Asklemmy

I believe the great filter is the jump from single-celled to multi-celled life.

Sorry, I'm going to be picky here.

You can believe in god's and magic. But aliens existing is about probability not faith, unless you want to consider if they've ever visited earth.

But yes, the chances are very high we are not alone in the universe. But I doubt they've bothered to come here . . . Yet.

I do, but I also find the idea of us being the remaining sign of life in a dying universe to be compelling in a tragic sort of way. We are like a whale who's the last of its species calling out to its kin in a dead ocean and we will never know it.

Do I believe this is the case if I'm completely honest? No. But I think it's romantic and sad in the same way that I think the Dark Forest theory is terrifying and creepy.

I think it's pretty likely there are other living worlds in our galaxy given that life likely arose on our planet multiple times in different conditions spontaneously. I think it's also pretty likely Mars still has something going on deep in it's crust (given we keep finding complex life miles deep in our own crust, some colonies of simple life have even been embedded inside of rocks for nearly a million years) and the fact that the inner solar system planets regularly exchange rocks with each other. I think it's fairly likely most bodies in the solar system have been contaminated by earth, other bodies, or by humans at this point, and that life will look pretty alien to us but may not be multicellular.

Generally, I think life is surprisingly hardy. Those worlds may not be livable for us but I'd bet you most solar systems have a little something going on somewhere, but we may not be able to discover it due to the costs and time involved to do so.

I wish, but no.

I'll refer to them as NHI (Non Human Intelligence) and yes I believe they exist and are actually on the earth with us now. There is too much eyewitness testimony from highly trained observers and scientifically verified anomalous behavior to be anything created by human beings.

No,

Much of the strange lights flying around her either top secret aircraft or drones. Many people do not know drone technology existed before the War on Terror, so when they saw lights moving unlike a airplane or helicopter they were very confused.

UFOs are largely in remote areas where they are testing top secret aircraft or drones. Area 51 or what it is officially called Homey Airport is one of them.

Roswell, New Mexico is known for being the site of a UFO crash. It is also the same town as the Walker Air Force Base. The best explanation was that Roswell was that it is not in fact a UFO crash or a hot air balloon crash, but in fact the crash of a top secret aircraft.

Gabe Valdez, a New Mexico state trooper was looking into cattle mutilations in New Mexico in the 70s and talking about how he believed the government was mutilating cattle to test the after effects of radiation from Project Gasbuggy where they did a underground nuclear detonation in rural northwestern New Mexico this includes the the Dulce area.

A leading UFO researcher Paul Bennewitz was looking for UFO and was recording strange lights and radio signals from Kirtland Air Force Base and he was assigned a handler and disinfo agent, Richard Doty of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) where according to Gabe Valdez was the source of information for the "Dulce Base" myth.

In 1989, Bill Moore, a well-known UFO investigator who came out and said he was a disinformation agent working for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations..

There are plenty of UFO whistleblowers coming out Jake Barber, a aerospace mechanic and David Grusch who was Air Force Intelligence which are pretty obviously disinformation. Also the United States government is starting to openly support the UFO conclusion without showing actually evidence during times when they need to distract people from other stuff going on.

Yes I believe it is likely that non earth originated life exists somewhere.

I absolutely do not believe “aliens” have visited earth in any way. I don’t even believe that “alien” originated radio waves have intersected earth, the odds would be crazy.

That depends. Yes, I believe it is probable that life exists elsewhere in the universe. But no, none of that life is building pyramids in ancient Egypt, abducting cows, or anal probing hillbillies.

Yes, I believe they exist. Do I believe they've visited Earth? No.

Yes, but I do not believe they have ever or will ever visit Earth. Faster-than-light travel is impossible & communications would be impossible between them in any biologically reasonable timeframe (I don't believe they would be immortal). I don't believe aliens are magic. So its "yes, but we can't meet them".

We could potentially know of them (at some point in their history) & vice versa, but that would be an Omae Wa Mo Shindeiru situation from the perspective of the observer.

Given the size of the universe, it seems inevitable that there is life on other planets. There is a tendency to regard the origin of life here as something isolated, I'd argue it's a mistake resulting from a common habit of treating life as something apart from the physical universe. The notion that life is an anomaly is a failure of perspective that comes from an arbitrary separation between the organic and inorganic worlds. There is a continuous chain of events stretching from the first auto-catalytic chemical reactions in the primitive environment of our planet and the organized complexity of a living cell.

Life is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and chemistry. Since those laws are what they are, the development of life should be seen as equally natural and inevitable on other suitable worlds because natural processes are inherently repeatable. Give the right chemical reactants and energy in similar amounts under comparable conditions, and you should invariably expect the same result.

