Do you think there is life on other planets?

Question

Honestly, I'm very religious and believe in a God..so, a second question to go along with this: If there is, doesn't this kind of interfere with what the Bible says?

Answer 1

You've asked a couple of good but tricky questions.

The issues of deep faith and reconciling that faith to the increasing understanding mankind has over the universe is a significant challenge for certain fundamentalist faiths which tend to try to interpret the Bible or any other religious texts as literal documents.

If your particular faith happens to endorse such viewpoints, than it's likely that members will feel increasingly alienated by society as we discover things with certainty which we can "right now" only speculate or make educated guesses about.

What if aliens intentionally or otherwise,but undeniably contacted us tomorrow? as I mention below, the movie Contact takes a decidedly realistic but somewhat atheistic approach to such discoveries.

For myself, the question is twofold, it reinforces the REAL meaning of religious piety and faith, which is that the world/universe around us are temporal in nature, and that our faith also speaks to us at an existential / spiritual level, which is relatively unaffected by what happens here or what is discovered by science.

So faith grounded in the traditions which we hold dear, regarding family and the good soundness of society as a result are most stable and will probably weather anything
discovered in the future much better than other faiths not as well grounded.

There is a whole philosophical aspect to this topic which discusses the prospect/possibility of superior / hyper-intelligent entities which can/have created whole star systems or stellar sized engineering projects.

Finding evidence of such stellar-engineering projects would be compelling evidence - not just of life but of "God-like" qualities of that life.

In fact it's very likely (the universe being as vast as it is) ,that such entities exist or have existed, however, there are only one or two organizations of objects in the universe which have so far eluded our ability to explain them.

One is the super-symmetrical arrangement of equally very young blue-giant stars in "co-orbital" spaces of a totally quiet galactic center/black hole in the Andromeda galaxy. So far, nobody can explain how such a structure could exist or remain stable for more than a few hundred thousand years at most.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050920_andromeda_stars.html

To a bunch of herders and farmers , such hyper-intelligences - might best be described as God, since nothing in science precludes the possibility of God. Science generally simply seeks to the best of OUR abilities to find scientific explanations for what we see , rather than simply "give up" from an intellectual perspective, and state that God has done something, we can KNOW how something happens.

Otherwise, the basically the answer to whether there is life in the universe is always a good one.

Is there life in the universe, absolutely, the trillions of stars in the billions of known galaxies harbor a tremendous number of planets. It's certainly the case that somewhere perhaps in a galaxy far away or perhaps in our own galaxy, advanced civilizations have taken to the stars, but the universe being as vast as it is, we may never contact them.

To answer your question, It's hugely probable 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 likelihood/probability to each.

Drake asked the question this way, what was the likelihood 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 guesstimate of how many civilizations are out there.

For instance one "factor" in his equation was "the likelihood of a sun like star"

Another "factor" was "The likelihood 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 months the US/NASA will - funding allowed - be able to launch an satellite 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

One of Drakes "factors" was on how many worlds around a star does life develop independently

Titan has a thick atmosphere and a varied terrain with methane lakes, rivers and ice-mountains and so could be a candidate for some cold-methane based life-forms.

We know that Titan, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and a host of other moons of the outer solar system, are "geologically" active, in that they are being squeezed by gravity from their parent worlds sufficiently that there is very active geology, this geology is on the "surface" ice but also exists internally, Underneath the ice, perhaps dozens of meters or miles beneath, would be large, deep liquid oceans, surrounding small rocky moons, If you have water, something to generate heat and abundant chemicals, odds are you have a good chance the conditions for life.

Put another way, if we took microbes and perhaps some small archean life-forms from Earth's oceans and put them in the Europan seas, the would do just fine and would find the place quite comfortable.

So I'm actually fairly optimistic that we might find life in our own solar system, having said that, the problem is that the life could be just that, From Earth, through some ancient impact, there is a very small possibility that microbes from Earth hitched a ride on a rock thrown up which landed on Europa and seeded their oceans with ancient Earth-generated life.

If we find however there is life on Europa AND (importantly) that life is not "related" to life on Earth - that it developed independently on Europa or Titan or wherever we find it, then we can know that the universe is fairly friendly to life formation, and that most of the stars we see probably have at least microbial life, it could also mean that advanced life-forms, animals, and possibly other civilizations are also much more common.

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 surprising answer, the answer may ALREADY be yes. The transmission is called the "Wow" signal and was detected on August 15,1977.

IF we were to asume the "Wow signal" is genuine,that means 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 of looking - and only a few years of specifically looking for alien signals, and that 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/
Stellar Superstructures in Andromeda :
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050920_andromeda_stars.html
Orion's Arm :
http://www.orionsarm.com/intro/religion_and_OA.html

Answer 2

I've talked to my friend about this and if I remember correctly he says the bible does not mention anything about life on other planets how ever if there is obviously god created them so it can't in any way go against the christian religion unless you believe god didn't create them. I on the other hand don't believe in god and think it's naive to think were the only planet with life on it. There has to be some type of life out there wether they have flying saucers or they are just small creatures like a dog I have no clue but there has to be some type of life out there. I remember a few years ago reading about a planet I think near a star in the big dipper that was supposedly around the same size as our planet and about the same distance away and the star was about the same size as our sun they had said they saw something blue on the planets similiar to earths water and there appeared to be land masses like our continents but the telescopes couldn't give much more detail how ever I havn't heard anything about that since. My theory is they found proof of life there and are keeping that knowledge away from us like roswell never happened.

Answer 3

oh yes!!! but maybe not the kind that is here.


Q#2 when u think about it deeply everything interferes with God and the bible. The very notion of God is a contradiction past middle school logic

Answer 4

Yes I do, this enormous universe wouldn´t have sense if not.

Answer 5

Dear Mr. Pipes2

I do believe that there is life on other planets, perhaps not in
the form we are use to seeing here on Earth, but I believe there could be the building blocks of what makes something alive and to live on other worlds, or in space itself.

Sincerely,
[e-mail]
(a.k.a. calvaliear )

Answer 6

Yes and they are probably tired of watching us.
Do you think that they kill each other there like we do ?

Answer 7

Good question, my friend. As a true believer in extraterrestrial life, life does exist on other planets. Although this was not proven, there could be life hovering over the clouds of Jupiter and swimming under the icy oceans of Europa and Ganymede. Since Saturn's moon Titan has an atmosphere, there could be alien lifeforms on it. Outside of our solar system, there should be as many terrestrial, or Earth-like, planets that are capable to support life, and ultimately, intelligent beings to develop civilization.

Answer 8

I am a firm believer that there is life on other planets.

Answer 9

yes, but not in this solar system.

Answer 10

yeah of course. theyre just very far away.

Answer 11

Of course...it's just too far away to ever contact.