What are the chances of intelligent life existing on other planets?

  • Thread starter Poorichard2
  • Start date
In summary: There is a lot of garbage in the myths, of course. But there is also a grain of truth. The truth is that we are all prisoners on this planet. We are all here because someone, somewhere decided that this was the best place for us. Maybe that person was right. Maybe this is the best place for us. But maybe it’s not. There are other places. Other universes. Other possibilities. And we could be living in one of those other universes right now. In summary, Earth is a prison planet because it was chosen as the home of the anomalous.
  • #1
Poorichard2
39
0
About the future, beings from outer space.

There is much speculation on what beings from other planets
would be like in appearance but mainly their brain/mind structure.
Would they be like us in body and mind but further advanced?
I have a theory that beings from outer-space would be very
different and have a brain structure relative to their place in the
cosmos. In other words unless they are of the same lineage as
our DNA,Genes,etc. they will in all probability have their own gene
codes developed from millions of years existing within the planet
or whatever of their environment. They may have even developed
senses from a brain structure which are tuned to a system very
different then ours such as having eye, hearing, smell/taste, feeling
and maybe other organs which have developed in their brain a reality
having values and responses we can't even guess.
Maybe,just maybe they will resemble us and perhaps we may even
be their ancestors from some dying galaxy millions of light years past.
How did we get here? the dust of a passing comet? dusting galaxy's
it passed or planets spewing seeds with the stuff that brings life.
Sounds like science fiction? yep! than again, maybe not.
 
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  • #2
Great Essay

Jon Rappoport's essay is marvelous and worth a read:


SECRET OPERATIONS, PART 3

JULY 1. You can think of this article as opinion, as guess, as fact, as metaphor, as lunacy, as lie, as speculation, as whatever suits you. Be my guest. I’m not going to bother labeling it, and I’m not going to offer evidence.

Earth, one of the millions or billions of locales that sustain conscious life, is, as a number of science fiction writers have suggested, a prison planet.

It may not have been built or seeded to be that, but it became that.

It became a place for anomalous individuals who just didn’t fit into their home-planet cultures, who fought against tyranny, who took hold of a crazy idea called freedom.

Of course, among the prisoners shipped to Earth over millennia, there were people who had used freedom as an excuse to commit many crimes.

So Earth has always been a mixed bag.

On a considerable number of other planets, art as we know it did not exist. Art was thought of as a crime, an outburst of emotion and intellect proceeding from a warped consciousness, having the effect of stirring up the masses.

On these planets, order was considered the mark of an advanced civilization. Order meant top-down control. Machine order. Cog in wheel order. Every citizen had his place. Appointed. You do this. You do that. Your function is ABV2-4 and nothing else.

War, disease, grinding poverty were enemies of order. So over time they were eliminated. They were used as reasons to impose machine order.

A person who rejected the order was killed, re-conditioned, put in prison, or shipped off to a place like Earth.

Earth was looked on as a kind of island where the worst characters were sent.

It was observed, as an experiment in motion, to see what would emerge from the collection of crazy criminals.

Eventually, it was decided that Earth too needed order, and the first target of that order was human consciousness. The mind. The mind needed to believe that slavery for most was part of the big cosmic plan. A caste system. A gift from God or the gods. A punishment for past sins. Sins committed in one life or over many lives.

The Roman Church and the ruling spiritual force called Hinduism and the religious dynasties of Egypt were three of the most important centers for this mind control. Through an interaction between those Earthly religious leaders and their off-planet patrons, cosmologies were built, rules were instituted, repression was enacted on a large scale, and wealth was accumulated.

Myths were woven. Messiah myths, sacrifice myths, guilt myths, obedience myths, salvation myths.

Myths about good and evil.

All of these myths played on the desire for liberation. That desire was channeled through the structures of these religious organizations. The desire was given what appeared to be a path into fulfillment.

Of course, that was a lie. The paths were just dead ends. They were symbols and images which captured the consciousness of individuals.

Eventually, the whole idea of reincarnation was debunked in the West. It was thought that, if people believed they only lived once, they would feel more bound to the fake liberation myths. They would understand less about their power.

In the East, reincarnation was embroiled in insane notions about a steady progress toward higher and higher castes---depending on one’s behavior. One could slip back and become a cricket or a worm, too.

