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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on September 16, 2012 at 10:23am

When it comes to other, intelligent life forms, I personally believe that they most probably do exist elsewhere in the universe.  I also believe that we will end up creating different types of intelligent life ourselves eventually; essentially becoming like little gods, in a way.  And both of these possibilities are full of material for scientific, ethical, and philosophical debate. 

As far as I know, from what I've learned so far, it is not very likely that we have ever been visited by any type of alien life; yet.  The idea of long space voyages is rife with problems, not the least of which is time.  Also, our biological makeup requires that we would have to take a ton of food and water along with us, which would create mass & weight problems;  and high-speed space travel is essentially impossible anyway because of the dangers involved.  I mean, most people have never considered it, but space is not really an empty vacuum. There is a whole bunch of stuff floating around out there, including dust and tiny rocks; and if you were to hit a space pebble at high velocity it would rip a hole right through your spaceship; and you, too.  lol  So, some scientists believe that alien beings would have to be at least mostly cybernetic to risk something like long-distance space travel; and would actually, most likely be a form of non-biological life, or machine intelligence.

Just thought I'd throw that in as something to think about.  :-)

And here are a couple of interesting articles:

Top 3 Questions People Ask an Astrophysicist (and Answers)

Will We Really Find Alien Life Within 20 Years?

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Permalink Reply by steven.a.a.bauer on September 16, 2012 at 12:03pm

"I also believe that we will end up creating different types of intelligent life ourselves eventually; essentially becoming like little gods, in a way."

That puts a whole new twist on intelligent design.  I've often wondered if we're some sort of an advanced alien science project.  Our kids have ant farms, and fish tanks...Type III alien kids have terraformed planets and grow life until it advances into a Type 0 civ...then they have to leave them alone (Prime Directive from Star Trek)...and then if we succeed some rite of passage and become a Type I civ, we become part of an alliance with them.  I have a weird sense of (or hope for) reality lol.

"The idea of long space voyages is rife with problems, not the least of which is time."

In my own life, I have found that some questions have no easy solutions, so the only thing left to do is to change the question.  It's easier to bypass the questions rather than trying to solve them.  I'm hoping that time and all the associated dangers won't be an issue because we'll find a way to create a shortcut (wormhole, fold space, etc) where those things won't be such a problem.  It may end up we find a way to use something like quantum entanglement since that seems to work regardless of distance involved.  If you could use that to create a personal teleporter, then you wouldn't even need a spaceship.

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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on September 17, 2012 at 3:30am

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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on September 17, 2012 at 2:05pm

I can see it coming- Terminators IN SPACE!

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Permalink Reply by Sorlaize on September 17, 2012 at 2:38pm

I posted replies in the ted page there-

I, too, had problems with this lecture in vis-a-vis making the intellectual leap from oil blobs to living cells. But he's not trying to say that they're the same thing. He's saying that at some point in our prehistory, life arose from non-life. He's speculating that by watching non-living prototypes behave like real cells, this somehow indicates that the first step from non-life to life is that non-life began behaving like life.

I think.

It's only a question of what you, as a human being, discern as intelligent life. Intelligence is a chain of systems- ultimately physical-reality laws in action.. working together in such a *consequential* way that we observe it has human meaning. Animals are less 'alive' than us, going down to insects like flies which operate on a much simpler system (thinking of it like computer code).. they are no more responsive to human-meaning things other than a bare-essentials drive for survival. It's a linear scale in that respect..

Intelligence for humans (or for any intelligent being; in terms of human meaning) is "just" a level by which it emerges that our minds can process and manufacture a species-consistent delusion of the world around us so that we can communicate and have an emotional stability [delusion that life is infinitely 'more' than something logical]. Albeit still, in 2012, primitively. We don't *communicate* although we speak; and we don't have a unified language.

I would very much appreciate it if TED talks would allow those who do NOT adhere to the Darwinian theory. This link will take you to a document that lists hundreds of scientists dissenting Darwinism: http://is.gd/koHY8B. Life, which is an attribute of God, Who is spirit, simply can't be detected by our human senses so I doubt it will be detected through material analyzation. But, secular scientists certainly have given it their best shot, and believe that one day they'll find the missing link between matter and life. TED folks, I believe all will benefit if Intelligent Design can be brought into the mix. What can it hurt to allow different points of view?

Mysticism isn't forever. Mankind is keen to conquer life itself, and he inevitably will. There is no stopping it; because the next generations of humans eventually won't have the same traditions that you hold onto. This is why we aren't immortal.. so that we can adapt.. and by coincidence of evolution which created the mass delusion of human life; so will we also come to conquer it (however pointless that may be found to be, in reality) via traditionalism not surviving. Human (collective) life isn't forever, either. Nothing is guaranteed, and nothing is forever. We severely underestimate our physical reality in every waking moment.

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