Do you think any aliens exist in the universe?

[aupmanyav]

I’d love to know for sure!

So would I, but in my case at least, it might not be possible. At the age of 82, how many more years I can hope to live? Things happen in their own time. So many before me also did not live to know many things, even Socrates and Laozi. No regrets.

 

[Elixir]

At the age of 82, how many more years I can hope to live?

How long do you want to live? (Asking myself as well). You can certainly hope to live another thirty years if you’re okay with pain, immobility and the other niceties of old age.
At 75 I’m pretty strong, but experience a lot more pain than I used to. At this rate of deterioration I figure 15-20 years is Max, unless new interventions arise. There’s not a lot of profit for such pursuits so I’m not even hoping for it. YMMV

 

[aupmanyav]

At least till Feb3, 2027 for both, my wife and myself, when we can celebrate the 60th anniversary of our marriage, and perhaps see the face of my my great-grandchild. I am urging my grand daughter to complete the task.

 

[ZiprHead]

He has the support of Elon Musk.

Are we sure Elon isn't an alien? He looks slightly... off.

 

[steve_bank]

It would certainly be a problem for literal creationists.

Remember the movie The Andromeda Strain?

The Andromeda Strain (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If there is something detected by a probe somewhere in the solar system there will be efforts to bring it back here.

 

[ideologyhunter]

If we ever locate them, they better hope they have a tech edge on us, because, if they're sitting on rare metals and gems that they consider merely picturesque, they'll need to get caught up with Aztec and Inca history, stat.

 

[ZiprHead]

If we ever locate them, they better hope they have a tech edge on us, because, if they're sitting on rare metals and gems that they consider merely picturesque, they'll need to get caught up with Aztec and Inca history, stat.

You just described the plot of the movie Avatar.

 

[Jarhyn]

Recently people have been discussing "mirror life" online, and the fact that it could very well be incompatible with "lefty life" (implying "lefty life is equally likely to be incompatible in exactly the same ways").

One possible outcome is that alien life does exist as I have stated (some kind of beachhead terraforming spore or some such), but that this life could very well be right handed as we are left.

Imagine that, that we get a communication from alien neighbors who moved in only to realize that actually visiting each other could result in widespread destruction just because someone breaths some gingivitis or whatever into the atmosphere.

 

[pood]

Recently people have been discussing "mirror life" online, and the fact that it could very well be incompatible with "lefty life" (implying "lefty life is equally likely to be incompatible in exactly the same ways").

One possible outcome is that alien life does exist as I have stated (some kind of beachhead terraforming spore or some such), but that this life could very well be right handed as we are left.

Imagine that, that we get a communication from alien neighbors who moved in only to realize that actually visiting each other could result in widespread destruction just because someone breaths some gingivitis or whatever into the atmosphere.

I’m more inclined to think alien biochemistries would be so different from one another that they couldn’t affect one another for good or ill, and certainly one could not and most assuredly would not want to eat the other. If speculative silicon life forms existed, for example, I imagine to us they would be like living rocks, and nobody wants to eat a rock.

More speculatively, I wonder whether their arrow of time would be the same as ours. The block world picture of space time posits that the future exists along with the past, and we know that at the microscopic level processes are time symmetric, with no arrow of time. Could it be possible that an alien intelligence remembers the future? This was the theme of the sci-fi flick Arrival, which left any number of philosophical riddles to ponder include the old standby of free will.

Also, their metabolic rates and sense of the passage of time might be quite different. On earth flies live only about 24 hours, but that is from our point of view. What about theirs? I was recently reading that the reason flies so effortlessly escape our efforts to swat them is that because to them, we and our swatters and everything else move in super slow motion. Perhaps a fly, if it has a distinct temporal passage sense at all, experiences 100 years of temporal passage for the 24 hours we see? What if we found a world we considered dead, only to discover that its life forms move only once every hundred years as we count time?

All sorts of tantalizing questions about potential contact with an alien intelligences. It is often thought that we could communicate because of a shared common math, but this too has been seriously questioned, and it has been argued that alien maths could be unrecognizably different from our own. This might depend on how much we think math is discovered and how much we think it is invented.

 

[Jarhyn]

Recently people have been discussing "mirror life" online, and the fact that it could very well be incompatible with "lefty life" (implying "lefty life is equally likely to be incompatible in exactly the same ways").

One possible outcome is that alien life does exist as I have stated (some kind of beachhead terraforming spore or some such), but that this life could very well be right handed as we are left.

