Are We or Aren't We Alone the Universe?

[Constantinopolis]

It depends what you mean by "alone". Is there other life out there? Probably yes. Are there other technological civilizations out there? Probably no.

How do you know their aren't other technological civilizations out there? What's to say their couldn't be?

The Fermi Paradox is a very good reason to believe that other technological civilizations do not exist - or at least not in our galaxy.

[Maljaratas]

I of course am of the opinion that there is other life somewhere in the universe, even if it is only single celled. To someone above, there was a decent argument for, evolutionarily thinking, that other intelligent life would need to be some forms of humanoid.

[Giovenith]

Have you seen how big the Universe is? It's big. Like really, really big. There are almost certainly other "technological civilisations" out there. I don't actually know exactly what you mean by that phrase, but I don't need to. Whatever kind of civilisation you have in mind almost certainly exists somewhere in the Universe.

Nonsense. Just because the universe is big, that doesn't mean that you can just imagine something and claim that "oh, it's got to exist somewhere!"

I mean, do you think that a copy of Middle Earth exists somewhere? Or a planet covered in chocolate fudge?

That comparison is nonsense.

Our own existence demonstrates that technologically advanced civilizations are possible and can evolve from even the most simplistic of beginnings. You really think it's only going to happen once in all of existence?

[Cybraxia]

It's statistically very probable. Whether we'll meet any before the end of our lives? Unlikely. IIRC, habitable planets are few and far between.

[Constantinopolis]

Nonsense. Just because the universe is big, that doesn't mean that you can just imagine something and claim that "oh, it's got to exist somewhere!"

I mean, do you think that a copy of Middle Earth exists somewhere? Or a planet covered in chocolate fudge?

That comparison is nonsense.

Our own existence demonstrates that technologically advanced civilizations are possible and can evolve from even the most simplistic of beginnings. You really think it's only going to happen once in all of existence?

As far as we know, it has only happened once in all of existence.

The fact that something has already happened once is no reason to believe that it will necessarily happen a second time somewhere else in the universe. Let me illustrate with a new comparison:

Do you believe there is another planet somewhere in the universe that has exactly the same continents, oceans, islands, and other geological features as Earth? After all, "it already happened once"...

[Zhenya]

It would be plain impossible for us to be alone in the Universe, considering how massive it is.

[Cybraxia]

That comparison is nonsense.

Our own existence demonstrates that technologically advanced civilizations are possible and can evolve from even the most simplistic of beginnings. You really think it's only going to happen once in all of existence?

As far as we know, it has only happened once in all of existence.

The fact that something has already happened once is no reason to believe that it will necessarily happen a second time somewhere else in the universe. Let me illustrate with a new comparison:

Do you believe there is another planet somewhere in the universe that has exactly the same continents, oceans, islands, and other geological features as Earth? After all, "it already happened once"...

If one subscribes to the "Multiverse Idea", then yes.

Will we ever see it? Unlikely.

[Anywhere Else But Here]

Have you seen how big the Universe is? It's big. Like really, really big. There are almost certainly other "technological civilisations" out there. I don't actually know exactly what you mean by that phrase, but I don't need to. Whatever kind of civilisation you have in mind almost certainly exists somewhere in the Universe.

Nonsense. Just because the universe is big, that doesn't mean that you can just imagine something and claim that "oh, it's got to exist somewhere!"

I mean, do you think that a copy of Middle Earth exists somewhere? Or a planet covered in chocolate fudge?

Unless you mean something weirdly specific by "technological civilisation", you basically can. Is there, somewhere in the Universe, a sentient species with the kind of primitive technology Stone age humans had? Yes, almost certainly. Is there a civilisation that has the kind of technological development we had in the early Renaissance? Yes, almost certainly. Is there a civilisation at pretty much the same level we are at now (not counting us, smartarses)? Yes, almost certainly.

[Maljaratas]

Have you seen how big the Universe is? It's big. Like really, really big. There are almost certainly other "technological civilisations" out there. I don't actually know exactly what you mean by that phrase, but I don't need to. Whatever kind of civilisation you have in mind almost certainly exists somewhere in the Universe.

