Aliens

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Aliens

have visited Earth
5
12%
exist
30
71%
do not exist
7
17%
 
Total votes: 42

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Igge
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Post by Igge »

An alien came here and told him.
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Post by A.K.B. »

Actually, having the DNA construct itself has an incredibly outrageous statistic.

Also, think of this:

Think the chances are 1000,000/1 and there are a million planets, does this mean that 1 will have life?

You'd be pretty duped if you believed it did, because that 1000,000 to 1 chance applies to each planet separately, not as a whole.

And when you bring that number right out to what it is. (I can't remember how many zeros) It's staggering. And Dawkins missed the fact of DNA assembling itself in the first place, the real statistic of DNA assembling itself coupled with the probability of a planet having the perfect distance from the sun, reasonable sized moon, being of reasonable size itself, having the right elements in it's atmosphere and having all of the correct conditions to even have life live on it, dwarfs the number of planets that are in the universe.

To give you an accurate example: (Yes, I am quoting Lee Strobel) lay quarters (american 25c coins) next each other so they cover the area of the entire united states of america and then stack them until they reach the height of the moon, that is around the number. Now paint one red, mix them all up in a BIG barrel and pick one. It has to be the red one, first try. (Lee Strobel had a number- I can't remember it- look it up on his site)
(Ever played Poker? It's like being dealt a Royal Flush on your first 100 or so hands in a randomized deck.)

And remember, it is that number for every planet. That's why I have trouble believing in the possibility of biological aliens.

But then, what's up with things like Roswell, and many alien/UFO sightings? Yes, I believe many of them were hoaxes, just people getting excited about the aliens coming to earth and faking something up to get others to believe they had seen an "alien", but then again, there was probably a genuine beginning to it; and why would any biological alien make a trip over to earth in the first place? If they had the technology to do so, they would obviously have no reason to come to such a planet with inferior intelligence, they'd have no reason whatsoever. Don't tell me it's like looking at an inferior race to have an idea of what more primitive behavior is like, because that's bullshit, it's like us traveling 30 years to zoron to observe the smartest down syndrome in the universe. We are smart enough to understand, and so would aliens be.

Just sharing opinions on my part, hope I don't annoy anyone, Igge especially, nothing bad to any of you, just a "religious" person's view on the matter. Yes, I voted, exist.
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Post by berhabdul »

My statements are.
They exist.
We will never see them.
They might have another life-conditions we may never imagine.
That's all.
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Post by sierra »

A.K.B. wrote:Actually, having the DNA construct itself has an incredibly outrageous statistic.

Also, think of this:

Think the chances are 1000,000/1 and there are a million planets, does this mean that 1 will have life?

You'd be pretty duped if you believed it did, because that 1000,000 to 1 chance applies to each planet separately, not as a whole.

And when you bring that number right out to what it is. (I can't remember how many zeros) It's staggering. And Dawkins missed the fact of DNA assembling itself in the first place, the real statistic of DNA assembling itself coupled with the probability of a planet having the perfect distance from the sun, reasonable sized moon, being of reasonable size itself, having the right elements in it's atmosphere and having all of the correct conditions to even have life live on it, dwarfs the number of planets that are in the universe.

To give you an accurate example: (Yes, I am quoting Lee Strobel) lay quarters (american 25c coins) next each other so they cover the area of the entire united states of america and then stack them until they reach the height of the moon, that is around the number. Now paint one red, mix them all up in a BIG barrel and pick one. It has to be the red one, first try. (Lee Strobel had a number- I can't remember it- look it up on his site)
(Ever played Poker? It's like being dealt a Royal Flush on your first 100 or so hands in a randomized deck.)

And remember, it is that number for every planet. That's why I have trouble believing in the possibility of biological aliens.

But then, what's up with things like Roswell, and many alien/UFO sightings? Yes, I believe many of them were hoaxes, just people getting excited about the aliens coming to earth and faking something up to get others to believe they had seen an "alien", but then again, there was probably a genuine beginning to it; and why would any biological alien make a trip over to earth in the first place? If they had the technology to do so, they would obviously have no reason to come to such a planet with inferior intelligence, they'd have no reason whatsoever. Don't tell me it's like looking at an inferior race to have an idea of what more primitive behavior is like, because that's bullshit, it's like us traveling 30 years to zoron to observe the smartest down syndrome in the universe. We are smart enough to understand, and so would aliens be.

