It kind of belongs here- It has political consequences- Extraterrestrials.

[Person Man]

The moderator should just move it if they don't agree. I personally think that there are perhaps a couple of modern (somewhere between compasses and muskets and intellstellar travel and indefinite life cycles) civilizations in our galaxy but about 99% of them destroy themselves over the course of the history of the cosmos and currently there are a few dozen Geologically old and very advanced civilizations in our galaxy. Beyond that, I'm sure there are hundreds of millions of planets with micobes and millions of planets that are teeming with something interesting. 

[Fritz]

Yes, and they are watching us.

[TNF]

There have to be.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Option 2 ("never" to be interpreted as "never in a foreseeable future").

[Tender Branson]

Yes, and they are watching us.

[John Dibble]

Probably, but it's doubtful they are aware of our existence. Single celled organisms are likely "common", whereas complex life is likely much more rare, and life intelligent enough to invent advanced technology is even rarer than that.

[Space7]

The moderator should just move it if they don't agree. I personally think that there are perhaps a couple of modern (somewhere between compasses and muskets and intellstellar travel and indefinite life cycles) civilizations in our galaxy but about 99% of them destroy themselves over the course of the history of the cosmos and currently there are a few dozen Geologically old and very advanced civilizations in our galaxy. Beyond that, I'm sure there are hundreds of millions of planets with micobes and millions of planets that are teeming with something interesting. 

Basically this, the galaxy is too massive and too old to not have any advanced civilizations.

I wonder what form of government they have?

If it were a one-person-one-vote system some races would have an unfair advantage because of massive population. Maybe it's a vote-by-planet system? Or a supreme dictatorship ruled by the first and most intelligent race?

Also,

Yes, and they are watching us.

[H. Ross Peron]

There have to be.

[Goldwater]

There have to be.

[barfbag]

Yes I've been abducted before because they wanted to study human feces. I made sure to stink up their bathroom.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Yes I've been abducted before because they wanted to study human feces. I made sure to stink up their bathroom.

You do realize that this forum is not an alien bathroom, don't you?

[barfbag]

I find it very hard to believe we're alone. Chances are that intelligent life is bound to happen somewhere along the line. However, we may never be able to prove such a thing. If we were to come into contact with extraterrestrial life, where would they fall on the political spectrum? How would they vote? What political policies would we need to implement to help their civil rights? By the time we find intelligent life on other planets, we may have a world government or if not develop a world government in order to work together to understand the new species. What should our foreign policy be towards these new life forms? We would have to have a diplomat to Mars or whichever other planets we find life on. Can you imagine the debt this could cause? Successful foreign policy could lead to aliens allowing us to drill on their planets for oil and fossil fuels. Life outside of earth could be earth shattering. We better never have a world government though.

[DemPGH]

Even if there is intelligent life "nearby," it will be a long, long time before we actually find it or interact with it. Space is just too vast, and until someone demonstrates warp speed or wormholes or whatever, it's just sci-fi.

The odds of life being out there are excellent; the odds of intelligent life, even if it's something like a whale or something we have not seen, like a bird species perhaps, not capable of building a radio, are less but still quite good. It is possible, though, that intelligent life is exceptionally rare and that conditions on Earth were just right at the right time. The nearest intelligent life could be on the other side of the galaxy.

In any event, if ET is out there, ET's got his own problems to deal with - he's probably not looking for us.

[Space7]

If we were to come into contact with extraterrestrial life, where would they fall on the political spectrum? How would they vote? What political policies would we need to implement to help their civil rights?

You say this as if we would assimilate them into our own culture. They would vote for their own affairs, in their own way.

We would have to have a diplomat to Mars or whichever other planets we find life on. Can you imagine the debt this could cause? Successful foreign policy could lead to aliens allowing us to drill on their planets for oil and fossil fuels. Life outside of earth could be earth shattering. We better never have a world government though.

A couple things:

We will not need a extraterrestrial diplomat in our solar system because we are exceedingly unlikely to find other intelligent life in our solar system. Remember, our Solar System is quite small. We have only four large, solid, round planets (including Earth) and 24 large, solid, round moons.

Of these bodies, only about 5 are expected to have any chance of life at all, let alone intelligent life. Asteroids and other small objects are even more unlikely because of their tiny size, and lack of nutrients and heat.

Extrastellar space is quite another matter though. With every solar system having an estimated 3 planets, each planet has about 2 moons... do the math.

'bout 50 million stars in an average galaxy...
Estimated 300 billion galaxies in the universe...

