Asklemmy

Earth is the neighborhood you roll your windows up when you drive through at max speed.

The universe is so unimaginable large and there are so many stars and planets that there are good chances of the existence of extra terrestrial life, but at same time there is a very small chance that they can find us, even if they are advanced enough to search for life in the universe. If they are much more advanced than us they probably don't care, in the same way we don't care to try to make contact with all the ants of the earth.

All of this is layman with some basic understanding only.

So, on the one hand in our galaxy alone there are between 100 and 400 billion stars (wikipedia), now a lot of those have no planets, but of course a lot have many more than our system does. So at least the same number in planets. There's a good chance there's more than one planet capable to supporting life among that number.

In fact as we improve our ability to observe our galaxy we are able to verify more and more viable planets and even a reasonable number that are similar to our own planet.

This means that there's definitely going to be a reasonable chance that somewhere, life has evolved to similar or beyond our level already.

But, this for sure doesn't mean there's any reason to expect visitors. That's because even if they can travel at the speed of light, it's still going to be thousands of years for the majority of them to reach us, provided they even choose to come to us. Because, from where they are they wouldn't be able to make out our radio signals, nor likely any other signs of life. So we'd be one of many "potentially live bearing" planets.

So, just my opinion. I think the chance of life being out there is reasonably high, the chance of actually being visited (assuming it holds true that we cannot travel faster than light) is probably very very low.

I'm 100% sure they exist and I'm 99.9% sure there won't be any contact over the next 10 years. It's entirely possible there will never be, though I do hope otherwise.

I believe that it is very likely that life exists elsewhere it the universe, but it ist very statistically unlikely for us to meet during the timeframe of our species existence. Even more so in the next 10 years. Tho an analysis of Europa might prove me wrong.

They're already here- is no one following the UAP situation?

1. They are to far away to reach us
2. If they have technology which would make it possible for them to travel faster than light, they have such high intelligence that they don't recognize us as intelligent beings like we don't recognize viruses as having any intelligence, so they would never think of visiting us and communicating with us.

If they're looking to build a relationship with Hunanese people, I hope these aliens are ready for spicy food.

Dunno but if I were an alien the stupidest thing I could do would be contact "humans".

I love Greg Bear's take in the War Dogs trilogy.

They show up but slowly introduce themselves, give us trinkets, coerce & exploit us , then after much happenings, leave and the world goes on like nothing ever happened.

i'd like to think life exists on every single rocky planet. i remember reading about the discovery of single celled organisms deep in the earth's crust. they exist in a very low-energy environment and therefore have slow metabolisms. some of these are theorized to be able to live for over a million years. they literally extract energy from inorganic compounds in metabolic pathways we don't understand.

the question is: did life originate on the surface (deep sea hydrothermal vents are still surface in this context) or deep in the earth?

if life originated in the earth, then I think there's a very high probability every single rocky planet is essentially a seed. inside of it's core it has life and whenever the surface environment grants some long term stability, the life slowly emerges and evolves into different forms.

so how would extra terrestrial beings and humans interact in the next 10 years?

basically, I think there's a chance (although low on such a short time scale as 10 years) that we will discover life on another planet. or at least some very significant signs of life. either on Mars or Venus or some Galilean moon, etc.

I fucking wish. Why would they come though? We demonstrably suck. Project cats to the universe and maybe we can attract some nice folks.

If there is life out there, it would be rather unspectular. It would exist in the form of microbes, probably not even visible by the human eye. There are theories that suggest that there is a high chance of life on Enceladus.

One of the reasons that life could develop into complexity on Earth is that it could develop over the course of millions of years relatively undisturbed. There were no outside events like supernovae that swept Earth out of exsistence. The Primordial Soup could be cooked long enough to result in complex and intelligent life forms. Other places in the universe probaply have not that advantage, so that the development of life didn't come that far yet.

I suspect that there is a higher chance that life in other places of the universe will be tainted by humanity than the other way round.

Human aren't worth their time

there wont be