Nonsense. Just because the universe is big, that doesn't mean that you can just imagine something and claim that "oh, it's got to exist somewhere!"

I mean, do you think that a copy of Middle Earth exists somewhere? Or a planet covered in chocolate fudge?

Middle Earth no, that requires different Laws of physics or something. Chocolate Fudge planet... possible

[Senkaku]

Given how fucking gigantic the universe is, they're probably out there somewhere. The odds of any of us alive ever meeting them, though, are even tinier than the odds of any member of our species meeting them, since we'll probably nuke ourselves to smithereens and have all traces of our presence wiped out by geological and stellar processes before any aliens can find us or our relics.

To the denialists' credit, their belief is rooted in current reality. All the believers in extraterrestrial life don't have any proof of complex life out in space and won't for quite some time, if at all. Maybe I'll believe it when I see it but not until then.

"I have not seen it and therefore I do not believe it exists."
I've never seen Kashgar, but I believe it is a city which exists. Nor have I ever seen a dodo bird, but I believe they exist. I didn't see the Holocaust either.

I would like to think we are Alone. This would greatly increase my self-esteem as a member of the human race (which I firmly believe is the master race).

However, I am not sure.

Really? I think it'd be kinda sad if we're the best, most complex, most advanced things the universe can vomit forth from its infinite maw.

It depends what you mean by "alone". Is there other life out there? Probably yes. Are there other technological civilizations out there? Probably no.

Why would there not be? How many billions of galaxies are there, again?

Being someone who have extremely detailed nightmares about being raped by a 5 meters long absolutely weird and unheard-of acquatic alien lifeform, on average two times per week, I'm pretty sure we are not alone. And since at the end she even kill me, I'm even pretty sure they're hopelessly hostile.

[Constantinopolis]

It would be plain impossible for us to be alone in the Universe, considering how massive it is.

As I keep saying:

Do you believe it is necessarily impossible for there to be only one ____ in the universe? For any object or type of thing, must there necessarily be many instances of it in the universe, just because the universe is big?

No. There is no reason to jump to such conclusions.

[Empire of Donner land]

I would like to think we are Alone. This would greatly increase my self-esteem as a member of the human race (which I firmly believe is the master race).

However, I am not sure.

Self esteem is bad for the Human race. Because once we find other life outside earth it's all gonna come down crashing

[Chessmistress]

Being someone who have extremely detailed nightmares about being raped by a 5 meters long absolutely weird and unheard-of acquatic alien lifeform, on average two times per week, I'm pretty sure we are not alone. And since at the end she even kill me, I'm even pretty sure they're hopelessly hostile.

It's not a joke, it's a serious thing.
It's not something similar to aliens I've watched in movies or read about within books, it's totally different.
It's an aquatic creature, idrodinamic shaped, with natural jet propulsion and a speed in water that exceed every living acquatic lifeform I know, it's about 5 meters long, she has 12 very long tentacles (she use it as hands, each tentacle end up in the shape of a shovel, and NO, it's totally unrelated with Japanese porn, nothing similar, she doesn't use such tentacles for sex). She have four eyes, and such eyes are the only thing that can resemble, though not so much, something human, but the pupils are gold and shine like the sun, and the surrounding iris surrounding is deep purple. The skin is lilac, but the color slightly change (however it's still little variations of the same lilac) and such skin is soft like no other thing, nor even the finer silk is so, I know well because during the nightmare I even have strong tactile sensations. Her sex organs are very different from both human females and human males.
Then it comes the worst part: I know she hate me, I feel her rage and is without limits, inhuman. She's having sex with me because she wish to experiment that thing before killing me, and it's even her way to humiliate me, because, shit, I like it, and I like it so much that I don't even care about that she'll kill me just after it, and she wants show me her power. Such creature hates me because I'm a woman: she hates all human females, and at the very same time she's totally indifferent towards human males, I have not even an hint why.
There's a sort of telepatic contact, or something, because I know quite a lot of things about her: she comes from the future, they are infinitely more advanced than us, and she's enraged for something we did, well, in a time that is the future for 2016 but the remote past for the time she comes from. Her species is so advanced that they do not even need "weapons" to kill us all. I have no idea about the kind of technology she has, I can see just only her within the nightmare. But I know there's absolutely nothing we can do to stop them with our present technology nor even with a future human technology, that would be absolutely utopian.
The part that is most mysterious for me is: if they're so advanced, how can be possible for us having hurted them so much?