Just sharing opinions on my part, hope I don't annoy anyone, Igge especially, nothing bad to any of you, just a "religious" person's view on the matter. Yes, I voted, exist.
Now now AKB, suggesting Richard Dawkins has missed any kind of point is a sure way to make yourself sound stupid. Have you read The Blind Watchmaker? Or The Ancestor's Tale? Any of his books? Did you even read what I quoted from The God Delusion? Look again:

"Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event".

His billion to 1 statistic therefore included the condition you alleged it to miss.

In any case, you appear to fundamentally misunderstand probability theory. Of course, if the odds of me flipping a coin and getting tails are 50% it doesn't mean that tails will come exactly one time in two tries. It's just probable. If there are a billion billion planets, and every one in one billion planets has life, then there are probably one billion planets with life. There could be only five. There could be twenty billion. But these extremes are improbable, and the further we move away from one billion, the less probable the number becomes.

Next - your analogy of the royal flush is simply nonsense. What you're saying is equivalent to me saying that if I deal out ten packs of cards and record the exact order of every card, I can say "Oh my god! The probability of the cards coming out in this exact order is so staggeringly small! It just can't have happened by chance!". Yet, it did.

Which brings me onto intelligent design, the idea of which Lee Strobel is of course a notorious supporter. First let me say that one of the ways intelligent design condoners have raised public awareness for their idea is by suggesting that evolution is a chance event, that evolutionists are suggesting that complicated organs such as the human eye just sprung into existence at a certain point in the human species' existence. This is painfully inaccurate: evolution is a non-random process: it is the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.

But anyway this is irrelevant in the grander scope because intelligent design fails on a much more basic piece of logic. Intelligent design came to fruition when Michael Behe coined the phrase 'irreducible complexity'. The general idea was that a lot of organisms had parts to them which seemed 'irreducibly complex' - if you were to remove one part of the mechanism, the entire thing would fail to work - and therefore could not have come about by gradual steps as evolution would seem to suggest. This phenomenon, he concluded, meant that the organisms must have been designed (Note here the monumentally pathetic cop-out: "Oh, what I understand evolution to mean doesn't fit this case, therefore design is the default answer"). Not only is it scientifically incorrect that 'irreducibly complex' mechanisms such as the human eye did not come about from evolution (they did, and if you want a clear explanation how, your easiest bet is Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker video on YouTube) but - and this is the delightfully simple part - that whole argument shoots itself in the foot. No matter how small the chance is that a human eye could be simply conjured up at random, there necessarily must be an even smaller chance that an entity existed beforehand to design it. To put it another way, no matter how complicated (and therefore unlikely) an organism is, the designer must necessarily be at least as complicated (and therefore at least as unlikely). Intelligent design solves absolutely nothing, because it poses an even bigger question than it answers.

I feel very anxious that what I've written won't read very clearly, or that I have missed out some important reasoning steps. If any of you are interested in learning more about this (or seriously wish to contend it), I strongly urge you to at least watch the documentary above, or even better, read The Blind Watchmaker.
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Post by teajay »

A.K.B, your argument about the probability is mathematically incorrect, like sierra said. Just read something about standard deviation and you'll understand a lot more.

Sierra, that last argument of yours is ofcourse the senseless discussion wether religion can be incorporated into the scientific area of physics. Religion is always just what it is, theoretical. So reasoning that a god must be more complex etc. is unfruitful. God stands above nature.

I don't believe in that though, mind you, but still it is a dead end to discuss about.
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Post by milagros »

sierra wrote:P(one planet cannot host life) = 1 - [1/(1,000,000,000)]
P(two planets cannot host life) = 1 - [1/(500,000,000)]
i guess you need to repeat some exams in statistics
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Post by milagros »

A.K.B. wrote:Think the chances are 1000,000/1 and there are a million planets, does this mean that 1 will have life?
probability that atleast one wil have life is :
1 - (1-0.000001)^1000000 = 63.2%
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Post by jaytea »

milagros wrote:
sierra wrote:P(one planet cannot host life) = 1 - [1/(1,000,000,000)]
P(two planets cannot host life) = 1 - [1/(500,000,000)]
i guess you need to repeat some exams in statistics
why? he'd just fail them

he needs to repeat the course THEN do the exams
im pretty good at elma
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Post by sierra »

tijsjoris wrote:A.K.B, your argument about the probability is mathematically incorrect, like sierra said. Just read something about standard deviation and you'll understand a lot more.

