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Well there is a thread for everything else.

Ok, seriously though: What do you believe life on other planets chances are? What form do you think they most commonly are? WHat do you think the atmoshpere of there planet would be? Do they need light? Do they need a drinkable substance? Are there brains large enough (or complexe enough) to be sentient? Do they HAVE brains? What is are the senses they have? Would they be hostile to us? So many questions... Those are the base ones. So here is my idea: Answer those, and if you have time, draw, or model a picture and attach it (or make a description )
I want to see what the community thinks. (THIS IS NOT A FUNNY THREAD, SO DONT DESCRIBE JIMMY OR SOMETHING:p)

My Answers:
1. 99.9999%
2. Microbe or Plant
3. Average Nitrogen/(optional include: and there is a small chance for even no atmosphere!)
4. No. Light rarely shines in some places, but it still persisists.
5. No, because of the microbes, which wouldnt require water.
6. Probably Not. It is a small chance that we might have become sentients, or land on our planet exist at all, so we are really lucky.
7. Funny you might say, but we look at our eco system as an example. I would have to say they probably do have brains, but not like ours.
8. Not human of course. Maybe all of humans plus some, but this is a hard question, so I give it a really big unknown, meaning I cant even think of any besides those humanity has, or talks of.
9 and 10. Most likely because of the un-sentientness, they would lean to neutral.

Picture attached.
Description: This is a picture of plant life developing with its root s in the ocean. Its star, a blue gaint is fading. Humans spread search lights, which causes them an extra growth boost (there life is 2 weeks human time, they orbit there star in 2 weeks). I could picture the military studing them. The water would probably be highly radioactive (from the star) liquid methane. The core is based on a hard molten rock substance, which provides just enough heat for the plants to live, and evolve (most likely eventually turning the planet into a methane based one).

Edit: you can add questions, or things. Post info you find from searching the inet. I want this to show truely in what this forum believes. And If you dont believe in Alien life, post why.

Edit_super: That image looked like exactly opposite of what I said, but I said REQUIRES LIGHT, it still might be benofactory. Just like humans dont need light, they need heat. It only comes with it.

1) There is a good chance of it, you would have to be pretty nieve to think we are the only life in space (with all of its trillions of stars and other planetoid-like bodies). The only problem is finding that life, which would take a damn long time, even if we could travel at the speed of light. And it would be hundreds if not thousands of years before we develop any sort of wormhole technology.

2) That all depends on how long they have been around and their surroundings. They could be anything from single celled organisms through to intelligent peices of pure energy, that dont have a physical body, so it is hard to say.

3) Could be a mix of either; hydrogen, methane, oxygen or nitrogen as these are pretty simple compounds, and common (not too sure on this one though).

4) Yes, otherwise plants would not develop as they would not be able to photosynthesise, thus creating a very difficult process for non-plant life to develop as they would have no food. If the planet has no light or a molten core, then there would be no heat, and no heat means things cant survive past incredibly primitive development stages.

5) Once again, without things like water (or a fluid substance of drinking value) things wouldn't be able to develop very well. The prescence of water on the other hand could be feasible, if you have hydrogen and oxygen in an atmosphere then you would get water. If you had some other alternitave to water, like liquid methane, nitrogen, or hydrogen, you would incurr extremely cold temperatures, thus not supporting much life.

6) It all depends on how long they've been there, given that the conditions were right, it could vary (see Q.2).

7) See above.

8) See above.

9) If they are intelligent enough to develop the correct technology to reach us then that could go one of two ways; they could realise that we are reasonably intelligent and try to communicate with us or; they would see us as an inferior race and a potential threat and exterminate us all. Given their intelligence, I would think that they would be past the age of wars and violence and take the more human friendly approach.

Sorry for babbling on for a bit but I like to theorise about such things.

Yes... but I think speculation about the details if fairly pointless.

I found this when having a gander at new scientist, its about Extrasolar planets. and it's pretty interesting, dunno if aliens could survive on this thing though.


Astronomers have found an extrasolar planet with the largest solid core ever detected. The core is so immense - as massive as 70 Earths - that astronomers believe it might have formed through collisions with other planets.

The planet was discovered around a star called HD 149026, which is rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Such "metal-rich" stars are three times more likely than their Sun-like cousins to harbour detectable planets.