Karma. That was one of the great myths. It was created, in part, so that the underclass could look up at their masters and say, “They’ll get their punishment for what they’re doing. No one escapes retribution. It’s all about action and reaction.”

All of the myths were built to invent order.

Order could be organized around anything. A few huge pointed stones in the desert. A snake with a bite. A priest with a key to heaven in his pocket. A goat with one eye and a limp. A shroud a thousand years old. A candy bar wrapper in a glass case.

The kind of order I’m talking about has one great function, at the level of the individual. It makes him think he is looking toward something he wants from the inside of something he doesn’t want.

Instead of looking at what he doesn’t want from the outside.

Order puts people in a place they don’t like, and makes them yearn for escape to a place they’re sure they’ll like.

A perfect OP.

Planet Earth is an op.

In a sense, the whole UFO phenomenon is working that angle, too. As in, “We’re all trapped on this planet and now we see we have visitors from somewhere else. Maybe they’ll help us get from here to a better place.”

Re-enforcing the notion that human consciousness belongs on Earth and seeks a better destination.

On the inside looking out. That’s the op.

Such a good op very few people can imagine any other state of affairs.

Then, other ops are set up to puncture the order, which makes people yearn for the order with more intensity. Blow up a building. I wish we could all return to the better time. We need more order.

People become convinced that without the order we have, chaos and crime would reign. It’s one or the other. Freedom doesn’t really exist. It’s a lie used to promote lawlessness, because look at what people do when they go outside the order. We need a tighter order. No one can handle being outside the order. Impossible. Everyone becomes a McVeigh or an Oswald or a school shooter or a terrorist.

Something, though, about the word SECRET triggers echoes in the mind. People begin to gnaw on this word and dimly suspect we are living inside an op, inside a matrix. People begin to look for clues that will tell them something about how the order is constructed to give the false appearance of a complete and seamless and self-contained landscape.

People begin to pull on tag-ends of clues.

People begin to report experiences of a certain weirdness, experiences that suggest the order is a fake painting that has bamboozled us.

People begin to talk about other dimensions of experience.

And as crazy as that talk may sound, more echoes trigger the mind to think, to explore.

I can tell you this. Some readers of this site, from the beginning, latched on to my investigations----and then cut and ran away as soon as they suspected I was really going somewhere they felt was dangerous. They usually used words like responsibility and order and values and morals and tradition as they sped away from nomorefakenews.

It was interesting.

They often sent me final messages about how the Democrats or the Republicans needed our support to weather the coming storms.

In other words, they fed me an op and hoped I would bite. I didn’t.

Being part of an op gives one a sense of security. I’m playing the right game. I’m fitting in. Things are going well. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m going Home. The tides are in my favor. All will be revealed. The revelation is at hand. The correct currents of energy are carrying me along to where I need to be. I’m just a particle in a perfect wave.

When Earth was designated a prison, consciousness itself was designated a relatively small space.

Funny thing, but every time I go to a museum, I look at paintings that tell me just the opposite. Consciousness is as wide as it wants to be. It can use harmony and dissonance and who knows what else to build other universes and spaces and times---and even in the bowels of dung-ridden caves, in the dark, there is always someone who picks up a sharp stone and scratches a few shapes on the wall. Saying, “I’m not what you think I am.”

And when I go into great cathedrals and see the religious tales portrayed on walls and ceilings and in windows, I see something else there too. I see the total contradiction of what the cathedral stands for. I see the order, the matrix, left behind. I see another universe. Other universes. All over the place, wherever I look. Right there.

Gorgeous.

And these paintings say, “This is what freedom can give birth to. You don’t have to think about escaping the order through this myth you see portrayed on the wall. What you’re seeing is not the myth. Not at all. It’s the spontaneous creation of a dimension. The morons who paid to have this fake myth fleshed out received just the opposite.”

And so it is.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
 
  • #3
If there is any truth to panspermia (the notion that life began in one place and has simply spread from there), then extraterrestrial life forms might resemble us to some extent. They might even have DNA. But other than that, I think it is very unlikely that there would be much resemblance at all.

