You know that is an interesting thought. Seems as though I read an article many months back about the possibility of "other" forms of life making its way to our planet via meteors or comets, namely bacteria. The possibility exists but chances were rare due to the fact that most objects burn up on entry into our atmosphere and that even those that may make it through somewhat intact would be so hot that any life as we know it could not survive on them. 😀

National Geographic or Google News had an article on their website about a star scientisits have discoverd, that had the physical properities that would make life possible to exist if there were a planet to be orbiting it. This star and its system were some X number of light years away and the only thing it seems to me that they had anything to go on were the spectrum readings taken from the stars light.

So, in my opinion it seems that even though the scientific world may take this form of biology seriously, there seems to be not much they can do with it and if life did exist on other planets it would not be in mans best interest not to go tampering with it, seeing as how we have botched up the life that exists on our own planet and we could never possibly travel there to study it even if we did have proof that it exists.

Our own world still holds many mysteries yet left to be discovered. So I will just have another cup of coffee, peer through the lenses of my microscope, study about that which is known on our own planet and hope that it will lead me to that which is not known as yet.

Xenobiology? To speculative to be seriously persued I think. As long as we rely on fossile fuels as our main source of energy and people of this world still go about homeless, hungry, and in poor health; our energy, time, and money are best spent being concerned with these things and the biology of our own kind and our own world, I think. 😉

Well I could say that I saw UFO’s but
most people wouldnt believe me just an
ordinary person
but there are some famous people
who have reported seeing them
and talk about it with the risk of being made fun of.

Asronauts and presedents to name of few.
Jimmy Carter for example wanted to tell the public
about some kind of secret but he was not "allowed" to.
and President Reagan alluded it. NASA has photos of
strange anomalies
(UFO"s) that cant be explained.
Although there is controversy from skeptics
that it was actually the planet Venus Carter saw
He still maintained that he saw a UFO and not Venus
Here is some info about Carter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter

Here is why people may think they see a ufo:

http://www.unmuseum.org/ifonat.htm

I heard a fairly complelling argument against it once, actually. The conditions under which life can form are a very narrow range, and even under the appropriate conditions it’s still ridiculously unlikely for the necessary amino acids to combine and form the corresponding proteins. Even after this, those protein combinations must couple with a mechanism by which it can reproduce itself before the building blocks of life are set.

That being said, I still think that the universe is large enough and has been around long enough that life has formed elsewhere at some point, but like alex I’m still waiting for evidence of it.

A friend of mine who’s very into physics told me once that if the speed of light is a constant, then time and space must be malleable. A planet might be 100 lightyears away as normal space goes, but if it could be bent to be 20 minutes away…

So I guess it’s the general lack of specific evidence that keeps me skeptical :p

Yeah, the math involved in altering space would be pretty crazy, and the theory is relatively recent (within the last decade or so for serious work, and conceptually only about 60 years ago). I wish I was as into physics as I am biology, then I could stay up to date on this stuff more easily.

But just because we can barely conceive of the idea now doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. A thousand years ago, if you told someone that there would one day be a weapon that could destroy an entire city in an instant, no one would be able to figure out how either.

You know all of this sounds well and good and we could get into some very cool discussions on curved space and wormholes but consider this; the light we are seeing from stars or star systems thousands if not billions or more light years away, may be just now getting to us. So the origin of that light may no longer exist. Those stellar systems may have burned out billions of light years ago. If our sun were to burn out instantly, it would be or take 8.6 seconds before we would know it or realize it. A lot of good that is going to do us. 😆

Question: If you were in a vehicle traveling at light speed and you turned on a spot light to shine ahead of that vehicle. Would it produce a beam of light or not? If so how fast would the beam be traveling? The answer could be in the infamous formula E=mc^2 😀

The answer is short answer is no, because as you approach the speed of light more and more of your energy is converted to mass (as the relativity equation shows). So you couldn’t actually reach the speed of light because of the mass you already had. If you were moving close to the speed of light, the light would still be travelling faster than you (3*10^8 ), and so it would project ahead of you. But if somehow you were already travelling at the speed of light, turning a searchlight on could only project light at the same speed at which you were already travelling, so the light could never leave its point of origin to make a beam.

