Extraterrestrial Life will be found

carstensdj

carstensdj

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http://m.news24.com/news24/SciTech/News/Extraterrestrial-life-will-be-found-expert-20120126

It is likely that scientists will find extraterrestrial life, but the chances of it being intelligent, or even multi-celled, are remote, an astronomer has said.

"In our solar system I think there's every chance that we will find things like bacteria - life at that level somewhere else. Multi-celled life, I think, is unlikely," Dr Robin Catchpole told News24.

Catchpole teaches at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, and is formerly a senior astronomer at the Royal Observatory.

He is presently giving a summer school at the University of Cape Town on "From Here to the Edge of the Observable Universe".

Astronomers have, in the last 30 years, been more accepting of the idea that life may occur elsewhere in the universe.

Technology

"There's almost a sort of philosophical point that we don't see ourselves as unique in the universe perhaps in the way that we used to.

"In the last 100 years since Darwin really we've seen that we are related to all the other living things. So we would expect not only to find ourselves, of course, but we would expect and anticipate finding life elsewhere," Catchpole said.

Technology has allowed astronomers to explore more of the universe and radio telescopes, in particular, have assisted in expanding knowledge.

"With radio telescopes we've discovered evidence of molecules - the basic precursors of life - all over the place in interstellar clouds. The more we look, the more we find," said Catchpole.

In the past, it was thought that planets around stars were a rare phenomenon, but advances in astronomy have shown that not only are planets common, they are even present around binary stars, as in the Star Wars movies.

"Indeed, work done in South Africa itself is helping to find planets around stars and we think now they're probably the rule, rather than the exception," Catchpole said.

"It was really the technology that led us to discover the first planets because, in very rare cases, we don't observe the planet itself," he added.

Methods

Astronomers use three common methods to detect planets: Astrometry, that measures the star's position and monitors it for a "wobble" that would indicate the presence of a body exercising a gravitational influence.

In the transit method, astronomers measure whether the light from a star dips fractionally as a planet passes between the star and observer.

With gravitational microlensing, experts observe two stars in alignment and use the gravity of the nearer star to magnify the light of the distant one.
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Apache

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It would be awesome if there was extraterrestrial life, but then God would have had to create them.

It would be interesting from a christian angle...
 
Nerfherder

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Apache said:
It would be awesome if there was extraterrestrial life, but then God would have had to create them.

It would be interesting from a christian angle...
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Would be even more interesting from an atheist POV. Mainly because the chance are that it would prove a lot of Christians wrong.
 
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Arthur

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Apache said:
It would be awesome if there was extraterrestrial life, but then God would have had to create them.

It would be interesting from a christian angle...
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From a classical theological perspective this is not the slightest problem. Not even intelligent ET life presents the slightest philosophical or theological problems. In the Aristotelico-Thomist perspective, a human is simply a rational animal, in other words a creature that has a physical body and a rational (ie non-material, ie spiritual) soul. The word "soul" (or anima in Latin) here has nothing to do with religion - it's used as Aristotle did in De Anima and by most philosophy until the mid-20th C, ie simply "life principle". When used this way (the classical philosophical use), you understand why Aristotle said plants and animals also have souls (life principles), but they are mechanical not spiritual (non-material). Soul is not some mystical or mythical-spooky cloudy-gas-energy-field thing, but simply the animating principle of things that are alive. The difference in humans is that instead of being purely material (ie mechanical, like a complex bio-engine), the soul is rational, and therefore non-material. The classical definition of a human is a physical body united to a rational soul, and if the aliens are intelligent, this is exactly what they are, and therefore human, though not terrestrial.

Intelligent ETs, though they might look very different and be friendly or hostile, are simply another human species.
 
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Ninja'd

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Apache said:
It would be awesome if there was extraterrestrial life, but then God would have had to create them.

It would be interesting from a christian angle...
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So what are you actually saying? The aliens abducted people and anally probed them in the Lord's name?
 
waynegohl

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If a scientist announces that he saw an ET or that ET exists then there is a chance he will lose his job and or funding so the next best thing to do is say that ET does exist except it be an amoeba or something. Should ET walk up to the Vatican or White House looking like you and me then these scientist will say "we told you so, except we had no idea it was multi-celled".
 
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killadoob

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Apache said:
It would be awesome if there was extraterrestrial life, but then God would have had to create them.

It would be interesting from a christian angle...
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Surely the burning question is who created GOD?
 
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Elimentals

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/me looks at the Forum section..

Erm yep its says Natural Sciences.... shoe, go back to PD, no place here for that creation crap as its not natural nor science.
 
waynegohl

waynegohl

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S4020041.JPG


And I'm no scientist, hell I failed maths and science and about 5 other subjects but look what I found.
 
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Elimentals

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waynegohl said:
And I'm no scientist, hell I failed maths and science and about 5 other subjects but look what I found.
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A clay figure in a jar filled with water?

Not that I dont think aliens do not exist, its just that I would only take a living specimen in front of me as 100% proof, not a photo of something that I have no way of validating.

I am of a personal view that they most probably have been here in the past and are avoiding or limiting access to our planet in order to let us grow our own identity.
 
waynegohl

waynegohl

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Elimentals said:
A clay figure in a jar filled with water?

Not that I dont think aliens do not exist, its just that I would only take a living specimen in front of me as 100% proof, not a photo of something that I have no way of validating.

I am of a personal view that they most probably have been here in the past and are avoiding or limiting access to our planet in order to let us grow our own identity.
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So what makes you thinks it's clay if you have no way of validating it?
 
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