Astronomers using Japan's powerful Subaru Telescope in Hawaii first detected the planet, called HD 149026b, in July 2004 by the gravitational tugs it exerted on its host star. Subsequent measurements taken by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii confirmed the star's resultant wobble, revealing the planet orbits its star every 2.87 days.

But in May 2005, astronomers using a relatively small robotic telescope in Arizona noticed a 0.3% dip in the star's brightness every 2.87 days. That dimming showed the planet was among an elite group of eight which are known to pass directly between their host stars and Earth during their orbits. Such transits can reveal the planet's exact physical size and mass, from which its density can be calculated.

“Weird object”
The results were surprising. The planet's diameter was about three-quarters that of Jupiter. But its density suggested that half to two-thirds of its mass was locked in heavy elements - mostly in a solid core.

That differs strikingly from other transiting extrasolar planets which, like Jupiter, are mostly hydrogen and helium gas with no more than a quarter of their mass taken up by their cores."This is a very weird object," says team member Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California in Santa Cruz, US.

Indeed, the discovery strains the two main planet-formation theories. In the “core accretion model”, planets form in a snowball effect by gradually building up a rocky core as a result of random collisions. The increasing gravity of the growing core then begins to attract more material and the gases that make up an atmosphere.

In the alternative “gravitational instability model”, gas giant planets form quickly by condensing directly from a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a young star.

Pushed to the limit
"We have no rigorous model for how this planet formed," Laughlin told New Scientist. He says gas giants in the gravitational instability model could gain heavy elements through collisions with comets or asteroids, but would not be able to swallow enough material to explain this observation.

"I'm a long-term cheerleader for the core accretion model," he says. "But this really pushes the model to its limits."

Laughlin says the new discovery suggests "something extra", such as a collision with one or more planets in the past, could explain the dense core. If so, the collision might have knocked the planet out of the star's equatorial plane. Astronomers have re-observed the star to check its axis of rotation and are currently processing this data.

Inward migration
The planet is a scalding 1200°C and lies about 25 times closer to its star than Earth does to the Sun. It probably migrated towards the star from a more distant orbit when friction with material in a disc around the star slowed it down, allowing the star's gravity to pull it closer.

Laughlin hopes to find more transiting planets to see how unusual this object is. The best data so far is on three extrasolar planets that transit bright stars, but all three are quite different. One is about a third larger in diameter than expected by theory, one is the predicted size, and this object is smaller and denser than expected.

That suggests planets lying very close to their stars - which are easiest for astronomers to detect - "are most likely to have suffered problems in the past", says Laughlin. "The fact you see oddballs all close to the star is telling us we're seeing the ruined fringes of the planetary distribution."

A paper on the newly discovered planet will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Only if you're too boring to have fun dreaming.

yah.

@durge: Ah, I see your points, but I will have to see what some of apollo says, before I make conclusions about yours

Anyone see Aliens of the Deep? Well the theory is that there might be life on the moon europa because of a photsyntehsiss like program from hot vents deep in the ocean like that of earth. Europa has the correct balance of heat and cold to make it possible for an ocean beneath the surface of the moon where life could live. See the movies its quite interesting.

Not so easy to pick out questions... so....

We're talking good olde sentient life I take it BTW? Viruses, and bits of slime etc I'm conveniently ignoring. (which are probably much the majority)

1. What do you believe life on other planets chances are?
Almost impossible not to be, what with the size of the universe and everything. Even with extremely unlikely conditions to allow life

2. What form do you think they most commonly are?
Probably very much like life on earth I would guess. Since we only have ourselves as examples, then we can only *really* say for definite that life would form in conditions such as ours (ie. earth, air etc - amazingly small envelope before conditions wouldn't have created us). Therefore we are good examples

3. Atmosphere? See above. ie. similar to ours. Without going into ideas about life forming in different conditions (which would be *total* guesswork really - ie. much easier to create life in those conditions within a testtube, is another to decide the same thing could happen on a planetary system

4. Do they need light?
I'm sticking to my "like here" stance. So yeah, to get to a decent level they would. We could do without light (for a while anyway) now, cos we evolved far enough to control (to a certain extent) our environment, but lower life forms would probably be screwed

5. Do they need a drinkable substance?
Still with the "like us" theory...

6. Are there brains large enough (or complexe enough) to be sentient?
Darn. Should have read this first. I truly believe theres loads of life out there, but not much sentience. But the chances of there not being another race out there with sentience is pretty small considering the sheer size of the universe.