Sierra, that last argument of yours is ofcourse the senseless discussion wether religion can be incorporated into the scientific area of physics. Religion is always just what it is, theoretical. So reasoning that a god must be more complex etc. is unfruitful. God stands above nature.

I don't believe in that though, mind you, but still it is a dead end to discuss about.
It isn't a dead end by any means. It's pure logic! Intelligent design proponents refute Darwinian evolution on the grounds that it is too improbable, yet are fully prepared to accept the necessarily more improbable Creation story. Let's not forget "God" is not only responsible for all life on our planet, but continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe, knowing the future, reading all of our minds and answering our prayers, and so on. I thought I'd made this point clear in my previous post; clearly I hadn't, and so you can all have some more Dawkins:

"Time and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicity divest it of all the baggage that the word 'God' carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. To suggest that the original prime mover was complicated enough to indulge in intelligent design, to say nothing of mindreading millions of humans simultaneously, is tantamount to dealing yourself a perfect hand at bridge. Look around at the world of life, at the Amazon rainforest with its rich interlacement of lianas, bromeliads, roots and flying buttresses; its army ants and its jaguars, its tapirs and peccaries, treefrogs and parrots. What you are looking at is the statistical equivalent of a perfect hand of cards (think of all the other ways you could permute the parts, none of which would work) - except that we know how it came about: by the gradualistic crane of natural selection. It is not just scientists who revolt at mute acceptance of such improbability arising spontaneously; common sense baulks too. To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery."

Too many people nowadays are writing off religion as something that isn't open to scientific debate. Has it not struck them, I wonder, that if god really did make the universe and all the laws of physics that govern it, then he must necessarily have been a scientist himself? Regardless, for those who are concerned with what is true (as opposed to what is comforting, socially optimal, financially rewarding, moral and so on), approaching the question "does God exist" as a scientific hypothesis is the only objective, rational methodology. If you're going to evoke the epistemological argument and tell me all about the limits of human knowledge then you have to accept absurd arguments such as "The universe was created by a giant Elma kuski who lives in heaven. If you don't play Elma ten hours a day you will be damned to an eternal afterlife of X-Moto". Since this hypothesis can't be disproved, you would have to accept it as being just as valid as Christianity, Islam, Mormonism and Scientology. Atheists on the other hand, since we concern ourselves with evidence, would confidently dismiss it on the grounds that it is just as absurd as Christianity, Islam, Mormonism and Scientology.

I know you were just playing Devil's advocate tijs but I couldn't let such potentially harmful thoughts fester in anyone's mind for any longer. And milagros, whatever, the end result is still 0.
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Post by Rust »

Fragment from Koran: "Seven times earth, seven times sky".
That +six worlds are, where life not simply can be... It is there.
It is difficult to trust, but who knows.
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Post by bob »

maybe E.T. and his mates and sitting around playin Starcraft as we speak...

then secretly coming to this forum and be like "lol"

hey....don't rule it out. no one knows anything.
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Post by k0xx »

:roll: i saw teh U.F.O. week ago.. so yes i believe they exist and i believe they know about us.. maybe time for sum changes
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Post by Harald Hasch »

our dna didn't originate from this planet
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Post by CMc »

Too much evidence show that they do exist and have visited earth. Not enough evidence to show they don't exist.
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Post by Staar »

CMc wrote:Too much evidence show that they do exist and have visited earth. Not enough evidence to show they don't exist.
ye, but evidence quality is questionable :P
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Post by Bismuth »

Actually the conditions are extremely exceptionnal... but there are so many planets... The odds are against us I think.
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Post by FW »

nony wrote:i saw a documentary once about chances of aliens in the universe. the chances of us not being alone is very slim, like 2-3%. anyway, to verify it, a rabbit was sent to some planet. there he actually met(!) an alien who wanted to blow up the 'oith'. the alien had an english speaking(!!!) faithful dog, but the rabbit stopped him, while sacrificing though that planet, that blew up in the shape of a quarter of a moon. nobody knows what happened afterwards, but the proof remains... :?
What on earth are you talking about? First of all, you can only estimate the chance that we are alone out of the space we already know of. Beyond the limits of what we can see and how far we have come to explore, there is no such thing as estimating percentage of chance that we are alone or not. With so many billions of galaxies that we already know of, I can hardly imagine earth being the only place with so many things gone right for life to be born.

