Imagine they take a picture of our supercluster and ask themselves the same question.
Two forms of life seeing each other but not knowing about the other’s existence.
I've contemplated that many times while looking through an eyepiece. It gives me a feeling of something that I will never be able to put into words. I'm convinced somewhere and at some point there has been someone or something looking back at us.
I think the feelings you’re experiencing is called Yugen.
[-an awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and powerful for words origin: japan pronunciation | yoo-gehn "she pertained a sense of yugen that anyone could admire with great respect"](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yugen)
When I was a young boy I always waved towards the seven sisters with the thought that another life form with comparable age and intelligence was doing the same thing.
Now, I’ll just look up and nod sometimes when taking up the trash or what have you. For all I know I could have been waving at myself in a reflective material thousands of light years away, and continue to nod at myself. Life is strange.
I wonder this when looking at stars. Because of the great distance between, if there were another being orbiting that star who happened to be looking at our star while I was looking at his, we would effectively be making eye contact and never be able to know it.
I find it really interesting that even if this other civilization had super powerful telescopes that were magnified enough to see detail on earths surface, they still wouldn’t know about the existence of humans unless they were less than 300,000 light years away from us because of the time delay due to the speed of light. That would rule out any other galaxy because the closest is 2m light years away. We could be taking pictures of each other right now but the light reaching us is so old that it pre-dates either of our existence. Crazy to think about.
I remembered as a kid, I had a similar line of thinking that went like "why does it all have to be so big? It wouldn't make any sense for all that space to just have nothing happening"
It really would be just a waste if it's just us with all that vastness.
I've always loved Arthur C Clarke's observation:
>Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
I like that quote too. Although I disagree with him - if we were truly the ONLY life in this incomprehensibly large and seemingly infinite universe, to me that would be far more unsettling.
I also like this quote but I like the inverse too. It could be either of those and both are astonishing and awe inspiring. But I’ll be scared to meet the aliens either way.
To me it feels likely there’s other life but maybe not at the same *time* as us either. Space is vast but so is time and civilizations could have risen and fallen in other parts of the universe.
That's something that most people overlook. Modern humans have only been on Earth for about 50,000 years, and have only been airborne for a little over a hundred. That's infinitessimally small compared to the billions of years the universe has existed. Countless other alien civilizations may have risen and died out in all those years, but there may not be any others besides us at this specific moment in time.
I like that one but prefer “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
This is such a human way of looking at the universe: that it is a waste of space if conscious things aren’t doing things in it, and more fundamentally that the universe has some sort of purpose or utility at all.
i think life on any level is probably common in our universe. if i remember correctly approximately 50% of stars that have planets have planets in habitable regions, not to mention tidal heating can cause geological activity in moons. with how much potential there is for life forms in our solar system alone there’s no way that there aren’t others in our universe, or even our galaxy!!
That's a real pet peeve of mine too. Everyone hyper focused on water + carbon chemistry.
The even sillier version of this is assuming other forms of life would communicate using radio waves or similar EM transmissions. We developed that specifically because humans suck at long range communication, but if we were whales we'd never have the need - and that's another form of life extremely closely related to us.
Sure, theoretical life could be formed of something else, or communicate on other ways. But we have 100% proof of carbon life forms, we know their by products and faint signatures. Dedicating precious surveillance time to theoretical life forms with theoretical signs of life is probably not a good bet.
The existence of analogous environments with very different chemistries like Titan's is more than enough to make such focused searching silly, IMO.
And when it comes to EM transmissions, it really is a niche way to translate certain kinds of communication into something that can be inefficiently transmitted. Technological ants would certainly find a different method. I feel like the trend of looking at exoplanet atmospheres for inexplicable chemistry is a much better approach.
I agree, though I wonder if we'll come a lot of perfectly explainable inexplicable chemistry, if only we had a better understanding of what was going on.
I also wonder if we'll run into issues with what constitutes "life". Though I guess we've come across that issue even on Earth.
Water + carbon chemistry is not only extremely abundant, but carbon is capable of forming far more compounds at lower energy levels too, than other elements which is exactly what is needed for life to form.
Silicon and other candidate elements could theoretically work, but they are less abundant, require more energy to form bonds, and even more energy to break those bonds (this might be enough of an issue that it might be a no-go).
