Are we alone in the universe?

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That is your opinion, and opinions prove nothing.

... prove only that people have vivid imaginations, which are all it takes to make the leap from "I don't know what it is" to "It must be extraterrestrials!"

What alien encounters? The only accounts I've read lacked valid material evidence to support the claims.

I have no idea if we're alone or not, but logic dictates we probably aren't.

And yet people knew that objects could travel faster than sound, and making a jet than could go a few hundred miles per hour faster than previous planes wasn't a huge stretch. As far as we know today, nothing travels faster than light. We may learn otherwise in the future, but even if we do, achieving it will be quite a task.

True, but a better analogy - just years before the first flight in 1903, people said a 'heavier than air' machine would never fly. It made sense; physics speaks against it in theory. Same with faster-than-light. When there's a will there's almost always a way.

I hope there are aliens out there. Even if they're evil and try to kill us, it'll still be the coolest thing ever.

The probabilities of intelligent life out there are huge, but so are the probabilities of not existing anything at all. Whatever is the answer, space travel would take much more time than we can live so, unless we find a way of hypersleeping through the voyage, all bets are off. Even considering that possibility, the chances are still slim: we haven't even found aliens with our telescopes.

IF the universe is infinite AND the cosmological principle holds THEN... maybe.


It does not now and did not then. People have known about screw propellers and hypothesised their use for flight for much longer than that, and jets and rockets are even simpler to understand; people had been using heavier-than-air rockets for hundreds of years by then.


The simple answer to the question of alien life is we do not know the odds. If we can successfully create life ourselves (er... with mad science, that is, not the usual method) or if we find life or evidence of life elsewhere, or if we find no life but many places devoid of life - then we can begin to estimate the prevalence of life.

I used to believe in aliens and everything weird and was obsessed with it, then I started getting really freaked out and weird feelings, so I stopped. Poltergeist was the last scary movie I ever saw, and the last one I intend to see or think about.

Nevertheless, I have heard the phrase in my religion that Heavenly Father has created worlds without number....so, there might be. This universe is infinite, our souls are infinite, existence is infinite, it's all too confusing for our brains. We were not made to comprehend theses concepts....yet. When I die, I want to ask though.

I'm 100% sure that I am the only terrestrial life in this universe, everyone else is extra-terrestrial to me!

The correct answer must be "I don't know", and both "yes" and "no" are overstating one's ability to know. I'd prefer if no aliens existed, as it would make the colonization and terraformation of other worlds a lot more easier than negotiating claims over regions of space or whatever else.

Civilizations? Maybe. More likely though there are just single-celled organisms.

We really don't know though. There might or might not be. The universe is a very large place with a lot of unknown things out there.

I voted I don't know.

Given that we are already discovering planets that may be within the 'habitable zones' of their stars, where there is a decent chance for liquid water, I would have to be a fool to say "We're the only ones". The scientist within me wants me to say "I don't know", because I don't have definitive evidence, but the astronomical numbers involved: billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, each star which may have multiple planets - I am inclined to think that life may not be as special as we think. If only 0.001% of all planets in the universe turned out to be capable of supporting life, that would still give us more planets than we could count in our lifetimes without the aid of a machine.

If we did one day pick up a radio signal from another form of life, it would be one of the greatest things I could ever find out. I will always hold on to the hope that it will happen before my time is up. While it is true that it is unlikely for us to detect another currently-living civilization, we must not forget that any day of the year we could suddenly receive the first faint radio signals from a civilization that may have died millions of years ago. While it'd be great to be able to have a conversation, I'd be more than happy just to know for sure that others are out there.

But I would settle for seeing a non-intelligent bacteria shoveled up from a distant world, not related to anything on Earth, just as much. That in itself would confirm to me that there must also be intelligent life out there, if there is any life at all.

I would be so exciting if there was life out there. I can't imagine a more exiting thing.

This is a genuine question, not a snarky remark:

HOW can it be mathematically impossible? How could math prove the existence of life elsewhere...I don't get it

Mathematics can not prove the existence of life. Only direct observation can prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, and all such alleged reports seems to involve alcohol, media hype, conspiracy theories, blatant ignorance, and no small measure of fear.

Isn't it enough to watch the pretty lights flying around in the sky without assuming that they are artifacts of an extraterrestrial civilization?

We are on a tiny rock spinning around a tiny sun in a tiny galaxy inside an infinitely enormous universe. Of course there's life elsewhere.