Many ideas of xenobiology have been put forth in PF. For example, in a Venusion environment conditions do not allow carbon to form into complex molecules like proteins. However, DNA is not the only acid in the universe, and carbon and oxygen are not the only two substances that react energetically with one another. It's not too much of a stretch to envision a creature that inhales a sulfurous atmosphere and eats metal, whose metabolism is based on sulfuric acid breaking down those metals. Or one of my favorite ideas, it's possible that crystalline life forms could form in the sea of some planet. Crystals might grow forming large lattice works like sea fans in the tidal zones, where the motion of the waves would generate a pisoelectric effect providing electrical power for life processes.

It's even possible that life may form in such an alien way that we would not even recognize it. Perhaps in a grade-school biology class you may once have been asked the question, "why isn't fire considered a life form?". Indeed, on this planet is not. However, it might be elsewhere. Or look at the great red spot on Jupiter, which takes in energy from outside of itself to maintain itself in a complex, organized state. I'm not saying that the great red spot is alive, but similar storms on other worlds could possibly be. But we could look right at them and not realize we had just seen a living creature.

In my opinion, that is both the greatest joy and the greatest frustration in xenobiology. Life may exist in any form we could possibly imagine, plus many other forms we can't.
 
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  • #4
To Theoryprocess and Lurch

Thank you for taking time to post your reply to
my post on "Beings from outer space"
 
  • #5
Greetings !

Well, I think that if we want to get the best answers so
far possible to these questions we have to turn to Astrobiology.

In general, I'm no expert - just some general stuff I read,
it's unlikely for complex life-forms to be non-carbon or non-silicon based.
As for environments, I suppose you could either have creatures
living in a liquid, or a gas or a more or less solid surface. Basicly
this leaves a very wide range of environments and types
of complex life-forms. However, it does allow us to conclude the
likeliness of various organs, like wings, hands/legs, mouths
or alternativly light gas filled floating baloons and tentacles.

As far as "intellegent" (abviously a relative term :wink:) life is concerned
the options get narrower - not any kind of materials can form a complex
creature and its complex brain. Also, "intellegent" creatures are not likely
to develop in a short period of a time, nor in an environment where
complex life is rare, nor on a world which has not undergone
some considrable complex life evolution - since according to the
mainstream, high levels of intelegence evolve when they provide
an evolutionary - survival adavntage - like a more evolved set of teeth
or claws.

Of course, there's also the debate about wheather an "intellegent"
will use tools and technology. Personally, I think that it's inevitable,
according to the local resources of course.

Live long and prosper.
 
  • #6
Reply to drag

Well you have some points there. The others had interesting
points also.

You mentioned astrobiology, yes I do believe they have some
interesting theories based on what they know already.
I wonder if T.O.E. covers biology? hmmmmmmnnnnnnn.

Live long and prosper, beam me up scotty!
 
  • #7
Top down? bottom up? answers from pure thought/logic??

This is, at the same time, one of the most fascinating and frustrating questions to ponder on!

As we have but one planet's examples of life, how to go about taking account of the bias that that introduces into our thinking?

As we are - arrogantly? - the only intelligent species of life on this one planet, how to extrapolate in any meaningful fashion??

One way - to me a very powerful way - is to look at what life on Earth actually is, how it evolves, whence came homo sap's intelligence, and so on. IMHO, many of the SETI enthusiasts (including *gasp* Carl Sagan) haven't taken a hard enough look at what our biologist/ecologist/naturalist colleagues have found from their hundreds of thousands of years of research. For me, some of the strongest implications are:

-> 'our' type of carbon-based life is pretty tough, and (since it got started very soon after the Earth had cooled enough) almost inevitable once conditions are right. Logically this could be either panspermia or independent local inevitability

-> homo sap is so 'contingent' (= 'accidental'? I constantly struggle with this) that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn re 'intelligence'

-> most, perhaps all, of the other 'universal' characteristics so beloved of ET fans can be argued either way, so Occam with his sharp razor should perhaps consign them to the 'pure speculation' bin. Examples: aggression/violence, fear, curiosity, tool-development and technology.

-> about the only exception is language, yet we so lack an understanding of how it arose, why, the extent to which it was purely an accidental by-product of something else entirely, and so on that I can't see how we could take this characteristic anywhere with confidence.