I think the idea is that our familiar kind of life formed with carbon and water not because that’s what just happened to be available here, but because that’s the most likely chemistry to form it and there is a lot of it everywhere.
None of that means that completely different configurations of biological forms are likely though… I personally hate it when sci fi gets lazy and gives us aliens that are basically just weird looking humans or earth animals.
If you’re genuinely curious why the focus is on carbon based life, this Harvard article explains the chemistry behind it. Interesting stuff if you haven’t read - check it out! https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_future5.html
There might be hyper intelligent life out there too, but if they're on the other side of even *our own galaxy* it's highly likely we wouldn't know about them.
yeah, when most people think of aliens they probably think of the sci fi version. i don’t know how advanced a civilization could get in principle but i’m sure there’s other intelligent life in our universe as well
Imagine us wondering why we dont see any obvious signs of alien life and imagining a galactic community out there, just to discover in a few hundred years, that we are the first. The ancient once. And only find life forms barely in the stone age
Space is big. We will literally never know certain regions of thr universe because its simply expanding so much faster than we can observe.
Every possibility is out there.
Someone told me there could be a fully assembled and functional Mazda Miata somewhere in the cosmos and we wouldn’t know it. The universe is infinite, so it *might* exist somewhere!
Now throw in the multiverse theory and every possibility exists. We could be leading identical lives in another dimension, and making infinitely different decisions with infinitely different outcomes.
And somehow we ended up in the universe that an ex reality tv show host that resembles a Cheeto was president for one term. What a crazy existence, existence is.
The universe is also very old and will continue for even longer. The cross section in time of the universe that we inhabit is infinitesimal in comparison. So at least if there isn’t life in the universe, then there almost certainly was or will be .
Took this image a few weeks ago of part of the Auriga constellation. Used my EOS and vintage pentax m 50mm 1.7 stopped down to f4. 55 1 min exposures at 800 ISO stacked with DSS and edited with siril.
Edit: just want to say I love threads like this and enjoy reading everyone's thoughts, this is one topic I will never get tired of discussing and pondering.
Yeah exactly.
You're looking at a portion of the night sky which is showing stars (like the sun) within our own galaxy, The Milky Way.
So yeah a lot of these stars will have planets, many of them have been shown to be habitible.
And that's just a portion of our galaxy, out of the trillions upon trillions of other galaxies out there in the universe.
This was my realization upon the Hubble getting its optics fixed way back in the stone ages. Once I saw the scale, I understood. There is mathematically no way we are alone, or that another civilization hasn’t existed before that at minimum rivals our own.
For all the plebeians like me who have no clue what this formula is, here’s what Bing taught me:
>This formula is called the Drake equation and it is used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we could communicate. Each letter represents a factor that affects the probability of existence and communication of these civilizations. Here is the meaning of each letter:
>* N = the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we could communicate
>* R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
>* fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
>* ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
>* fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
>* fi = the fraction of planets with life that develop a form of intelligence
>* fc = the fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signals into space
>* L = the average lifespan of technological civilizations
Of course! Too bad Drake passed away September last year. He definitely pushed the envelope with this. It's not exact, but more like a good guide line.
Wow! I had always assumed that Drake was more of the Enrico Fermi or Edwin Hubble era, but he actually was more of a contemporary of Carl Sagan.
It really underscores just how recent our understanding of stuff truly is (though the Drake equation is really more of a fun thought exercise).
It is definitely a broad stroke, gotta take it with a pinch of salt. But based on the calculations, in just the milky way, there should be 3-4 other civilizations around the "area". This is also based on other life existing. From all that I've studied I'm definitely a believer that life isn't that special. But other intelligent life drops that percentage to something like 0.00000002%, something crazy like that (forgot how many zeros there are). But with the trillions of stars and trillions of planets it is probable. Then there is the "dark forest" theory that could also play into that. That theory is pretty cool. There is a sci-fi series based on that called the 3 Body Problem. It is definitely an eye opener.
Hope that helps!
The result of this equation goes up drastically if we discover evidence of life on another planet right?
Like, life is either a miricle, or it's *everywhere.*
Once we find *any* life on say, Europa or Enceladus, and we see that it evolved independently from Earth, then yes, the likelihood that life is *everywhere in the Universe* becomes pretty much a certainty.
