Yes, the problem we have here is that (as far as all the evidence we have tells us) all life on Earth has a single origin, i.e. every living thing on Earth is evolved from a single common ancestor. With a different origin life could indeed be completely different to anything we can imagine. But I don’t see what that has to do with cricket.
600 not 600 million. That is a relief. I guess life might take a form beyond even what we can imagine, precisely because we have nothing to compare it with.
On a water world, with atmosphere, I’d venture to say, life will be very much comparable to life here, precisely because the universe and the laws of physics are predictable and universal. God, after all, doesn’t play dice with the universe.
I guess the answer lies in how likely abiogenesis is. Once life exists, it has proven to be extremely robust and rigorous to spread and thrive in even the most hostile of environments. It is that very first step from organic chemistry to what we consider life (which is just organic chemistry in a specific form?) which will determine this.
If abiogenesis is likely and probable, one of the last bastions for god of the gaps will be forever close. I’ll rejoice.
Venus and Mars are technically also in our sun’s Goldilocks zone. Venus (the goddess of love) is a boiling hell. Mars (the god of war) is a freezing, sterile desert. It should have been the other way round I think as far as war and love is concerned.
The earth had life on it for some 3.5 billion years now. Intelligent life, us, maybe 1 million. How would alien life know we are here? Our radio and TV signals leaking into space and one or two signals send deliberately. That only happened during during the last 100 years or so. How long are we going to be around to carry on doing this? Don’t know but I can’t see humanity surviving for ever.
If alien planets had similar histories, the chances that their intelligent life is synchronized with ours (their signals arriving now) must be extremely low. Another point is that evolution does not seem to favour high intelligence.
I think there must be life out there in some form or another but it won’t have much effect on religion. It will be like the old ships sailing into the unknown, encountering other religions. If it was a primitive tribe, they would convert them, if not, there would be a religious war followed by centuries of mistrust.
i read a book a while ago, by Arthur C Clarke or some such, where humans terraformed mars,(with plant and animal life already there), ditto for venus. obviously never going to happen for venus.
but, they did find ‘cloud whales’ on jupiter. or in jupiter if you will. which made me think. how do know that life, is what we think it to be. how do we not know that life could be a ‘hive’ of individuals, acting together as an entity (much like, might i add, our own bodies). 400 years ago, the idea of bacteria living in the sulphorous, boiling, volcanic pools, could not be conceived of.
what would we know in another 400 years.
to make a final conclusion about anything, is arrogant. we dont understand the complexities of space/time, dimensions, all that mind-aching stuff. how can we decide what alien life should look like? act like?
they want to find life on mars? what if the entire planet is a living thing, with a metabolism so slow, it is barely perceptible? wouldn’t that just blow your socks off?
Well, aren’t cricket bats made of willow wood, rubbed with linseed oil, and the balls covered in leather, stitched with cotton twine? These are all products of terrestrial carbon-based life. Then there’s the scoring. Imagine the trouble it would cause if our Alien XI team was blessed with eight fingers per hand and they counted in hexadecimal… 
'Luthon64
“Therein,” as the Bard of Avon wrote, “lies the rub” — or at least a significant and most tricky part of it. No single definition of “life” seems adequate even to cover fully the range of it we have found on our home planet, let alone universally. We have only terrestrial life to compare notes on. There’s even a bizarre standard by which rocks can be considered to be “life” because minerals, the principal constituents of rocks, are typically built in a systematic way from simpler parts of the environment using external sources of energy such as geothermal heat. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis proposes that the whole planet is in a sense “alive”, an idea that New Agers absolutely adore because they are given to conflating “life” and “consciousness”.
However, none of the above suggests that there aren’t clear-cut cases where life is unmistakably life, and those are the ones that we are looking for. First prize would be discovering sentient or even sapient ET life, but any ET life we might find has the potential to extend vastly our understanding of what life is.
'Luthon64
Yes, the overwhelming throng and crush of humanity is strong evidence for this: Stupid people far outbreed the rest…
'Luthon64
Stupid people far outbreed the rest…If that were true the proportion of stupid people would be more than it was some 10 000 yrs ago? No? How do you define stupid? Doesn't the very notion fly in the face of Darwin?
Did you see idiocracy? A comedy on this very topic. The hero finds himself 500 years in the future, where things are even more fucked up than they are now.
There are some very smart people thinking about this.
For instance this guy is actually trying to make non-carbon based life in the lab (mostly out of metals).
Lee Cronin: Making matter come alive
Also, it seems to me like the US military is suddenly concerned about this new find, and want to fund SETI to check if there be aliens. “Just to be safe” it sounds to me.
Ay, ’twas a joke! Not a very good one obviously, but a joke nevertheless. Still, in a state of stable (or near-stable) equilibrium, the proportion of, say, redheads to non-redheads remains relatively constant in the population even though far fewer redheads than non-redheads are bred. Worldwide, there is ever more room for people to entertain unrealistic and counterfactual ideas because a progressively shrinking fraction of scientifically and technologically literate people makes life easy enough for them to do so with impunity.
For the purposes of this exercise, we may define “stupid” as “a habitual hanging on to particular ideas despite being made well aware of a patent lack of good reason, argument and/or evidence in their favour, and marked by a paralysing inability to examine or laugh at those ideas.” And no, it doesn’t fly in the face of Darwin: If you breathe and breed before you expire, your genes will persist, however scarcely.
'Luthon64
The US Air Force Space Command has asked the Allen Telescope to take a look at Kepler 22b to see if ET lives there.
It may cause the destruction of some theologies, but would almost certainly lead to the creation of new theologies in the place of the old, or some of the old ones will simply be modified to fold the new information into them.
The hosts of the nutty will apparently always be with us.
I am not sure what it would do to theology, but it would certainly give proselytises a challenge. A whole planet of beings who have never heard of Jesus! Finally a reason for religious organisations to give money to space programs, and could you go away and stop bothering me now.