regwec
Make Mine Marble
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2005
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- 28,473
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No real probability. To give them credit, even people who do believe in a supreme being tend not to think of it as a 'giant bearded man' nowadays.Damn, then I'd like to see the statistics for a giant bearded man in the sky declaring 'let there be light' or 'life, finds a way'.
I'm not 'disagreeing' with anything as such, I am just saying that it is so unlikely that it barely merits consideration. Obviously, I am expressing my own view.
You're right to say that scientists don't know everything. Scientists themselves are the first to point this out, and it is the starting point of all empirical research. What you shouldn't think is that science can't explain everything. It can, because 'science' is really just a description of explaining the physical through evidence and experimentation.
Allied to that point is that the role of the scientist is to challenge all 'accepted' knowledge. This is why scientists publish their methods and data in tedious detail- so that other scientists can review it and challenge it. Theories are improved and strengthened by this process. For instance, Isaac Newton's theory of gravity is much more complete today.
The point I would seek to make is that you shouldn't take the inevitable fact that scientists don't know everything to be a supporting argument for something that is overwhelmingly unlikely- like human progress being the work of alien visitors. There is nothing wrong with science fiction, but you should apply the same scepticism to it as you would any other fiction.
You're right to say that the cognitive ability of a human being is limited. I am currently reading a very dense book on the Reformation, and I am lucky if I can recall half of the names and dates from one chapter as I move to the next.
Nevertheless, we're really just talking about probabilities here. I agree with everyone else here that there is almost certainly alien life, and most probably intelligent alien life, elsewhere in the universe. The sheer size that physicists think the universe is makes it seem inevitable. All the same, the distances involved also render the possibility of an alien visit very remote. It is more likely now that we are sending radio waves out into space all the time, but before the last few hundred years we would have been an entirely silent an anonymous planet. You must also consider that there is no evidence for any alien visitors. What are the chances that they visited us, made a significant impact on our development, but left no evidence at all? Nothing is impossible, but I'm not sure that it is much more likely than any of the creation myths of the world's religions.
Your last point is a good one- what are the 'rules' for life? You can find a broad mix of views on this subject. It seems that there must be some 'rules', otherwise every planet, moon and asteroid would support life. An atmosphere seems like a certainty, but what constitutes a breathable one? The planet must surely have a temperature low enough for elements not to vaporize, but high enough for chemical reactions to take place. But what is the 'sweet spot'? We know what our ideal conditions are, but we have never found alien life, and we don't know how different it might be to the animals and plants on Earth, so how can we say how universal our concept of ideal conditions is?
Of course no theory is 'absolute', otherwise we wouldn't describe it as a theory. We are just considering probabilities by extrapolating on data that we do have. So I would say that 'intelligent life outside our galaxy' = overwhelmingly likely, and 'intelligent life inside our galaxy = much less likely but certainly not impossible'.
t:
. Kinda gross, really lol.
. I can just imagine their secondary mission was to kidnap Bay, stick him in a pod and eject him off into space when they were far enough away from earth.