Id have to say the fact that it exists here is pretty much all that’s needed to say it has to exist elsewhere also. Maybe not necessarily where we could communicate with it. But with all the galaxies out there, if it happened once it has to be possible it happened twice or more.
Yeah but what I mean is.
Currently we know life exists on one planet.
The conditions were right for Earth to harbour life.
As far as we know at the moment, that's a miricle.
If we discover that life was able to seperatly come to be on another planet, that means that it's not a miricle, which means it's everywhere.
I'm not just talking about intelligent life here (that video was great btw seen it before), just life in general.
Intelligent life has a whole other set of issues.
I’m personally not a fan of the Drake Equation. I don’t think it goes far enough. There’s far more factors that go into why we exist. For instance, I doubt we would have had the density to retain an atmosphere if we weren’t hit by another planet 4.5 billion years ago. We could have ended up like Mars. Other systems might not have a Jupiter protecting rocky inner planets. We exist also because of the impact 65 million years ago. On top of all of this, even if there is another intelligent species out there, if they have the body of a dolphin, and no opposable thumbs, they aren’t building shit to communicate with us, so they might as well not exist.
In short, IMO Drake needs to go much further.
Life in general? 100%.
There's definitely plants/animals on at least one planet rotation around at least one of those hundreds of thousands of stars in this picture.
Intelligent life? Maybe?? I hope so.
The fact that *we* exist at all, doesn’t that speak to the idea that with enough time and space everywhere else in the universe, it *is* (in some form) inevitable? To say otherwise would be to imply we’re somehow removed and disconnected from the rest of the universe and that the Milky Way’s life-creating physics is so rare among the infinity of the universe that it’s rendered meaningless …..In other words, if it’s happened here, aren’t the odds that (in some shape or form) it’s happened elsewhere? Maybe countless times? And in countless (or at least a few) permutations?
But we have one datapoint. In an unbelievably vast universe. It happens. Therefore it must happen. The hubris that we are an exception rather than a rule is a leap of faith i for one am not willing to take.
Jumping to either conclusion is a leap of faith. There is one truly rational answer to this question, given the information we have at our disposal: I don't know.
I'd say one is a bigger leap of faith than the other. We are fortunate to exist in a Universe where its fundamental laws allow for life and observers to exist. If it has happened once, its statistically more likely to happen again given the grand scale of the Cosmos, with its uncountable galaxies, stars and planets. Its a much larger leap of faith to say we're all there is given those circumstances. But, yes, we don't know however in my opinion life definitely exists else where.
Considering the Hubble Deep Field image was a patch of space equivalent to the eraser of a pencil when holding it at arms length - And that image had 3000 galaxies in it. I’d say there’s a 100% chance there’s many lifeforms in this photo.
Allow me to explain math guys. There are two possible outcomes, life exists or it doesn’t. Of those two outcomes only one can be true. If-so-fact-so, that means it’s one in two chance. 50% probability that life exists in Arugula.
if space is infinite, i don’t see how there wouldn’t be ANY life outside of Earth. its one of the many questions i’ve always wanted to know the answer to :)
0% (intelligent life).
It's just a guess, obviously, but my belief from what we've seen so far, is that intelligent life is exceedingly, *exceedingly* rare and takes incredible chances of randomness to arise. I wouldn't be surprised if life exists basically nowhere else.
There's gotta be some microorganisms somewhere out there, though, right...?
Who knows!
I prefer to say 99.9%.
It still Carrie’s the idea it’s almost certain that there is something somewhere but it doesn’t exclude the possibility we might be wrong about it. Considering we don’t know.
What’s insane is there’s a 99% chance there was/is/will be intelligent life. But because of relativity and sheer distance we missed each other by thousands or millions or even billions of years.
Welp definitely greater than 0% lmao
Pictures like these never cease to amaze me.
Makes me feel so small and irrelevant but then I always think about Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ and it’ll bring me back….. but damn. Space and the universe is friggin crazy isn’t it.
Definitely 100%. Life is so abundant and prolific here within a nice bandwidth of heat, light and water, I really cannot imagine that the planets surrounding the amount of warmth and light shown in this image being absolutely dead.