Imagine that, that we get a communication from alien neighbors who moved in only to realize that actually visiting each other could result in widespread destruction just because someone breaths some gingivitis or whatever into the atmosphere.

I’m more inclined to think alien biochemistries would be so different from one another that they couldn’t affect one another for good or ill, and certainly one could not and most assuredly would not want to eat the other. If speculative silicon life forms existed, for example, I imagine to us they would be like living rocks, and nobody wants to eat a rock.

More speculatively, I wonder whether their arrow of time would be the same as ours. The block world picture of space time posits that the future exists along with the past, and we know that at the microscopic level processes are time symmetric, with no arrow of time. Could it be possible that an alien intelligence remembers the future? This was the theme of the sci-fi flick Arrival, which left any number of philosophical riddles to ponder include the old standby of free will.

Also, their metabolic rates and sense of the passage of time might be quite different. On earth flies live only about 24 hours, but that is from our point of view. What about theirs? I was recently reading that the reason flies so effortlessly escape our efforts to swat them is that because to them, we and our swatters and everything else move in super slow motion. Perhaps a fly, if it has a distinct temporal passage sense at all, experiences 100 years of temporal passage for the 24 hours we see? What if we found a world we considered dead, only to discover that its life forms move only once every hundred years as we count time?

All sorts of tantalizing questions about potential contact with an alien intelligences. It is often thought that we could communicate because of a shared common math, but this too has been seriously questioned, and it has been argued that alien maths could be unrecognizably different from our own. This might depend on how much we think math is discovered and how much we think it is invented.

Yeah, a lot depends on how fast whatever switch their cognition is based on is as to how they perceive time. Maybe they get here and they take 20 years just to say "hello" once, and wondering at this weird static they are getting in response and their "fast" computers are to us so slow as to be ancient tech.

But other paradigms of life are going to create varieties of chemicals that could have all manner of horrific incompatibilities. As it is, all sorts of stuff is noxious to all sorts of stuff here on earth.

Chemicals are pouring off of everything that lives here. Remember, Vicks vapor rub is a mirror of methamphetamine. Thalidomide's structure in one arrangement prevents nausea and in a other creates birth defects, and complex molecules may very well have much more complicated issues if manufactured right handed.

I would say we should actively study this and other concepts of life, however, specifically so that we know how to be as compatible as possible with them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Recently people have been discussing "mirror life" online, and the fact that it could very well be incompatible with "lefty life" (implying "lefty life is equally likely to be incompatible in exactly the same ways").

One possible outcome is that alien life does exist as I have stated (some kind of beachhead terraforming spore or some such), but that this life could very well be right handed as we are left.

Imagine that, that we get a communication from alien neighbors who moved in only to realize that actually visiting each other could result in widespread destruction just because someone breaths some gingivitis or whatever into the atmosphere.

If it's wrong-way life it has no way to exploit us. It could establish a separate, opposite ecosystem if given the opportunity, but the life we bring with us isn't exactly adapted to setting up shop in what's basically a sterile ecosystem to it.

Nasty reversed chemicals exist but there's no reason to think the life makes them.

 

[Jarhyn]

Recently people have been discussing "mirror life" online, and the fact that it could very well be incompatible with "lefty life" (implying "lefty life is equally likely to be incompatible in exactly the same ways").

One possible outcome is that alien life does exist as I have stated (some kind of beachhead terraforming spore or some such), but that this life could very well be right handed as we are left.

Imagine that, that we get a communication from alien neighbors who moved in only to realize that actually visiting each other could result in widespread destruction just because someone breaths some gingivitis or whatever into the atmosphere.

If it's wrong-way life it has no way to exploit us. It could establish a separate, opposite ecosystem if given the opportunity, but the life we bring with us isn't exactly adapted to setting up shop in what's basically a sterile ecosystem to it.

Nasty reversed chemicals exist but there's no reason to think the life makes them.

Well, that's the point I think. Imagine a wrong-way life that has been exposed to other-ways life and come into conflict more than once.

Eventually, these apocalyptic moments would cause there to be dramatic selection pressure to a form that tolerates mirror life, but is not necessarily tolerable to mirror life, other than it's exact mirror!

The point is to discuss aliens that might have won the battle of chirality towards the other end, because we're in a thread talking about aliens. For all we know that's a symmetric war that ends like a coin flip on worlds such as ours!

But after making contact, one side or the other wins, and now they have knowledge of what happens and how to engineer solutions towards hardness against such threats.

I present this as an argument that we should study such life intensely, specifically and only with exact mirrors of extant and common organisms... That way, if they are deadly to us, their foil is ubiquitous.