That gives us about 135 quintillion moons and planets in the universe, divide by, say, a billion, if you say life happens 1 in a billion, and that's still 135 trillion life-supporting planets. In an 13.77 billion-year old universe...

Well that's a lot of life, and a lot of time for super-intelligent cultures to develop.

It won't be us finding them, it will be them finding us.

Successful foreign policy could lead to aliens allowing us to drill on their planets for oil and fossil fuels.

Edit: Also, if you're looking for this type of fuel... there's plenty of natural gas in our Solar System. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has oceans of the stuff. Once we get decent space travel going, we'll have no lack of it, and no real need to disturb other races.

[angus]

Those discovery channel shows are always so narrow-minded.  They're looking for places with a mean annual temperature between zero and 100, because they want liquid water.  Presumably the only thermochemical reactions with which they're familiar involve sugar, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen.  Life could come from the strangest materials.  There could be a silicate brick that breathes, or a puff of smoke capable of organizing energy with its thoughts. 

Anyway, I didn't vote in the poll because I have no idea what life may or may not be out there.  My gut feeling is that there's probably lots of it, unimaginable to our limited minds, and we're probably newer than some of them, so they'll be observing and cataloging us long before we're aware of them.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Any life found in Earth-like conditions will almost certainly be carbon-based with water as the solvent,  Theoretically, boron-based life using ammonia as the solvent could exist at temperatures below 0C and silicon-based life using nydrogem sulfide  as the solvent could exist at much higher temperatures.  Indeed, it could be that silcon-based life exists on Venus now.

[barfbag]

If we were to come into contact with extraterrestrial life, where would they fall on the political spectrum? How would they vote? What political policies would we need to implement to help their civil rights?

You say this as if we would assimilate them into our own culture. They would vote for their own affairs, in their own way.

We would have to have a diplomat to Mars or whichever other planets we find life on. Can you imagine the debt this could cause? Successful foreign policy could lead to aliens allowing us to drill on their planets for oil and fossil fuels. Life outside of earth could be earth shattering. We better never have a world government though.

A couple things:

We will not need a extraterrestrial diplomat in our solar system because we are exceedingly unlikely to find other intelligent life in our solar system. Remember, our Solar System is quite small. We have only four large, solid, round planets (including Earth) and 24 large, solid, round moons.

Of these bodies, only about 5 are expected to have any chance of life at all, let alone intelligent life. Asteroids and other small objects are even more unlikely because of their tiny size, and lack of nutrients and heat.

Extrastellar space is quite another matter though. With every solar system having an estimated 3 planets, each planet has about 2 moons... do the math.

'bout 50 million stars in an average galaxy...
Estimated 300 billion galaxies in the universe...

That gives us about 135 quintillion moons and planets in the universe, divide by, say, a billion, if you say life happens 1 in a billion, and that's still 135 trillion life-supporting planets. In an 13.77 billion-year old universe...

Well that's a lot of life, and a lot of time for super-intelligent cultures to develop.

It won't be us finding them, it will be them finding us.

Successful foreign policy could lead to aliens allowing us to drill on their planets for oil and fossil fuels.

Edit: Also, if you're looking for this type of fuel... there's plenty of natural gas in our Solar System. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has oceans of the stuff. Once we get decent space travel going, we'll have no lack of it, and no real need to disturb other races.

I think I stated in so many words earlier that with the numbers we're dealing with, intelligent life is bound to be out there. It would've had three times the amount of time to advance as our solar system has too. Whether or not anyone will be able to get to the point of finding other intelligent life is doubtful. We'd be dealing with sounds, colors, shapes, and elements that we can't possibly think of.

[DemPGH]

Silicon is extremely unlikely to be a basis for life because it doesn't "play well" with other elements, its bonds are not very good for such things, and its abundance would be a problem.

A colleague used to joke, what would a silicon life form eat, glass? And what would it sh*t, sand?

Who knows, the point was, such things are pure sci-fi. Biochemistry actually operating outside the "goldilocks zone" is nearly impossible (perhaps not with an internal heat source), but we would be talking about some really, really exotic life. Not "little green men."

[Person Man]

 

Silicon is extremely unlikely to be a basis for life because it doesn't "play well" with other elements, its bonds are not very good for such things, and its abundance would be a problem.

A colleague used to joke, what would a silicon life form eat, glass? And what would it sh*t, sand?

