For as "smart" as "scientists" are...

[f3lix]

why do they almost unilaterally think that water must exist for there to be life?

How dense are human beings to think that alien life must be like us?

[Ugly Bastard]

Water is mandatory for carbon based life to exist since complex chemistry of any sort is incredibly slow in gases and almost non existent in solids. Other solvents have been suggested but none of the alternatives are really credible alternatives to water.

[f3lix]

You forgot to add "on earth"

[ninjaface]

[DJ FC]

Originally Posted by f3lix

why do they almost unilaterally think that water must exist for there to be life?

How dense are human beings to think that alien life must be like us?

I think you're just plain wrong.

Hypothetical types of biochemistry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[thekremlin]

It depends how you define life, I'd say. I actually agree with f3lix on this one.

[DJ FC]

Agree that it's dumb to blindly assume that life must come from water or agree that scientists universally believe this?

[thekremlin]

Originally Posted by DJ FC

Agree that it's dumb to blindly assume that life must come from water

this

[Dent]

BBC The Search for Life The Drake Equation PDTV x264 AAC - EZTV - TV Torrents Online
Gets off to a slow start but finishes well, there's a little bit on why the water/no water thing isn't a 50/50 split.
Whether our universes biogenesis formed this way, or some other way and waters magic came after, well i'd like to know.
Carl Sagan isn't mentioned until 53:28.
Answers on a postcard for the Fermi Paradox please.
Nope, the BBC don't have an answer for Fermi either

[thekremlin]

As an aside, I like Richard Dawkins idea that meme's can be considered actual living things. For instance, the story of Sleeping Beauty can be considered a living thing, which reproduces as different people tell it, and even evolves as it changes, and popular changes survive. It "lives" in the medium of "culture" the same way we live in the medium of "physical space" and has a symbiotic relationship with humans the same way flowers do with bees.

You could also easily make the argument that computer programs are already alive despite not being sentient.

[Dent]

Originally Posted by thekremlin

As an aside, I like Richard Dawkins idea that meme's can be considered actual living things.

living isn't what memes do, replication yes evolution yes living no.
BBC Radio 4 - The Life Scientific, Richard Dawkins latest Dawkins podcast, brief mention for the meme.

What lies beneath? Antarctic mission to find life isolated deep under the ice - Science - News - The Independent

This is an important experiment for both furthering our knowledge of extreme life and also testing equipment for space missions.

“Finding evidence of such compounds would show us that if life can withstand even the deepest, darkest and most isolated conditions for more than a million years, then it has the ability to exist anywhere – and by that I mean not just on Earth.”

OOooOOoooOOOoo (he means in space)

[Dent]

Buy this book read it and send it to me after to read please
water is special.. many reasons on different levels of structure

BBC - Podcasts - Dr Karl and the Naked Scientist
DrKarl 07 June 12: Tastebuds, Water and Tracking Venus

Thu, 7 Jun 12
Little water bit at around 14 minutes in, asked for confirmation that bbc.co.uk podcast links work in the US, can someone confirm?

[thekremlin]

buy this book read it
water is special there are
so many reasons

[Saint DH]

I think it could be considered equally dumb to assume that life elsewhere isn't like life here on Earth.

Water is also special because it only exists in liquid form under very special circumstances of heat and pressure.

[Dent]

^ not unique about water at all, all the elements are special in that sense.
How amazing for water to be liquid at 1 bar and 0°c!

Did you know that there are many more states other than solid liquid gas and plasma?
something like 19 structures of ice.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m0ltw
Here's another good recent podcast episode on the topic of water/life elsewhere.
testing the extremes of earth gives us some idea.

to the original question there's a difference between anthropomorphic and 'like us'
there probably are silicon and other such beings, but as much as we know carbon/water is more likely

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

We should replace "scientists" with band teachers.

[Saint DH]

Yes, but the conditions under which water is a liquid are special because they are considered moderate. They are conditions comfortable for organic life. Sure, there are other objects in space with liquid on them, but the conditions are so rough, that there is no life.

If we view evolution as a universal constant, which it certainly is, then it makes no sense to believe that life anywhere else is all that much different than life here on Earth. There might be slight evolutionary differences, but I'd bet dicks to dollars the end product is quite similar

[thekremlin]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

If we view evolution as a universal constant, which it certainly is, then it makes no sense to believe that life anywhere else is all that much different than life here on Earth.

What?

[Dent]

Guessing you mean that some form of natural selection will be taking place on another worlds, in that case then yes i'd agree that other life out there will be similar to earth

But natural selection will force things to be suited to whatever they inhabit, at the same time the processes behind how things arise can be similar but lead to very different things.