7. What are the senses they have?
Which species now? If we go with my sentient species, then again would be similar to ours.

8. Would they be hostile to us?
Who knows? I'll go with yes. Mainly because we are pretty evolved and we would blow the **** out of them if they poked their noses through the clouds So apart from a tiny minority (you would imagine) on super evolved species then yes they would be hostile. And the super evolved species probably got wiped out years ago by everyone else

Another question I would ask would be:-

9. Will we ever meet them?
Personally if "we" means literally us here, then no way matey. The same unbelievable odds of life *not* existing in the universe would reverse in this case, and basically come up with unbelievable odds that we would ever meet them. The human race as a whole on the other hand (before we blow each other up) has a *slightly* better chance than just us here. Do the maths.

Always liked the Douglas Adams comment about how the universe, statistically, has no life. By just using simple mathematics of the mass of all life in the universe compared to the mass of the universe itself, then you end up with a number so infitisimly small and next to zero, that it's zero by any other name.

Cheers

Dude, you could have shortened that down to 10^10^100 (also known as a googolplex)

Also, our brain size is currently at the most optimum size.. any bigger and intellect and brain functions slow down.

Maybe there is something higher than intelligence which has not yet evolved on earth. Given that it took nature 4 billion years to create the most complex form of life (us, humans) and therefore intelligence, imagine what another 4 billion years will do ? (Also add to this that humans can direct their own evolution through manipulating dna)

Concerning life existing elsewhere in the universe, well why not ?

N* = Number of stars in the milky way
fp = Fraction of stars that have planets
ne = Number of planets ecologically suitable for life
fl = Fraction of where life actually arises
fi = Fraction of where intelligence emerges
fc = Fraction of the technologically communicative
fL = Fraction of a planets lifetime that's graced by a technological civilisation
N = Total Number of advanced civilisations

N = N* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x fL
400 billion x 1/4 x 2 x 1/2 x 1/10 x 1/10 x 1/100 millionth

N= 10 technologically advanced civilisations just in the milky way alone is probable, then add to that billions of billions of other galaxies in our universe.. suddenly it doesn't seem like we are the only ones.

The problem is the distances involved are absolutely huge, just to get to the center of our galaxy would take 10,000 years at the speed of light. From that it becomes increasingly more important that technology has to be advanced enough to travel those kind of distances in alot shorter time periods.


Of course, this just depends on what you believe and I'm just stating science's best guess based on the available evidence and experiments.

is there life: almost definately but whether it exists in the same timeframe as us is another matter.

type of life: where and when are we talking? there could be thousands or millions of planets sustaining life at any one time, ranging from bacteria, viruses, algae etc to complex plants and animals.

is it sentient: posibly somewhere else at some time in space not necessarily during out brief existance there may be other inteligent lifeforms

atmospere? who needs an atmosphere really? liquid isperfectly acceptable living medium. it need not contain pure oxygen either, life at volcanic chimneys in the ocean thrive of sulphur-oxides for energy.

do they need light? no, there is life deep underground in enclosed cave systems that survive on the sulphur-oxide reactions instead of photosynthesys. geothermal evergy can sustain the temperature and chemical reactions.

would they have brains? if they were sentient them perhaps but not necessarily in the way ours is, a neural network may be spread through the whole body instead of located in a descrete area.

would they have senses? depends how you look at it, in a way everything has senses, an oxygen molecule will react woth a carbon atom t form co2, would you call that a sense? how about a plant growing towards light because the increased photosynthesis results in accelerated growth of the plant where it is exposed to sunlight? the nerve impulses in a human neural network work in a very similar level so you acn't erally not have a "sense" of aspects of the environment and still be alive.
even a virus can "sense" when it's in contact with a cell membrane and attach and start to invade the cell and replicate.

would they be hostile? well for them to make contact with us we would have to asume a high level of sentience so they may treat us like we treat insects and just ignore/wipe us out before we even noticed them or they may be more political and peaceful, how on the otherhand would the gun-ho americans react is another matter, it is possible the military would work on a shoot first ask questions later basis and provoke them to wipe us out.

I have a strange itch that somewhere in the universe, several beings are sitting around a similar virtual conversation area and discussing the same thing.

Possibly with small triangle beards?

Cheers