[Senkaku]

How do you know their aren't other technological civilizations out there? What's to say their couldn't be?

The Fermi Paradox is a very good reason to believe that other technological civilizations do not exist - or at least not in our galaxy.

Human civilization has been around for let's generously say 10,000 years. For the last hundred years or so we have had radio, and in the last 70-ish years we've started actually sending radio signals into interstellar space. For the last fifty-ish years we've sorta been listening for alien life (though not that much, we haven't put a ton into it and we've spent a lot of that only searching certain frequencies and star clusters, mainly within our own galaxy).

Our galaxy is 100,000 light years wide, and our universe billions of years old. For all we know, for the last 90,000 years there might've been a civilization on the far side of the galaxy spewing radio signals like there's no tomorrow, and we won't know about it for another 10,000 years. Our own radio waves have barely gone anywhere on a galactic scale. I think you're being far to quick to dismiss the possibilities, mainly because you're operating on a timescale of individual human lives and a young civilization.

[Anywhere Else But Here]

It would be plain impossible for us to be alone in the Universe, considering how massive it is.

As I keep saying:

Do you believe it is necessarily impossible for there to be only one ____ in the universe? For any object or type of thing, must there necessarily be many instances of it in the universe, just because the universe is big?

No. There is no reason to jump to such conclusions.

No one is claiming that there are perfect copies of Earth or humans. But claiming that we're the only sentient species is almost as ridiculous as claiming that our asteroid belt is the only asteroid belt.

[Giovenith]

It's not a joke, it's a serious thing.
It's not something similar to aliens I've watched in movies or read about within books, it's totally different.
It's an aquatic creature, idrodinamic shaped, with natural jet propulsion and a speed in water that exceed every living acquatic lifeform I know, it's about 5 meters long, she has 12 very long tentacles (she use it as hands, each tentacle end up in the shape of a shovel, and NO, it's totally unrelated with Japanese porn, nothing similar, she doesn't use such tentacles for sex). She have four eyes, and such eyes are the only thing that can resemble, though not so much, something human, but the pupils are gold and shine like the sun, and the surrounding iris surrounding is deep purple. The skin is lilac, but the color slightly change (however it's still little variations of the same lilac) and such skin is soft like no other thing, nor even the finer silk is so, I know well because during the nightmare I even have strong tactile sensations. Her sex organs are very different from both human females and human males.
Then it comes the worst part: I know she hate me, I feel her rage and is without limits, inhuman. She's having sex with me because she wish to experiment that thing before killing me, and it's even her way to humiliate me, because, shit, I like it, and I like it so much that I don't even care about that she'll kill me just after it, and she wants show me her power. Such creature hates me because I'm a woman: she hates all human females, and at the very same time she's totally indifferent towards human males, I have not even an hint why.
There's a sort of telepatic contact, or something, because I know quite a lot of things about her: she comes from the future, they are infinitely more advanced than us, and she's enraged for something we did, well, in a time that is the future for 2016 but the remote past for the time she comes from. Her species is so advanced that they do not even need "weapons" to kill us all. I have no idea about the kind of technology she has, I can see just only her within the nightmare. But I know there's absolutely nothing we can do to stop them with our present technology nor even with a future human technology, that would be absolutely utopian.
The part that is most mysterious for me is: if they're so advanced, how can be possible for us having hurted them so much?

What the fuck, Chess...

[Constantinopolis]

As I keep saying:

Do you believe it is necessarily impossible for there to be only one ____ in the universe? For any object or type of thing, must there necessarily be many instances of it in the universe, just because the universe is big?

No. There is no reason to jump to such conclusions.

No one is claiming that there are perfect copies of Earth or humans. But claiming that we're the only sentient species is almost as ridiculous as claiming that our asteroid belt is the only asteroid belt.

