What will happen first?

Question

Do you think we'll find life on another planet?

Or

Do you think they'll find us first?

and do you think it could happen in this life time?

Answer 1

I think they've already found us but we just don't know it.

Answer 2

Just based on the numbers alone, I'm convinced that there has to be other sentient (self-aware), intelligent life forms out there in the Universe. But the distances involved are so huge that it's not likely we'll ever be able to become 'good friends' (or, for that matter, 'mortal enemies') with any of them. Then again, maybe there -is- some way (that we haven't even dreamed of as yet) to get around the limitation of faster than light travel.

The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has only been running for about 25 years and the amount of space that has been 'listened to' is nothing compared to what's out there.

OTOH, it could happen next week. That's the beauty of probabilities. You can pretty much guarantee that, if you flip 6 coins and repeat it 64 times, that one of those times they will all 6 come up heads. But it could happen on the 1'st try, or the last.

I kinda hope it happens within my lifetime, but who knows?

Doug

Answer 3

Neither is likely, if you mean intelligent life, not so much because of the distance between possible civilizations, but because of the distance between peaks of civilizations over time. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Human civilization, at least if measured from the invention of writing, and so the ability to remember an alien encounter, is about 5,000 years old so far. At the rate we're going, it's pretty unlikely that we'll last another 5,000 years before destroying our civilization through some means. The odds that another civilization hits its developmental peak and develops space travel AND lands on the Earth during this next 5000 year window, even if they came again and again after finding primitive life in an earlier visit, is tiny. Say they're coming by to check up on this planet periodically because they found life here 300 million years ago, and they're very stable and patient, so they come back every 5 million years to see how it's developing. Assuming that, the odds that their once-in-5-million-year visit hits during our 5000 year peak, are 1000 to 1. The odds in your lifetime, assuming you live another 100 years, are 50,000 to 1.

On the other hand, if by 'life' you accept 'traces of ancient fossilized bacteria, or perhaps primitive single-celled life in a water or methane ocean,' I think it's not too unlikely that we'll find one or the other on Mars or one of the satellites of Jupiter or Saturn, or inside a meteorite landing on Earth or on the Moon. It's probably not the case that life is all that rare, it's just unlikely that we encounter another life form during its intelligent peak. (The assumptions I made about an intelligent race living at this peak over hundreds of millions of years is awfully unlikely to begin with, given how likely WE are to be stable that long!)

Answer 4

I think we will find life on another planet in the next 100 years, but it will not be more than microbes.

I think we may detect technological civilizations in the next 500 years, but may never meet them. What we will have instead are their signals from many thousands to millions of years ago. If there were any in our galactic neighborhood that would make them contemporary to us we would likely have found them already.

We may have already been found. Our signals have been going out for about 100 years, in huge volume for about 50. If there is a planet within 100 light years that has a civilization sufficiently advanced that they do not use EM communications (meaning undetectable to us) but know how to detect it, they may be listening to Burns and Allen right now and learning about us. But without extreme technology or physics we have not discovered, it would take many thousands of years to get here.

Answer 5

We'll find life on another planet first - but it won't be "intelligent" life.

There is a fair chance that it could happen in our lifetimes, as long as you accept one of the gas giants moons as "another planet". The chances of finding life outside our solar system in our lifetime is pretty remote I would think.

As to whether intelligent life will find us. Well, assuming they would want to come to a back-water of a galaxy on the edge of its own cluster (in other words, the back-end of beyond) then it would take them a very long time to get here and they'd probably be very disappointed when they got here. So why would they bother?

Answer 6

This is a very open question.
I'll give it a try anyways, lol.

I will gamble that we will find them first.

While reading an article earlier in a science magazine,
they mentioned the possibility of creating wormholes in space using negative energy.

Thing is..the universe is so vast,
To scour every star system for intelligent life in every which direction for mly (millions of light years) is a highly improbable phenomenon to occur for both humans and this other intelligent species, even if they have superior technologies, much less within our lifetimes.

But if anyone is to find intelligent life first, I'd put my bets on ourselves ;p (provided we, as a race, survive that long!)

Answer 7

Our expectations never made sense to me. It is a possibility that life exists elsewhere. Assuming that they will be like us and be found like us is another matter. There are enough species on the planet to indicate that life can take many forms and even survive on inhospitable worlds.

With the age of the universe, it is also a possibility that other types of life have lived and died off.

When will we find each other -- who knows? I don't expect in our lifetime with the limitations of current technology.

Answer 8

Neither.
If there is other life, it is in some other galaxy and we can't reach it. If they were looking for us, we would have found each other by now.

Answer 9

They have pew pew lazorz.
We have a stick. Nuff said.

Answer 10

Isn't Dumbya frum anudder planet?....den if so...I'm afraid they found us arready!