Who knows, the point was, such things are pure sci-fi. Biochemistry actually operating outside the "goldilocks zone" is nearly impossible (perhaps not with an internal heat source), but we would be talking about some really, really exotic life. Not "little green men."

I lean towards this. I just don't see how anything else besides Carbon forming complex and stable molecules over a long period of time. Carbon just has more possibilities than Silicon, Boron or Sulfer, given its atomic weight and electron configuration. But barbag is taking this conversating in a good direction. What should happen if or when "it happens"?

[Space7]

What should happen if or when "it happens"?

Depends on the scenario. If we find some small, unintelligent life, we'll probably just study it from afar.

If we, by complete chance, actually found other intelligent life in our own solar system (unlikely), it would still depend on a variety of circumstances, like how strange their culture is (can we communicate with them?), and how difficult they are to get to (underneath 62 miles of ice, under the crust of Europa?).

If we are contacted by something outside of our solar system (that was intelligent enough to contact us), then presumably they'd have it all meticulously planned out how they would introduce themselves to us, and we could mostly just go along with it. This is probably unlikely in the near future though. I think that if there is an alien government watching us, they would wait for us to invent interstellar travel or something before they decide to offer us a place in government (Earth Zoo Hypothesis).

Galactic operations would be extremely difficult because of the sheer size of the galaxy, 120,000 light-years across. Perhaps it's more likely that there are just little "clusters" of solar systems where all the races know each other.

Maybe we're not near any of them and that's why we haven't been contacted yet.

[Vosem]

It's impossible to extrapolate from a sample size of one. We only know of one body that supports life. On our one body, during 4 billion years, life is thought to have only appeared once (from non-life); multi-cellular life is thought to have evolved once from unicellular life (this one I'm unsure about, correct me if I'm wrong); and intelligent life is thought to have evolved only once from multi-cellular life. 4 billion years, even by cosmic standards, is still an awfully long time for all of these things to have happened just once on a planet that can support a great deal of life. This gives me pause when considering the possibility of other intelligent life being 'out there'.

[Person Man]

It's impossible to extrapolate from a sample size of one. We only know of one body that supports life. On our one body, during 4 billion years, life is thought to have only appeared once (from non-life); multi-cellular life is thought to have evolved once from unicellular life (this one I'm unsure about, correct me if I'm wrong); and intelligent life is thought to have evolved only once from multi-cellular life. 4 billion years, even by cosmic standards, is still an awfully long time for all of these things to have happened just once on a planet that can support a great deal of life. This gives me pause when considering the possibility of other intelligent life being 'out there'.

Though there may be evidence that not all life on Earth had the same genesis. What is the deal with Pandoravirus?
And do the possibilties of many Earth-like extrasolar planets weigh into our consideration yet?

[DemPGH]

And as to Venus. . .

It's nearly 900 degrees F on Venus with an atmosphere so dense and heavy that it crushed the early probes that landed there. Biochemical processes would not work there. For starters, it's probably too hot for molecules to stick together, and the pressure would disrupt the process so that it's just not reasonable. Likewise, it's too cold on the outer planets and moons with not nearly enough sunlight. Titan, I think, could be Earth-like if it were warmed, or so goes the current thinking.

Silicon is extremely unlikely to be a basis for life because it doesn't "play well" with other elements, its bonds are not very good for such things, and its abundance would be a problem.

A colleague used to joke, what would a silicon life form eat, glass? And what would it sh*t, sand?

Who knows, the point was, such things are pure sci-fi. Biochemistry actually operating outside the "goldilocks zone" is nearly impossible (perhaps not with an internal heat source), but we would be talking about some really, really exotic life. Not "little green men."

I lean towards this. I just don't see how anything else besides Carbon forming complex and stable molecules over a long period of time. Carbon just has more possibilities than Silicon, Boron or Sulfer, given its atomic weight and electron configuration. But barbag is taking this conversating in a good direction. What should happen if or when "it happens"?

It's possible that other elements could be a basis for life, but it's unlikely. Carbon is so great because it's really, really abundant, it's soft, it's durable, and it forms good bonds. It's really ideal.

[Pessimistic Antineutrino]

It's a mathematical certainty that there are but at the same time it is probably so far away in time and space that if we find them at all it will not be for hundreds or even thousands of years.

[Person Man]

It's a mathematical certainty that there are but at the same time it is probably so far away in time and space that if we find them at all it will not be for hundreds or even thousands of years.

I would buy this. It will be interesting to see if we can know beyond a preponderence if there is biology on an exosolar super Earth we have spotted.