if the chanses of us being alone in the uneverse are lower than .01 percent, why havnt we found any life yet?

Question

and i was reading about that planet 20.5 lightyears away... they were making a big deal out of b.s. that planet cant support life. and also what if we found out that (JUST SAYING) jupiter supported life. remember that not every life form requires the same things. maybe they dont require oxygen to survive. what would happen then? and the one that i want to ask the most: If you were forced to believe that there are other life forms out there, when do you think first contact will be?

Answer 1

We haven't found life yet because we haven't even been to a planet in our own system (probes and rovers are great but they can only do so much) to find life.
Its out there, we just haven't found it yet. We need patience to find it.
And life does NOT mean that its intelligent or capable of space travel. Life could be as simple as bacteria, mosses or lichens, or small microbes.

Answer 2

Your statement is interesting, but the question seems to be phrased wrong. We haven't found any life yet simply because we have only visited the moon, Venus and Mars and gathered information in sufficient amount to support the supposition that there is, or is not, life. With the planet 20.5 years away, there are a lot of "maybees" in the arguement that it could support life.

You might want to read Carl Sagan's book COSMOS. It is dated, but has a chapter discussing the possible number of planets with an intellegent civilization. Of course, comparing that to the number of planets we expect to be around, the probability is rather low for intellegent civilization contact. So save those Klingon specials for a while. On the other hand, we may run into some blobs of goo and green slime, which is admittedly life, but after the beings on Star Trek and Star Wars, are incredibly boring.

Answer 3

The distances involved are what is most problamatic. It is considered highly likely that liquid water is required for life, this rules out jupiter. The assumptions about likely hood of life and technological advancement that were used to calculate the probability of other life that you quoted, would suggest that the nearest advanced life would still be 100's or 1000's of light years away from us. If they were advanced enough to run around the universe like star trek there we would be one of billions of star systems they might choose to visit. You also have to realize that it is entirely possible that faster than light speed travel is impossible to achieve and still be matter. This would make long distance space travel impossible except for generational ships. I take it as a given that there is extra terrestrial life. I also think that if the kind of space travel required to visit other planets is possible that it would be a difficult enough process that the idea of coming here just to mutilate cattle and make crop circles is absurd. I also think that people need to realize that manned extra solar space flight might be impossible. I haven't seen any physics that suggest humans could even approach light speed and survive. On the other hand they said we couldn't break the sound barrier and survive, so maybe we can.

Answer 4

Those are all great questions, and people really don't know what to expect from life on other planets.

We look for life that looks like things we see on Earth. It's possible that life exists on other planets in our solar system, but it would have to be so different from what we know as life, that we might not recognize it if we looked right at it!

If life exists on a planet in another solar system, we simply have no way to detect it. We can't see that far with enough detail. There's also no reason to assume that life forms on other planets would have light sources on their planets (as we do), which would make them even harder to detect.

As far as contact goes, it could be a while. If we were able to detect life on another planet, there's no reason to think that we would have any way of communicating with it. Radio signals would depend on them having a level of technology similar to our own, and that they would be listening for us. Physical contact would probably depend on them having found a way to travel much faster than the speed of light (which our current theory says is impossible), or having left toward our planet a very long time ago.

You might be interested in learning about a program called SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), which essentially listens for signals from outside of our own planet that are not random background noise. If you've seen the movie or read the book CONTACT, this is the program that detects the signal. They actually have a program you can download that will allow the folks at SETI to use your computer when it's idle to process data they've collected to search for patterns, so you can actually do your part to help out. You'd probably want to talk to your parents before downloading something like this, though. (if you're a minor, anyway.)

Answer 5

That's a great question. Basically the answer to whether there is life in the universe is always a good one.

It's like this, we think our solar system is not ALL that uncommon, it's pretty average, on balance. So simply because there are such large numbers involved. If we send another probe to Titan or Europa or Encleadus or Mars and find life, it's VERY likely going to be microbial or something similar to microbial life forms. IF we can determine that those microbes didn't originate on Earth. It would mean for sure that life originated two separate times in one solar system, that's allows us to say hey, it arose once on a planet almost perfect for "our kind of life" and independently on a planet with another or maybe similiar kind of biochemistry. And that would mean that life (microbial life at least) is EVERYWHERE or probably on every 10th or 20th planet you find. (so far we've found 3-4 super-earth type worlds and dozens of larger Jupiter type worlds, when you start counting planets and large moons, there are billions or tens of billions of possible good homes for life in just our Galaxy.

