RicOlie_2 said:
Post Praetorian said:
RicOlie_2 said:
Bingowings said:
RicOlie_2 said:
The chances of sentient life existing elsewhere in the universe are pretty low. Even the universe has limits.
http://voices.yahoo.com/what-chances-intelligent-life-elsewhere-2295217.html
If the universe has limits the only ones we know about are the ones we can detect (the visible universe is almost certainly not all of it and it's accelerating away from us).
Organic material is everywhere. It coats comets, it's found inside meteors, it drifts between Galaxies in clouds bigger than our solar system it can be made very easily on any world where the conditions are right ("Billions and Billions" so sayeth the St Sagan).
Life elsewhere is almost a certainty.
The Church you belong to entertains this high probability.
Add deep time and the scale of the universe the chances of sentient life existing only on Earth are so low as to be barely worth considering. Though the chances of it existing on Earth are pretty low when I'm not here.
The word from Geneva is that distances between planets with advanced civilisations (digital watches etc) are so vaste that meeting them would be unlikely.
My Church does not entertain a high probability of intelligent, extra-terrestrial life, but rather a possibility of such life existing. More recently, the scientific community seems to be leaning in favour of an only 0.01% chance of sentient extra-terrestrial life existing (as far as I am aware, anyway and I linked to an article earlier which stated that).
Kindly note only that said article, having been written in 2008, was initiated prior to a time when the scientific community was to witness the wholesale cache of worlds latently discovered over the course of the past 4 years: a spectacle that has proven far more optomistic than most had previously considered possible.
I thought the position was unchanged, but I have largely outdated sources. :P
Ah, fair enough!