And what's all that about a rabbit in space, xD

Anyway, I'm really into U.F.O.'s, and loves reading about it or watching video clips about it, but really, I can't get myself to believe there has actually been U.F.O. activity on earth, I'm not denying anything though
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Post by berhabdul »

Btw have you ever tried to imagine nothing? Spend like 3 minutes imaging no universe no time no anything. Like the 'big bang' hasn't happened. And there wasn't anything, really nothing... 'lol'
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Post by FW »

berhabdul wrote:Btw have you ever tried to imagine nothing? Spend like 3 minutes imaging no universe no time no anything. Like the 'big bang' hasn't happened. And there wasn't anything, really nothing... 'lol'
Sure, but imaginating "nothing" isn't possible for us humans. Seeing it from a scientific point of view, we can only imagine what we have experienced, whether its colors, visions, blurry images, faces, feelings, smells, tastes and so on. There's no way of imaging something that does not exist. We don't understand "nothing" of two reasons. 1) we have no experience with nothing as nothing does not exist. 2) even if there was stuff to understand in "nothing", it would be over our head, over our brain capacity.

I keep imaginating about how "nothing" is though, and how "eternity is". It just fucks up ones head, really. What we can't change and what we don't understand, scares us to death...And fucks us up, it's just not healthy
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Post by berhabdul »

FW wrote:I keep imaginating about how "nothing" is though, and how "eternity is". It just fucks up ones head, really. What we can't change and what we don't understand, scares us to death...And fucks us up, it's just not healthy
So if I kept trying imaging nothing for few hours daily I would go retard soon? :)
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Post by FW »

berhabdul wrote:
FW wrote:I keep imaginating about how "nothing" is though, and how "eternity is". It just fucks up ones head, really. What we can't change and what we don't understand, scares us to death...And fucks us up, it's just not healthy
So if I kept trying imaging nothing for few hours daily I would go retard soon? :)
I can't tell you that, but I can tell you that I thought too much of this a year ago and end up going to a psychiatrist just because of that. Too much being a couple of hours every day in the start, and later much more. That being thinking about nothing and eternity. It can really end up stealing basically all of your time. Watch out with it mate.
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Post by berhabdul »

FW wrote:I can't tell you that, but I can tell you that I thought too much of this a year ago and end up going to a psychiatrist just because of that. Too much being a couple of hours every day in the start, and later much more. That being thinking about nothing and eternity. It can really end up stealing basically all of your time. Watch out with it mate.
Oh... Thanks for advising, I try to avoid thinking about it, but sometimes it's stronger than me, today I thought about it for almost an hour, and then, after the dinner again for about 20 minutes... Now I promise to myself not to do it anymore, but it will be hard, it's kind of addictive... After a couple of beers I might not be able to handle the prohibition though... What did the doctor tell you

edit: I haven't tried eternity, might lick it... How did you manage trying to imagine eternity? What pattern of eternity did you use?
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Post by Harald Hasch »

funny because we are eternal
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Post by FW »

berhabdul wrote:
FW wrote:I can't tell you that, but I can tell you that I thought too much of this a year ago and end up going to a psychiatrist just because of that. Too much being a couple of hours every day in the start, and later much more. That being thinking about nothing and eternity. It can really end up stealing basically all of your time. Watch out with it mate.
Oh... Thanks for advising, I try to avoid thinking about it, but sometimes it's stronger than me, today I thought about it for almost an hour, and then, after the dinner again for about 20 minutes... Now I promise to myself not to do it anymore, but it will be hard, it's kind of addictive... After a couple of beers I might not be able to handle the prohibition though... What did the doctor tell you

edit: I haven't tried eternity, might lick it... How did you manage trying to imagine eternity? What pattern of eternity did you use?
What I concluded before going to the doctor, was that "nothing" scared me as much as "eternity", so I though of eternity in the pattern of "eternal life" that had "no end", that scared me a lot, I couldn't take the feeling of living forever, but in the same time, I feared dying when I die in my physic existence and would reach the "nothing" state.

The doctor did what such people do, try to find something in my life that made those thoughts happen, and tried to find an inner source to this frustration, but it turned out that the doctor had no luck with it, I was an active, happy, young boy, just like you and anyone else, so It's not like I have some mental disorder to trigger it ;)
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Post by A.K.B. »

Harald Hasch wrote:funny because we are eternal
yes
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