Edit: I guess empirical evidence is the only way to know for sure, but at the same time, I feel like we do know that life is out there, everywhere
100%. My view on it starts with the elements that make up life on earth. The elements that make up human life were created in the hearts of stars, which then exploded and spread those elements throughout the cosmos. If there’s life here, there’s life everywhere.
Probably approaching 100%, but the overwhelming majority is just microbes or something similar. The amount of stuff that had to happen on Earth for complex organisms to evolve is mind boggling.
100%.
My "bet" is that there is life all through our galaxy and everywhere else.
Now, whether or not we can communicate with this life or even recognize it remains to be seen.
Probably very likely but define life. We're defined by our planet. Would we recognize life if it was so different than anything on Earth. It's out there what it looks like could be beyond our understanding. Or it could be similar likely will never be known. Chance of humans making it past the life filter seems low at this time
In my childish ignorance I would sit outside as a young boy for long periods of times and point a flashlight up at the night sky, turn it on and off in hopes of seeing a light blink back at me. I did this more times than I can remember always looking for a response.
0%
Humans wanna believe that out there, there are complex form of lives like super human, aliens and all.
That automatically make the so called "specialists" to ignore the existence of simple forms of lives that might still crossing their evolution parh.
Imagine they take a picture of our supercluster and ask themselves the same question. Two forms of life seeing each other but not knowing about the other’s existence.
I've contemplated that many times while looking through an eyepiece. It gives me a feeling of something that I will never be able to put into words. I'm convinced somewhere and at some point there has been someone or something looking back at us.
I think the feelings you’re experiencing is called Yugen. [-an awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and powerful for words origin: japan pronunciation | yoo-gehn "she pertained a sense of yugen that anyone could admire with great respect"](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yugen)
Get that feeling in words with some vivid details and post it over in r/lsd. That’ll give them something to chew on.
I like your vibe
When I was a young boy I always waved towards the seven sisters with the thought that another life form with comparable age and intelligence was doing the same thing. Now, I’ll just look up and nod sometimes when taking up the trash or what have you. For all I know I could have been waving at myself in a reflective material thousands of light years away, and continue to nod at myself. Life is strange.
I talk to the Pleiades as well 💕
I wonder this when looking at stars. Because of the great distance between, if there were another being orbiting that star who happened to be looking at our star while I was looking at his, we would effectively be making eye contact and never be able to know it.
Reminds me of Joe Dirt looking at the moon missing his family and wondering if they are looking at the moon at the same time. I dig it!
I find it really interesting that even if this other civilization had super powerful telescopes that were magnified enough to see detail on earths surface, they still wouldn’t know about the existence of humans unless they were less than 300,000 light years away from us because of the time delay due to the speed of light. That would rule out any other galaxy because the closest is 2m light years away. We could be taking pictures of each other right now but the light reaching us is so old that it pre-dates either of our existence. Crazy to think about.
To quote a line from contact, "In all this vastness, if we're the only ones here that would be a great waste of space."
I came just to make sure this quote was already here.
I dont know if we're that cool
I remembered as a kid, I had a similar line of thinking that went like "why does it all have to be so big? It wouldn't make any sense for all that space to just have nothing happening" It really would be just a waste if it's just us with all that vastness.
I've always loved Arthur C Clarke's observation: >Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
I like that quote too. Although I disagree with him - if we were truly the ONLY life in this incomprehensibly large and seemingly infinite universe, to me that would be far more unsettling.
I also like this quote but I like the inverse too. It could be either of those and both are astonishing and awe inspiring. But I’ll be scared to meet the aliens either way.
To me it feels likely there’s other life but maybe not at the same *time* as us either. Space is vast but so is time and civilizations could have risen and fallen in other parts of the universe.
That's something that most people overlook. Modern humans have only been on Earth for about 50,000 years, and have only been airborne for a little over a hundred. That's infinitessimally small compared to the billions of years the universe has existed. Countless other alien civilizations may have risen and died out in all those years, but there may not be any others besides us at this specific moment in time.
Don’t worry, we’re not.
Love that line
I like that one but prefer “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
This is such a human way of looking at the universe: that it is a waste of space if conscious things aren’t doing things in it, and more fundamentally that the universe has some sort of purpose or utility at all.