Fermi's question - 'where are they?' - quickly puts many ET ideas into perspective. A quick, order-of-magnitude look at time periods shows that there aren't any 'civilizations like us', at least not within 10,000 light-years, and probably not within the Local Group. For example: it's but ~100,000 since homo sap developed symbolic reasoning (as evidenced by artifacts and paintings), and look how far we've come. Any half-way consistent extrapolation from our current technological base says there's no one 'like us' nearby. And consider: the Earth is but 4.5 billion years young, and 100,000 years is <1% of the time it takes to go round the Milky Way supermassive BH.

That leaves a vast ocean of parameter space to speculate in! Given that baryonic matter is merely the (pond) scum of the universe (~4%; dark energy and dark matter rule), let's let our imaginations run wild about dark-matter creatures cruising the outer regions of galaxy clusters; struggling but failing to detect trivial deviations from chemical equilibrium in the atmosphere of some hard to detect concentration of cold, exotic matter in a minor galaxy in the outskirts of a crushingly average cluster.

Mayhap we don't even have a word for where these dark-matter creatures reside - 'world'? What does *that* mean?
 
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  • #8
ok what did that have to do with beings from other worlds. sounds like something for the environment forum.
 
  • #9
Read it again. It's a rational answer to the question that raises many new questions the alien fans don't want to discuss. See the book Rare Earth for a full length discussion of these issues. Life may be rarer than has been conjectured, and even if life is found, the formation of intelligence is a very contingent thing; we shouldn't assume that evolution is in the business of leading to intelligence.
 
  • #10
I think intellegent life is abundant in the universe. Why don't we see them? Well, this could be argued in many different ways, but I'll stick with two for now.

Argument 1
We do see them. Thousands of people report UFO's and alien abductions every year. In fact, humans may already be living on other worlds as part of an exchange program. The government knows about all of this, and may even be involved in it. As it is dealing with more advanced civilizations, it must proceed with caution or we might be destroyed. If the public were to come in contact with these aliens without authorization, diseases from other worlds would become rampant. Cultural conflicts might cause unnecessary warfare. This is why it must be kept secret, at least for now.

Argument 2
We don't see them because we're looking in the wrong places. In 100,000 years, we've reached our current level of technology. Probably 99% of the civilizations out there are way beyond this level and 0.99% are below it. That leaves about 0.01% of all civilizations at our level. We listen mainly for radio signals when looking for advanced life. This is quite foolish considering that radios are quickly becoming obsolete even for us. Most civilizations either don't have radios or don't need or use them anymore. Probably the most common form of communications would be diminuitive, highly focused lasers. To our instruments, they'd be undetectable. We look for anomolies and environmental disruptions when we look for life elsewhere. Wouldn't it make sense that most civilizations are either incapable of mass disruptions or have learned to perfectly coexist with their environment without making a sound? Afterall, it's more efficient to send information via a laser to a specified target than to fling radio waves all over the place and hope they get to their destination. Even if their was another civilization sending out radio waves, their signals would probably be destroyed or disrupted before they ever got here.

Just my 2 cents :wink:
 

What is the definition of "Beings from other worlds"?

"Beings from other worlds" refer to living organisms or intelligent creatures that originate from a planet or celestial body other than Earth. They may also be referred to as extraterrestrial life or aliens.

Is there any evidence of "Beings from other worlds"?

There is currently no concrete evidence that definitively proves the existence of "Beings from other worlds", but there have been numerous reported sightings and encounters throughout history that suggest the possibility of their existence.

How do scientists search for "Beings from other worlds"?

Scientists use various methods to search for "Beings from other worlds", such as studying the possibility of habitable planets in other solar systems, listening for radio signals from other civilizations, and searching for microbial life on other planets.

What are the potential implications of discovering "Beings from other worlds"?

The discovery of "Beings from other worlds" could have significant implications for humanity, both scientifically and culturally. It could provide insights into the origins of life and the universe, as well as challenge our understanding of our place in the cosmos.

Are there any ethical considerations regarding the search for "Beings from other worlds"?

There are ongoing discussions and debates about the ethical considerations of actively searching for "Beings from other worlds". Some argue that it could be dangerous to make contact with potentially advanced and technologically superior civilizations, while others believe it is our duty to explore and communicate with other beings in the universe.

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