[Saint DH]

What I was saying was this:

In order for life to exist, the environmental conditions must be suitable for organic life. Basically, I'd expect to see another planet like Earth in many ways.

So if we have a planet very much similar to Earth, and we have natural selection occuring on this planet, then I believe the end result would be something almost identical to human beings. Whether or not these other beings are ahead or behind us intellectually would largely depend on how old the intelligent life is. If intelligent life on another planet is 10,000 years older than we are, then I'd expect traveling to their world would be quite similar to traveling 10,000 years into the future on Earth. If the E.T. humans are 1,000 years younger than we are, I'd expect visiting their planet to be similar to traveling back in the time 1,000 years on Earth, with obvious differences in history and culture between the two planets.

It would be very interesting to see how much the different history and culture would affect the progress of the species. Sort of like how the Middle East in many ways is 100 years behind the West in terms of development and progress.

Since the universe is expanding from the point of the big bang, it seems likely that any life-haboring planet that exists further away than us from the singularity would have younger intelligent life on it. Any such planet closer to the singularity would have older intelligent life on it.

[thekremlin]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

In order for life to exist, the environmental conditions must be suitable for organic life.

No.

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

So if we have a planet very much similar to Earth, and we have natural selection occuring on this planet, then I believe the end result would be something almost identical to human beings.

What? Why?

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Since the universe is expanding from the point of the big bang, it seems likely that any life-haboring planet that exists further away than us from the singularity would have younger intelligent life on it. Any such planet closer to the singularity would have older intelligent life on it.

I don't think you understand how evolution works.

[Saint DH]

Honestly, I thought we've gone over this kremlin. I don't give a fuck what you think. I don't like you. I think you are a piece of shit. This will be the last time I ever address you. If you want to be wrong, then be wrong. It makes no difference to me. If there even is life on other planets, we will never find it within our lifetimes, so this entire thread is pointless.

[f3lix]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

If there even is life on other planets, we will never find it within our lifetimes, so this entire thread is pointless.

This thread is to show what we thought as individuals at this point in time. It's great going back and seeing how dumb or accepting of ignorance we were in previous times.

[Mr. Blonde]

Originally Posted by f3lix

This thread is to show what we thought as individuals at this point in time. It's great going back and seeing how dumb or accepting of ignorance we were in previous times.

Past scientists or knowledge seekers getting an idea wrong doesn't mean that they are dumb or non-scientific, which you inferred by your post title. Almost all of them were doing the best they could under the religious and political environment of their time with the evidence they had at that time.

This whole post makes you look like an ignorant hick from Indiana, F3lix. Easy for you to criticize the scientists, great men and women who helped to build our current human knowledge (even if their ideas proved wrong by history and more evidence) by being a sniveling fuck behind a computer with Google and Wikipedia.

You're basically picking on dead people who have accomplished more with their lives for humanity than you ever will. You're standing on the shoulders of giants and then calling those giants stupid because they lived in an era before you did.

You are a piece of shit.

[Dent]

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

If there even is life on other planets, we will never find it within our lifetimes, so this entire thread is pointless.

Edit : felt like adding a bit more

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

What I was saying was this:

In order for life to exist, the environmental conditions must be suitable for organic life. Basically, I'd expect to see another planet like Earth in many ways.

This would be perfect if you'd just get rid of 'organic', no one can prove that life can't come from something inorganic.
It's called the anthropic principle.

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

I believe the end result would be something almost identical to human beings

Do you really mean this? how 'almost identical' are we talking here? It's scary if you think that humans are some sort of pinnacle of evolution.
The chances of us being here in our forms is beyond description, the chances of there being other humans ON ANY PLANET IN THE UNIVERSE, IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE is pretty much nil.
I can flirt with the idea that some sort of Humanoid, Eyes and things like that have evolved separately many times on Earth, and i'd expect there to be many earth-like planets out there.

Originally Posted by Dirty Harry

Since the universe is expanding from the point of the big bang, it seems likely that any life-haboring planet that exists further away than us from the singularity would have younger intelligent life on it. Any such planet closer to the singularity would have older intelligent life on it.

??? expanding from the "point" of the big bang? point me in the direction of the centre of the universe please.
There is no such thing as life-harboring planets further away from the big bang, the big bang involved the creation of space-time.
If you are imagining an explosion with the first bits of shit flicked out cooling and evolving, and the latter bits of shit evolving at a later stage, then you're wrong.
Cosmic microwave background shows that the universe was pretty uniform a few hundred thousand years after creation.

Anyone watched the drake equation program? there's a discussion with someone about the possibility of a second genesis on earth, that not everything here is related to each other may be related.