Do you believe in aliens?

When I say aliens I do not mean any kind of alien life, but beings with intelligence rivaling/surpassing our own.

If you do believe, why? Is it because you just think it is highly probable intelligent life isn't unique to one planet? Is it because of certain sightings and encounters of UFO's you have heard about? Or even perhaps a personal experience with a sighting?

If you don't believe they exist, why? Is it just a lack of solid evidence? Or there are some people who believe the specific properties you need for intelligent life to come about will not ever occur anywhere else in the universe.

Yes.

If you do believe, why? Is it because you just think it is highly probable intelligent life isn't unique to one planet? Is it because of certain sightings and encounters of UFO's you have heard about? Or even perhaps a personal experience with a sighting?

All but one of the above.

Originally posted by Surtur
When I say aliens I do not mean any kind of alien life, but beings with intelligence rivaling/surpassing our own.

If you do believe, why? Is it because you just think it is highly probable intelligent life isn't unique to one planet? Is it because of certain sightings and encounters of UFO's you have heard about? Or even perhaps a personal experience with a sighting?

If you don't believe they exist, why? Is it just a lack of solid evidence? Or there are some people who believe the specific properties you need for intelligent life to come about will not ever occur anywhere else in the universe.

I think the possibility of intelligent life existing in the universe is far beyond just a 100% probability. It is probably far closer to a 1,000,000,000% probability. What this means is that there are probably millions of forms of intelligent life in our universe, alone. We re so far removed from being alone in the universe that it is ridiculous.

Probably many many species of intelligent life have already come into existence and become extinct.

The idea that humanity is alone in the universe, as the only sapient lifeform, is the height of ignorant arrogance.

What's your preferred answer to the Fermi Paradox then?

^^^Whats yours to the OP? Or you keeping your vote on the DL for now?

I personally have no problem with the Fermi.
It could be as simple as aliens not wanting to contaminate us, since they're observing us, or they're avoiding us.
I mean, with the probes and messages and such we keep sending out, we could be seen as interstellar Jehovah's witnesses, bothering others.

I believe

The galaxy is a big place, could be that any intelligent life that has reached a level of possessing interstellar travel went extinct or possibly lost the ability to travel between stars long before they reached us

I'm one of those people who think it's extremely likely there's alien life somewhere out there in the universe rivaling or even surpassing humanity in sophistication, but that's about it.

Not sure.

As a kid, I was riding in the back seat, my mom at the wheel, and my sister in the passengers seat. It was the dead of night, no one else around. As we approached home they both started shouting about seeing something, just hovering in the sky.

And like an idiot, I was distracted by my music, and missed it completely. I looked, sure, but I couldn't see anything from my vantage point and really had no idea where to look.

I figured they were.messing with me, but years later at a big family get together, the older generation was talking about their various sightings, and I overheard my sister tell a friend she really did see something that looked like a saucer, sitting there for a bit, and then disappearing.

No idea what really happened, I only regret missing it. And to this day, years later, when it's dark out I look to the skies in the hopes of getting another shot at it.

So far, no luck.

The universe is so large that the probability of aliens existing seems (to me) to be almost 100% likely.

Whether they have or will ever visit us is another story. As noted, the universe is a big place.

I do, but I don't really know whether or not they've visited Earth.

Yes they exist, no we haven't met them and nor have they visited earth (at the least, we have no sign of it), but we may meet them in the future.

For me I think they exist and I believe there is a solid chance that some sightings of UFO's have been legit. The government itself when it studied thousands of cases admitted that there was a very small percentage that science couldn't explain.

Though for me I tend to look at the people who would probably be the most credible witness to these kinds of things: a pilot. Especially someone who is in the air force. There have been multiple sightings by experienced pilots going as far back as WW2 at the very least. We also have a bit more recent sightings by pilots, look up the Tehran UFO incident of 1976. These were people flying supersonic jets who were tracking the object, they know what a flying object with an intelligence behind it looks like in terms of how it would move.

The other thing for me is when the government gives us an "explanation" for a sighting that makes no scientific sense. You ever hear of "The Battle of Los Angeles" ? It happened a few months after Pearl Harbor. We pumped a whole lot of anti-aircraft artillery at...some kind of flying object and we failed to bring it down. A couple people actually died because of the chaos of friggin anti-aircraft artillery falling all over the city(their cars crashed and/or were hit by falling shells) and several buildings were damaged, so this wasn't a tiny firefight. At the time most thought it was an advanced Japanese aircraft. The government then said it was just a case of "war nerves" brought on by a weather balloon sighting.

