says that it's most likely to be infinite in size.

No, really, current cosmological view (in the professional astrophysics community) definitely does not say that the universe is mathematically infinite.

(If you want to consider it infinite in the sense of "all-encompassing", that's fine, but it's mathematically finite and dimensionally bounded).

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Mathematically, it's quite unlikely that we are the only intelligent life - let alone the only life - in this universe. So I can say that yes, I am convinced that "we are not alone".
Our galaxy, the milky way, alone has up to 300 billion stars. That's 300,000,000,000. Now if only every tenth star has planets, that's still 30,000,000,000 (30 billion). Now if one in every thousand solar systems would have life, that would still be 30,000,000 (30 million) systems. Now if one of every thousand systems with a planet with life sports intelligent life, that would still be 30,000 (30 thousand) systems and thus civilizations.

And that's in our galaxy alone. At the moment 50 billion (50,000,000,000) galaxies are observable from earth, each with several billions of stars in them...
Heck, even if only every millionth galaxy had one single planet bearing intelligent life, it would still amount to 50 thousand civilizations.

On the other hand, I don't believe in the "grays" visiting us and cover up conspirations. As any life form would have to adhere to the same physics as we do, it's just not feasable that they would travel here, or even have remote contact.

i have always agreed with the mathematical viewpoint of this, however you never know on us having contact, look how much science has gone forward (as far as mankind goes) in the past 200 years? look at 400 years from now, which is very relatively young, hell the United States isn't even that old, look how far science might go/be, I seriously doubt we won't have found a way around space travel/light travel

 

[AgentNein]

The incredible improbability of life on Earth dwarfs the number of stars in the universe.

I'd assume that such a wildly unlikely event has not happened again.

Then you might want to recheck your numbers. Current cosmological view of the universe says that it's most likely to be infinite in size.

No, really, current cosmological view (in the professional astrophysics community) definitely does not say that the universe is mathematically infinite.

(If you want to consider it infinite in the sense of "all-encompassing", that's fine, but it's mathematically finite and dimensionally bounded).

"Recent measurements (c. 2001) by a number of ground-based and balloon-based experiments, including MAT/TOCO, Boomerang, Maxima, and DASI, have shown that the brightest spots are about 1 degree across. Thus the universe was known to be flat to within about 15% accuracy prior to the WMAP results. WMAP has confirmed this result with very high accuracy and precision. We now know that the universe is flat with only a 0.5% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe. All we can truly conclude is that the Universe is much larger than the volume we can directly observe."

NASA.

probably flat universe=probably infinite universe.

 

[RaNDM G]

I believe it's a big universe and that it's more than likely a life-sustaining planet similar to Earth is out there. There may or may not be extraterrestrial life, but the potential is always there.