There's a good thought experiment by Edwin Jaynes imagining a laboratory with thousands of identical flasks each containing pure water, and each heated to exactly the same temperature. Such a scenario leads us to expect with near certainty that the dissolution of a given chemical compound in one of them will be repeated with all the others, being a function of stable conditions uniform throughout the whole experiment. To suppose that the substance dissolves in only one single flask is to imply that the laboratory’s conditions are not uniform. It would mean the room must be an extremely special place, with the temperature and pressure in just the right combination to sit on the solubility boundary of the compound. From the statistician’s point of view such an arrangement is a vanishingly small probability as compared with the unvaried explanation.

And our universe is just such a laboratory with each solar system being its own flask, and the world of life on our Earth establishes one data point proving that the probability of abiogenesis is not zero. If the laws of physics have permitted chemistry to pass into biology here, statistical logic suggests that they will do so elsewhere. The presence of life in a single case by no means implies a crowded universe, but it does strongly suggest that biology is no stupendous miracle.

And so the burden of proof is shifted by the fact that the essential inputs of biology are not unique to the Earth, but are shared by the universe as a whole. The latter acts as a vast spawning ground dotted with incalculable potential nurseries for life where the specific chemical threshold may be breached. And we haven't even really explored much of our own solar system, such as the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn or even Mars.

The great variety of organisms on our planet, embodying the main streams of biological development and occupying every conceivable sort of environment, shows the plasticity of life’s basic physiological processes. Though the primary biochemical constituents be the same, their aggregation into functional systems may be accomplished in many ways, allowing life to take hold in the most extreme environments from acid pools to searing deserts.

All that said though, it’s highly unlikely we’d observe a civilization at our level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in space. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We’re aware that it’s happening, but it’s of little interest to use on day to day basis. It’s quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

He likelyhood of this planet being the only place in the universe some complex proteins folded a billion years ago is zero.

Yes but I don't believe they figured out how to cross the distance/time vastness of space.

It's not a belief for me, rather knowledge that there's a high probability.

Here and now? Doubt it. Out there at some time. Seems likely.

Depends what you class as "alien".

Given that there are literally billions of galaxies out there and each one contains billions of stars with each one having the possibility of its own multi planetary system, it would be rather silly to assume that on our random planet of literally trillions of others, it's the only one that life has or will evolve on. It might be not be life that has the ability to read a post on a smartphone but it might be more simple. It might be more advanced but I'm sure there's probably some form of life.

Whether any have been able to build inter-planetary/or inter-galactic vessels and travelled to Earth...highly unlikely. And we shouldn't be so conceited that if they did come that they would come for us! We've only been around for a million years. We're relative newcomers on the block.

Life on other planets? Seems likely.

Life on earth started pretty soon once the conditions were met.

Intelligent life (humanlike), maybe not. Most probably not. Out of millions of species through billions of years only humans have evolved to have this kind of thinking machine during a relatively short period of time.

Giving the size of universe, there is problably life on other planets, too.

I personally believe we actually live in the era after abundant life and we're one of the late starters. I don't think it'll happen but if humans could traverse the universe quickly I think we'd find a lot of long gone life and a small fraction of lost civilizations maybe a few still surviving pools of life.

I also believe life is actually pretty common. I think Mars and moons of Jupiter or Saturn have had life on them at a time

I'm an alien. I'm a legal alien.

Do they exist? Somewhere in the universe? Likely.

Are we in (or subject to) contact from them? Don't think so.

With one exception.

In the sense people mean when they ask that, no. It's gods and spirits for people afraid to just believe in gods and spirits.

In the literal sense of if life exists anywhere except Earth, the consenses is yes, it should. Although even there you have to wonder. The stars are awfully quiet and uncolonised-looking.

I think it’s likely aliens exist, but unlikely any alien species will be what we expect. I highly doubt we will see humanoid “little green men” or anything like the majority of science fiction portrays. Each planet is vastly different in just our solar system. The vast differences in environments across the galaxy will yield vastly different paths of evolution. We are only looking for “life” that fits our narrow definition based on Earth’s species - we have likely already missed signs of alien life.

Yes/no is less interesting than your reasons for your answer. And most importantly, what impact does your answer have?

For me, it's a no. Because there's no hard evidence. And by not believing, I save a lot of time and lose absolutely nothing.

That isn't to say it's impossible. It's to say nobody has show me where it's probable, based on hard evidence.

And to those here posting that animals wouldn't count because they're not intelligent: you're wrong.

I'm actually kind of excited for what we might find in the oceans of Europa. You never know!

I 100 percent believe there are aliens out there, o don't believe they've ever come even close to the Earth

What humanity has dubbed "aliens"? No.

Extraterrestrial creatures/other lifeforms outside our galaxy? I don't know. We don't have enough data to prove it true or false yet.

No but i want to. I just havent seen any credible evidence. shrug