Is There Life on Mars?

[Siege]

Life is fairly common, multi-cellular life less so, sapient life drastically less so, industrialised sapient life vanishingly so.
Aliens are either gods or cavemen. And since we've seen no signs of bizzare alien-made stellar phenomena the gods, if they exist, must be pretty far away.

Dunno why that has to be the case.  Aliens out there could be muddling through an industrial society and dealing with unemployment, shareholder value and killing each other over abortion as well.

Good point.
Given the age of the universe, chances are we are on the leading edge.
Meaning we are it.
We are the ancient astronauts for other civilizations.

We enjoy a perfect environment.

Question is, how do we know other drastically different environment are not ideal for other life-forms?

[Admiral Yi]

Can life forms exist without water?  That seems to be the big limiter.

[Siege]

Can life forms exist without water?  That seems to be the big limiter.

Therefore the goldilocks theory.

[Razgovory]

Life is fairly common, multi-cellular life less so, sapient life drastically less so, industrialised sapient life vanishingly so.
Aliens are either gods or cavemen. And since we've seen no signs of bizzare alien-made stellar phenomena the gods, if they exist, must be pretty far away.

Dunno why that has to be the case.  Aliens out there could be muddling through an industrial society and dealing with unemployment, shareholder value and killing each other over abortion as well.

It's due to the time scale.  If there are sapient aliens out there they almost certainly evolved that way millions of years before we did.  Think of Earth's history as book with each page corresponding to a million years.  The book will be several million pages long.  At the 4-5 billion page mark is today.  Human beings make up maybe a page.  Behavioral modernity might be a paragraph.  Farming and metal work be a few words.  Industrial civilization half a letter.  I have no idea how long the current epoch of humanity will last.  We may evolve into something else, we might die out, we may modify ourselves to we wouldn't recognized.  All in all 10 pages forward humanity is likely to be radically different (if it even exists).  Now lets imagine we find a different planet that is like ours and life evolves roughly the same way. It is a different book. If we were to open that book to a random page it is extremely unlikely we open to a similar page corresponding to an industrial society.  Now even if the the opening the book is not completely random, say we always open toward the middle area of the book just a few pages (or a few sentences) difference from our book are going to have either presentient life or something that has been sentient much, much longer then us.

[Neil]

Can life forms exist without water?  That seems to be the big limiter.

Other solvents are possible, but the fact that water is one of the most common molecules in the universe makes it a very good candidate.

[CountDeMoney]

It's due to the time scale.  If there are sapient aliens out there they almost certainly evolved that way millions of years before we did.  Think of Earth's history as book with each page corresponding to a million years.  The book will be several million pages long.  At the 4-5 billion page mark is today.  Human beings make up maybe a page.  Behavioral modernity might be a paragraph.  Farming and metal work be a few words.  Industrial civilization half a letter.  I have no idea how long the current epoch of humanity will last.  We may evolve into something else, we might die out, we may modify ourselves to we wouldn't recognized.  All in all 10 pages forward humanity is likely to be radically different (if it even exists).  Now lets imagine we find a different planet that is like ours and life evolves roughly the same way. It is a different book. If we were to open that book to a random page it is extremely unlikely we open to a similar page corresponding to an industrial society.  Now even if the the opening the book is not completely random, say we always open toward the middle area of the book just a few pages (or a few sentences) difference from our book are going to have either presentient life or something that has been sentient much, much longer then us.

Problem with questions like this is that it takes a "snapshot" approach.  The percentages of possibility change when the question goes from "Is there sapient life out there?" to "Has there ever been sapient life out there? or "Will there ever be sapient life out there?"  The universe's timeline is a big one.

[Siege]

Life is fairly common, multi-cellular life less so, sapient life drastically less so, industrialised sapient life vanishingly so.
Aliens are either gods or cavemen. And since we've seen no signs of bizzare alien-made stellar phenomena the gods, if they exist, must be pretty far away.

Dunno why that has to be the case.  Aliens out there could be muddling through an industrial society and dealing with unemployment, shareholder value and killing each other over abortion as well.

It's due to the time scale.  If there are sapient aliens out there they almost certainly evolved that way millions of years before we did.  Think of Earth's history as book with each page corresponding to a million years.  The book will be several million pages long.  At the 4-5 billion page mark is today.  Human beings make up maybe a page.  Behavioral modernity might be a paragraph.  Farming and metal work be a few words.  Industrial civilization half a letter.  I have no idea how long the current epoch of humanity will last.  We may evolve into something else, we might die out, we may modify ourselves to we wouldn't recognized.  All in all 10 pages forward humanity is likely to be radically different (if it even exists).  Now lets imagine we find a different planet that is like ours and life evolves roughly the same way. It is a different book. If we were to open that book to a random page it is extremely unlikely we open to a similar page corresponding to an industrial society.  Now even if the the opening the book is not completely random, say we always open toward the middle area of the book just a few pages (or a few sentences) difference from our book are going to have either presentient life or something that has been sentient much, much longer then us.

What the hell are you talking about?
Post-human civs develop tech at a multimillion speed of what we can do right now.
One of the predicaments of the technological singularity is that un-enhanced humans cannot follow tech development because of how fast it develops.

[CountDeMoney]

Can life forms exist without water?  That seems to be the big limiter.

Other solvents are possible, but the fact that water is one of the most common molecules in the universe makes it a very good candidate.

Our blood is red because of the iron content.  The horseshoe crab?  It's blue because of the copper content.  All sorts of nifty biological diversions are possible.

[Admiral Yi]

Our blood is red because of the iron content.  The horseshoe crab?  It's blue because of the copper content.  All sorts of nifty biological diversions are possible.

Both still in a water solvent.

[CountDeMoney]

Our blood is red because of the iron content.  The horseshoe crab?  It's blue because of the copper content.  All sorts of nifty biological diversions are possible.

Both still in a water solvent.

I'm not arguing against the water point, for fuck's sake.  All sorts of nifty biological diversions are possible WITH WATER.  Fucking happy now? 

Fuck it, we're going to change the forum format to a Yes/No only response format, for all you OCD Rainman Assburgers with Cheese that can't tolerate anything that deviates from such a standardized format.  Fuck. 

[Eddie Teach]

Fuck it, we're going to change the forum format to a Yes/No only response format, for all you OCD Rainman Assburgers with Cheese that can't tolerate anything that deviates from such a standardized format.  Fuck.

No.

[Admiral Yi]

Jeez.  Take a blood pressure med and do some yoga.

[CountDeMoney]

Jeez.  Take a blood pressure med and do some yoga.

No.

[Siege]

Come on, there is a wide merging for water based life.
We can safely say that 30% of all star systems have the potential for water based life-forms.
This is a massive number...

[Admiral Yi]

I don't see it.  Water assumes liquid form in a very tiny temperature range.