What beliefs or hypotheses do you hold strongly despite not feeling confident that you can necessarily prove or evince it?
Let hear them conjects
You're viewing a single thread.
I believe that life as we know it exists somewhere else in the universe .
Tied to this, I believe there is no intelligent life close enough to ever reach us physically (short of freezing themselves and traveling millions of years, but we really aren't worth that trip lol) I don't believe faster than light travel will ever exist.
Yeah, I’ve lost my interest in their being other intelligent life in the universe. It’s pretty clear we’ll never be able to meet and quite likely never be able to even see the evidence for their existence. So, how does it matter?
Yeah, I don't think there's intelligent life in our galaxy. Life definitely, on the level of microbes. But probably nothing higher.
I believe the opposite.
I think there’s so much evidence of intelligent alien life visiting us that it takes a massive act of denial and self-delusion to ignore it.
In fact, I think the idea that alien evidence is all faked is a massively unbelievable conspiracy theory. The alien hoax would require a level of secret conspiracy that puts chemtrails or CIA mind control conspiracy theories to shame.
The organization necessary to produce the constant stream of alien evidence would dwarf the Manhattan Project.
In the same respect the level of organization and silence required to hide such evidence is extraordinary. It's every government of every country that would have to keep what they know under wraps. The more people involved in a conspiracy the more likely it is for the silence to be broken. It's not that every bit of "evidence" is faked, it's that the majority of it that comes from a government source is misinterpreted from someone who wants it to be aliens as opposed to having an independent expert in whatever field study it.
As far as we can tell, other than people looking to sell books, all the "evidence" we have of visitations/technology has been disproven by either independent analysis of footage, or the eventual release of government documentation that shows it was an experiment "we" conducted. Those kinds of things are kept confidential for a certain amount of time in case they are connected to potential military research.
There is absolutely nothing from what we currently understand about physics that would allow for traveling the kinds of distances necessary. The vast majority of what is left to understand about how "physics" works is in relation to the types of energy/particles that don't interact with matter as we currently understand it so it couldn't carry anything "physical" with it, unless we're now talking about "dark matter" aliens, but if that were the case then we'd have no evidence of their existence because we can't observe that as it doesn't interact with the matter we have access to. A camera cant capture a "dark matter" substance.
I say all of this as someone who WANTS aliens to exist and be able to visit us. It's very upsetting to me to think it isn't possible lol
What "evidence"? Lmfao what the fuck are you talking about?
Has anyone calculated like "the odds" of it probabalistically?
If you take standard cosmological assumptions (the universe is infinite and homogeonous) then the odds are 100% as everything that is physically possible happens infinite times.
unless you mean the observable universe, in which case we dont know, but given the vast scale of it is likely very close to 1. We cant calculate it without knowing how likely life is to form in the first place.
I'm not sure exactly how else you might calculate it, but, we know life is possible, so in an infinitely large universe, containing infinite stars with infinite planets existing for an infinite amount of time, the odds of life existing on another planet can't be less than 100%.
The Drake Equation is a probabilistic formula meant to derive the number of civilizations which humans could potentially communicate with.
The fermi paradox does challenge the formula though, as it implies fi and/or fc are very small or zero.
What if the earth is a singular and universal outlier?
That's just arrogant.
For life in general I would agree but for human level intelligence I'm not so sure, in our galaxy anyway. The number of things that had to line up for us to be the dominant lifeform on the planet is enormous.
Goldilocks zone. Life. Large outer gas giants. Complex life (someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe this has only happened once in 4B years / all complex lifeforms have a common ancestor) Oxygen tolerant life. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Multiple mass extinctions. Planet habitable for enormously long periods. Evolution of large brains for the first time. Etc
Please subtract the assumptions and respond to specific claim. Life is a lottery. What are the equivalent chances of that in coinflips analogy and then give the response in the approximate amount of times that could happen over an eternity or minimally the "death of our galaxy or universe" context
I'll break it down further.
We know life is possible, because we're here.
Nobody knows the exact odds of life being created, but we know it's >0. One in a billion? Trillion?
So imagine a trillion sided die. If you roll a 1, life is created.
If you get only one chance, you probably aren't creating life, but if you are allowed to roll the die constantly from the instant of the big bang, until the end of time, you WILL roll a one. Now, imagine an infinite number of planets rolling an infinite number of trillion sided dice for billions of years.
Sure, it's very unlikely for any individual roll to be 1, but it's downright IMPOSSIBLE for NONE of them to EVER roll it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that there are aliens flying around and probing people. I don't believe that's true at all. But there is life out there. Maybe it's just plants or bacteria, or some form of living rock that we've never encountered before, but it's out there.
I say it's arrogant because Earth is a tiny insignificant speck in the universe, and assuming that only YOUR planet can randomly produce life is a very self centered point of view.
Bold of you to assume life on earth originated on earth.
Chances are they won't be oxygen breathers anyway.
Don’t be too sure about that. If you look around online, you should be able to find chemistry predictions for intelligent life. While not assuming any compatible chemistry, we can look at some of the basic types of reactions needed to support a life form and the type of environment we assume. Apparently carbon and oxygen based chemistry is most favorable
Do we already have that with the crazy anerobic volcano or the high-temperature deep sea vent dwelling microorganisms or something?
We don't have enough data about the frequency of life to say for sure, since we only have one data point (our planet). If we knew more about how life can arise originally, then perhaps we could make a prediction.
It was calculated decades ago. I remember Carl Sagan talking about it.
I think you're referring to the Drake Equation, but that's more of a thought experiment, there's no way to calculate any of the required probabilities inputted to the equation to be able to calculate the output.