Well, it's pretty obvious that we are making great strides in finding planets that could support life (as we know it) and that, at some point one of these planets will be settled on by Earthlings. If they find that the inhabitants of that planet have little/no intelligence then a new breed will develop on that planet (maybe even some outcrossing). They will have to be careful to avoid any planet where more intelligent life already exists. How life ever started is still a mystery but, if we accept this migration to another planet as a certainty (or even a distinct possibility), we would have to be very conceited to believe that everything started on this planet. There is plenty of reported evidence that aliens must have been present on this planet at some stage. How about this as an amusing thought. God was an astronaut and dropped off Adam to check out Earth. Adam was a sex craved alien and Eve was a gorilla. Apparently Adam is believed to have threatened Eve by saying "I'm going to **** some sense into you"
With space being so vast, it's hard to believe that aliens have been here. We've had a good look at this small, run of the mill galaxy which is located way out in the boonies. And we've found no life as far out as 40,000 light years. It's probably reasonable to believe that there'll be no thinking life in the Milky Way, if that's the case, then we have to look at our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2,000,000 lights years away. So unless aliens can somehow find a way of circumventing time, we're probably alone in this part of the Universe.
At the moment we could well be alone. But we don't even know when time started. We are a mere dot in time. Advanced life could have existed on a planet in another Galaxy billions of years ago. What do you reckon they would have done long before their planet expired?
The trouble is Cyc, most people will only believe what they can conceive or what has been proved. Guess what prehistoric man would have said was impossible. Or even civilised people in the last century or so.
I think we need to place our faith in what we believe to be the most probable. Sure others in the past have come up with all sorts of strange stuff to explain the world around them, but as we became more advanced, we better understood reality. There was once a time when the sky was believed to be toted upon the shoulders of Atlas. We now know this to be false, but as they had little knowledge of the real world, this was what they came up with. It's understandable. Sadly though, the world is full of bullshit beliefs. And I'm not suggesting that your opinions can be among them, but there are folk out there who actually believe that lizard people actually exist. Public Policy Polling published information suggesting that some 12 million American people believe lizard people control politics, and 47 million of them think the government is using mind controlling technology emitted from our televisions, to put them under their thumb. I don't think I want to go down that path, I'll take what a more reputable source can offer.
This surely should just be called “Ron: As Yet Untitled”, in homage to the Dave show “Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled”. You do not have to come up with a title until the end as it is completely unscripted.
I think what you are saying Cyc (correct me if I'm wrong) is that what we know is what is and what we don't know can't be - until we know it.
Logic decrees that there must be life somewhere else in the universe. Whether it has developed more intelligence than us is a matter for conjecture. I would take exception to the notion that we would go to another planet for the purpose of “starting life”. If we were able to travel to another planet that was habitable to our species, it is reasonable to conclude that a form of life, similar to some of the vast array of life forms on this planet, would have evolved there already. We could land on a planet akin to Jurassic Park or one that is more advanced than ours but with no interest in the conquest of space. The imperfection of evolution. In the year 2525, if man is still alive, he may have evolved arms long enough to reach the middle of his back or have removed the itching gene from the human genome by eugenics.
That's very true QM. Sorry, I didn't really mean start life in the general sense. I was meaning start our lives (as in emigrating to another country). Whatever life might exist there would co-exist with humans. There could even be some interesting results from inter breeding. Who's to say for certain that didn't happen here?
The Earth will be destroyed when our Sun becomes a Red Giant because it will have already boiled our planet dry (therefore, ending all life) as it expands – a form of global warming that no amount of wind turbines will prevent – and will swallow it up even though scientists predict that the Earth may be pushed away from the Sun as it loses mass and energy. The habitable Earth only has about a billion years left but we will probably have become extinct by then. Or we could have developed plans to move to one of the outer planets by then if we find that as they warm up they have oceans of water and solid surfaces in the new model of the solar system.
Any life smarter than us somewhere in the universe may have decided to leave us alone because it would be detrimental to our existence to show us our inadequacies. We do know when time started – the big bang was 4.57 billion years ago, our Sun is about 40 million years old. My dad had a Vauxhall Viva back in the 70s with the original date-stamped log book – and it had not been clocked.