They are telling us that we had weather balloons that could withstand massive barrages of machine guns and anti-aircraft artillery. Or if you look at the Tehran incident I mentioned the explanation someone gave(though to be fair this was not a government official, but someone who wrote a book about debunking UFO's) they said what the pilots saw was really just Jupiter. Despite the fact stars and planets do not show up on the radar in airplanes.

Wow, its great to see so many people here believe.

I think that any race intelligent enough to master space travel will figure out that mass suicide is better than the territorial effort that is continued existence. That's why we never meet them.

😬

So to clarify my answer, I do believe aliens much more intelligent than us existed or exist, and then offed themselves or are about to do it.

Originally posted by riv6672
^^^Whats yours to the OP? Or you keeping your vote on the DL for now?

I personally have no problem with the Fermi.
It could be as simple as aliens not wanting to contaminate us, since they're observing us, or they're avoiding us.
I mean, with the probes and messages and such we keep sending out, we could be seen as interstellar Jehovah's witnesses, bothering others.

I don't know. Obviously I know the argument that there's so many planets in the universe there statistically must be intelligent life, but the problem is that I don't know how likely intelligent life is. If it is such an infinitesimally small likelihood that even the number of planets in the universe pales against it then obviously it wouldn't be a good argument.

Now, it seems that the likelihood of some form of life in the universe is extremely high (perhaps even in our solar system), and that of course takes away one big uncertainty making it more likely that there is intelligent life. But still, I don't feel well informed enough to make a guess either way.

I suspect the universe is probably teeming with life, that even our solar system has life "hidden" in extreme, off-Earth biospheres we have yet to penetrate. But like the ocean, you just can't walk up to the shore, scope out a glass of seawater, look, see nothing, then conclude the rest of the ocean is lifeless. The universe is simply too vast for that. But this sort of life is likely primitive or microbial.

Life with intelligence (*cynicism on hold here*) like us, or greater?

If Earth is in any way typical, I'd say such life is extremely rare, if for no other reason than, as we've seen on Earth, higher intelligence isn't exactly necessary for life to thrive.

My version of the Drake equation:
1. Since life began on Earth, I'd read that some 50 billion different species have come and gone (mostly gone).
2. Out of that 50 billion, only one -- 1 -- has risen to extreme technological eminence. So we now have a ratio of pre-intelligent life to intelligent life: 50 billion to 1.
3. The Milky Way is estimated to have about 500 billion stars. If we apply the same ratio on Earth to the whole galaxy, we have 10 stars with at least one planet harboring intelligent life.
4. With a galaxy 100,000 lightyears across, that puts the average distance between intelligent life systems at 10,000 lightyears.
5. 10K LY is far more than enough to keep any radio/EM-broadcasting (or certainly less advanced) civilization seemingly isolated and apparently alone.
6. Those at a "Star Trek" phase of exploration: aliens at that exact level of development, as we imagine (and what are the odds of that), could be out there, or not; could be close by, or not. (Regarding UFOs: I find no compelling evidence that these are alien visitations. If anything, given the *prevalence* of humanoid types, at worst that's a cultural trope; at best, if real, I would sooner go with time travelers from a far future.) In any event, given the distances and energy requirements, I would think interstellar flight via starships would not be as routine as our pop scifi generally portrays.
7. Those that are far more advanced than us (ie, using some other form of communication/transportation) likely aren't detectable by us, and they know better than to interact with a race at our stage of, um, development.)

Conclusion: Yes, I think there is intelligent alien life out there, but it is rare, again if only because intelligence isn't necessary for life to thrive (and indeed, if we end up destroying ourselves, than higher intelligence may be, in the longer term, actually counterproductive to extreme, long-term species survival).

/speculative lecture

"If we apply the same ratio on Earth to the whole galaxy, we have 10 stars with at least one planet harboring intelligent life."

This is completely arbitrary though.....those two numbers have nothing to do with each other.

I'm glad you mentioned the Drake equation though. That is basically what I wanted to say with my last post, the uncertainty of most of the variables in it is what makes me uncomfortable giving a guess at all.