I take ET life seriously alex. I am finishing school this year and wish they had a masters in astrobiology somewhere so that I could go there. But the best I can find are certificates. I think microbiology would probably be the specialty of choice for someone in this field, so I am lucky there. What is your degree in and have you thought about pursuing a career in astrobiology 🙂

That is good that you are going back to school. You seem smart and I thought you already have degree. I hope it works out. I never thought about evolutionary biology, but after reading the origin thread and some others, it seem very interesting. But I will stick to my germs 🙂

What do you think?:

http://news.ifas.ufl.edu/archstory.php?id=85

http://fig.cox.miami.edu/~cmallery/150/ … permia.htm

Here’s my opinion. I’m a future biologist and I thought about this many times… There is proof that most basic organic molecule can be created in the athmosphear or underwater. It is statistically possible that simple life like system auto-assemble in natural conditions, it happened here after all. Considering the unbeliveable size of the universe, it is impossible that what happened on Earth did’nt happened somewhere else. There’s got to be earth-like planets in millions of solar systems. There is also the possibility that life may exist in other forms than the one we know. There is actually interresting theories about sillicium based organisms instead of the carbon based organisms we know. If you believe that life exists on other planets, you’ve got to be very egoist. Earth is not unique, it’s special, but not unique. Now about the question of aliens visiting our planet… Space is not like in the movies, you cannot jump from a planet to another in a second. Other solar systems are very far, the closest are at a couple of light years… A light year is the distance light travels in a year… According to actual knowledge, traveling at the speed of light is impossible for us. Most people just don’t realise how fast light goes, just under 300 km/second! There is also the fact that only photons and electromagnetic waves can reach such speeds. The best we could ever hope is about 1/3 speed of light wich is very generous. Unless your aliens are so good that they can change the laws of physics, it is improbable that they could come here. If they are quite far, the echoes of human activities would come to their planet with a delay equal to the number of light years between our worlds. Then they would have to come here and travel unbelievable distances to kidnap our cows, study the human rectum and do some business with the american governement. 😛 To detect our activities they would have to scan all the frequencies of the electromagnetic waves that hit their planet. Not sure we’re event doing half a percent of that on earth.
So… i’m pretty sure that extraterrestrial life exists but i don’t belive that they can visit us.
I want to believe in it, but it seems too unprobable to me. Not impossible.

Ken ramos said:<< If our sun were to burn out instantly, it would be or take 8.6 seconds before we would know it or realize it. A lot of good that is going to do us. >>

Ken, in fact the sun is 8,32 light minutes from earth.

You also said: <<most objects burn up on entry into our atmosphere and that even those that may make it through somewhat intact would be so hot that any life as we know it could not survive on them. >>

Nope, life can survive athmospheric entry. Some bacterias can survive empty space, thousands of years without food and inbelievable heat. It performs such things by turning into spores. It remains like that until it is activated bya stimulus such as water. If you don’t believe it just read "Sciences et vie’, I read this in an aricle in 2006. You will also be surprised to know that man already contaminated many planets with earth life spores. A study revealed that decontaminations that are performed on space probes are not sufficient to kill many types of bacteria that can survive a space travel. :p It is very improbable that these spores turn back to bacterias due to the harsh conditions on the other solar system planets. 🙂

I thought that when the sun runs out of Hydrogen to turn into heavy Helium by fusion it will go through a huge change and start changing heavy Helium into another molecule and get huge and engulf the 4 closest plants to it? I didn’t think it would burn out before it engulfed Earth.

I was also going to say it is easier to believe humans or any other life form can travel at the speed of life if you look back however many years you want to, 1000 or 2000 or even a few hundred. We look back on humans at that time and talk about how primitive their knowledge was, like ours is so high-tech and superior, but ours will seem probably just that silly when someone looks back at our civilizations in the next 1000 years. Hard to image still, I guess.

becomes a red giant before engulfing earth

That’s the word! Thanks.

February Beetle
The laws of physics are the same for aliens.

yup that is what I have read in many scientific journals and have seen on national geographic and the science channel.

Also, astronomers are searching for a planet that is
earth like in size
with a sun in approximation like our earth,
where the likelihood of life is much greater.

I just saw on a show the other day that they
think they have found one.