What makes you think that the chances of there being other sentient species are higher than the chances of there being perfect copies of Earth? We've never found either one or the other. Between two things we have never seen, how can you be so certain which is more likely?

We don't know what the odds of our evolution were. Our existence may be astronomically improbable.

[Kannap]

Going to wait until they decide to present themselves to us before I decide to believe in their existence.

[The Great Devourer of All]

If you're looking at pure logic, then there is next to no way that we are alone in our galaxy cluster, not to mention the observable universe or the universe as a whole.

But since you're supposed to use logic and you've already called humanity the master race, banned boxing and Santa Claus, and become an anti-taxation pro-drug hyper-libertarian militant, I see this reasoning is pointless.

And you must understand that your self esteem literally has no impact on anything and will not effect the grand scheme of things in any remotely noticeable way,so there's no reason to think it matters, or that the entirety of the history of our tiny speck of blue and green dust, not to mention our short-lived, frail, and vain species, matters much more. Probability states humanity will be destroyed within the next few million years, and if it doesn't, it will have completely evolved into a new species and ceased to exist, which is another way of saying 'failed as a species'.

Edit: Ignore the struck-out text, I started on the second page and thought that Infected Mushroom was the OP.

[Napkiraly]

Being someone who have extremely detailed nightmares about being raped by a 5 meters long absolutely weird and unheard-of acquatic alien lifeform, on average two times per week, I'm pretty sure we are not alone. And since at the end she even kill me, I'm even pretty sure they're hopelessly hostile.

You're watching too much hentai there, Chess.

[O5vx]

We are the only one out there. "God made man to his likeness and to rule over all other things".... absolute rubbish!!

[Maljaratas]

How do you know their aren't other technological civilizations out there? What's to say their couldn't be?

The Fermi Paradox is a very good reason to believe that other technological civilizations do not exist - or at least not in our galaxy.

The Fermi paradox refers to type 2 and beyond civs, I don't think that we are restricting our definition of technologically advanced to them.

[Empire of Donner land]

As I keep saying:

Do you believe it is necessarily impossible for there to be only one ____ in the universe? For any object or type of thing, must there necessarily be many instances of it in the universe, just because the universe is big?

No. There is no reason to jump to such conclusions.

No one is claiming that there are perfect copies of Earth or humans. But claiming that we're the only sentient species is almost as ridiculous as claiming that our asteroid belt is the only asteroid belt.

Or that our own sun is the only sun: Disproved over trillions of times since astronomy first begun.

Or that our own planet is the only planet: Disproved when we looked in the sky with telescopes and when we looked at other stars for other planets.

Or that our Galaxy is the only Galaxy:

Hell, we might not even be the only universe according to some theories.

So why would we be the ONLY life in the universe? There's an equation for this actually. The Drake equation.

[Constantinopolis]

The Fermi Paradox is a very good reason to believe that other technological civilizations do not exist - or at least not in our galaxy.

The Fermi paradox refers to type 2 and beyond civs, I don't think that we are restricting our definition of technologically advanced to them.

But if there is an abundance of Type 1 and below civs, yet a lack of Type 2 and above civs...

...then that would imply that the Great Filter is somewhere between Type 1 and Type 2, which, in layman's terms, means we're totally screwed.

[Senkaku]

No one is claiming that there are perfect copies of Earth or humans. But claiming that we're the only sentient species is almost as ridiculous as claiming that our asteroid belt is the only asteroid belt.

What makes you think that the chances of there being other sentient species are higher than the chances of there being perfect copies of Earth? We've never found either one or the other. Between two things we have never seen, how can you be so certain which is more likely?

We don't know what the odds of our evolution were. Our existence may be astronomically improbable.

For all we know, there are impossibly advanced aliens busily colonizing solar systems only a few hundred or a few thousand light-years away and we could not see or hear them because of the lightspeed delay, because they are so far away and we have only so recently gained the capabilities to *maybe* notice them.

Going to wait until they decide to present themselves to us before I decide to believe in their existence.

Get ready to keep waiting. I'd give it at least a few hundred thousand years.