On whether there is advanced life, It's VERY likely that there other civilizations in this galaxy. The reasons is simple but you have to put up with some math and some history.

Back in the 60's some scientists asked the very same question, and came out with a basic formula that figures that out.

The main idea was fleshed out by a scientist named Frank Drake, he basically put some of the parts of the question together differently and assigned a likelyhood/probability to each.

Drake asked the question this way, what was the likelyhood of us communicating with another technically advanced civilization. Since that question breaks down, into parts that we can discover by looking around the universe, over time , we will be able to make a very good guestimate of how many civilizations are out there.

For instance one "factor" in his equasion was "the likelyhood of a sunlike star"

Another "factor" was "The likelyhood of a sunlike star with planets like Earth" - this gives you the basic idea.

The link here, takes you to a PBS special from some time ago which allows you to plug different numbers in and guess how many other civilizations there might be!

But this is where you can keep an eye on the headlines,

The French have recently launched a space-telescope which should be able to find "Earthlike" planets.

Corot Launched : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6203161.stm,
when "Corot" finds some planets, we can then do math to figure out how common they are ,and basically "know" one of the numbers Drake only could guess at in the 1960's.

In a few years the US/NASA will - funding allowed - be able to launch an satelite in 2008 called "Kepler" which will search for "Earthlike" finding space-telescope of our own.

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/tpf_techwed_040526.html

Drake Equation : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/drake.html

Another question similar to yours is whether we will contact or ever be contacted by an alien civilization.

The SETI program in the 1990's and presently is designed to discovery signals from alien civilizations, and it is regularly if not constantly listening towards the stars for the faintest of signals.

But this question actually has a suprising answer, the answer may ALREADY be yes. The transmission is called the "Wow" signal and was detected on August 15,1977.

IF we asume the "Wow signal" is genuine, we would have been able to detect an alien civilization's message without it being specifically "for" us, which is a rare find, but after only 80 or 90 years could potentially mean the universe is crawling with life!

However, because it's just a fluke since we have not since found another "Wow" type signal,we shouldn't get too excited.

In the movie Contact (based on the Carl Sagan novel), the first 1/2 of the movie shows what a "first contact" situation might actually be like. It's unlikely that the signal would be able to be interpreted in the first couple of years or maybe even decades.

An open and interesting socioloigcal question is what would the immediate aftermath (on Earth) be of a first contact situation, the movie points out some of the "popular" disruptions to society.

Corot : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6203161.stm
Kepler and Corot : http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/tpf_techwed_040526.html
Drake Equation : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/drake.html
The WOW signal : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow%21_signal
Contact : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/

Answer 6

Life in other planets do not necessarily mean intelligent life,other worlds might harbor life as microbes that can not be detected,or the planet could be covered with water like our oceans,the only way to find out,is to send probes,but even that would take lifetimes of traveling through space

Answer 7

Universe is huge. It's so big even if there are bunch of aliens out there chances of them running into each other is not good.

So just think how many Ferraris are on streets in the US. Not that many. Pretty rare to see one of those. Now think what are the chance of seeing two Ferraris run into each other in an accident. Even rarer.

Answer 8

huh? who says they haven't already? no. i don't read too much science fiction 'cause today's fiction is tomorrow's fact! first & foremost, if & when these guys/gals (or whatever they'll be) decide to 'arrive', rest assured because they managed to 'get here', that lightyear thing won't mean fudge to them. their technology will be way better than ours (lightyears ahead of us-anywhere on this planet). what concerns me is that when they arrive, and assuming they don't have hostile intents, they'll take one look at us humans, think us all unworthy & split! heck! sometimes human behavior oftens distresses me & i live here!

Answer 9

The Universe is a very massive place, and we have not even covered the door mat yet.