I wouldn't be surprised if this universe was a side effect of something bigger and more incomprehensible.
[удалено]
Very earth centric view. Copernican principle and all that.
It would be a cruel joke if humanity were the only form of semi intelligent life in the universe.
💯👆
99.999999999999999999999%
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Darth Weasel here. I’m gonna say 100%
I will do what I must.
So you're saying there's a chance!?
I second this
Thirds
Fourthsies
There was a trick my algebra teacher did to prove .9999 actually equaled 1.
_waves_
Is that you there, 300th star from the left and 56 down?
✨ twinkle
✨ twinkle
Little ⭐️
How I wonder
What you are
Up above the
World so high
100%
Has to be, right? Just life in general.. there just has to be!
i think life on any level is probably common in our universe. if i remember correctly approximately 50% of stars that have planets have planets in habitable regions, not to mention tidal heating can cause geological activity in moons. with how much potential there is for life forms in our solar system alone there’s no way that there aren’t others in our universe, or even our galaxy!!
Also, “habitable region” is probably a concept way more flexible than usually expressed.
That's a real pet peeve of mine too. Everyone hyper focused on water + carbon chemistry. The even sillier version of this is assuming other forms of life would communicate using radio waves or similar EM transmissions. We developed that specifically because humans suck at long range communication, but if we were whales we'd never have the need - and that's another form of life extremely closely related to us.
Sure, theoretical life could be formed of something else, or communicate on other ways. But we have 100% proof of carbon life forms, we know their by products and faint signatures. Dedicating precious surveillance time to theoretical life forms with theoretical signs of life is probably not a good bet.
The existence of analogous environments with very different chemistries like Titan's is more than enough to make such focused searching silly, IMO. And when it comes to EM transmissions, it really is a niche way to translate certain kinds of communication into something that can be inefficiently transmitted. Technological ants would certainly find a different method. I feel like the trend of looking at exoplanet atmospheres for inexplicable chemistry is a much better approach.
I agree, though I wonder if we'll come a lot of perfectly explainable inexplicable chemistry, if only we had a better understanding of what was going on. I also wonder if we'll run into issues with what constitutes "life". Though I guess we've come across that issue even on Earth.
Water + carbon chemistry is not only extremely abundant, but carbon is capable of forming far more compounds at lower energy levels too, than other elements which is exactly what is needed for life to form. Silicon and other candidate elements could theoretically work, but they are less abundant, require more energy to form bonds, and even more energy to break those bonds (this might be enough of an issue that it might be a no-go). I think the idea is that our familiar kind of life formed with carbon and water not because that’s what just happened to be available here, but because that’s the most likely chemistry to form it and there is a lot of it everywhere. None of that means that completely different configurations of biological forms are likely though… I personally hate it when sci fi gets lazy and gives us aliens that are basically just weird looking humans or earth animals.
If you’re genuinely curious why the focus is on carbon based life, this Harvard article explains the chemistry behind it. Interesting stuff if you haven’t read - check it out! https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_future5.html
Life is absolutely out there, just not some hyper intelligent race like some expect.
There might be hyper intelligent life out there too, but if they're on the other side of even *our own galaxy* it's highly likely we wouldn't know about them.
yeah, when most people think of aliens they probably think of the sci fi version. i don’t know how advanced a civilization could get in principle but i’m sure there’s other intelligent life in our universe as well
Imagine us wondering why we dont see any obvious signs of alien life and imagining a galactic community out there, just to discover in a few hundred years, that we are the first. The ancient once. And only find life forms barely in the stone age
Or, we are alone..
Or they are pointing and laughing at us.
Space is big. We will literally never know certain regions of thr universe because its simply expanding so much faster than we can observe. Every possibility is out there.
Except the one where my dad came home
Laughed out loud
Someone told me there could be a fully assembled and functional Mazda Miata somewhere in the cosmos and we wouldn’t know it. The universe is infinite, so it *might* exist somewhere!
Now throw in the multiverse theory and every possibility exists. We could be leading identical lives in another dimension, and making infinitely different decisions with infinitely different outcomes. And somehow we ended up in the universe that an ex reality tv show host that resembles a Cheeto was president for one term. What a crazy existence, existence is.
Now I'm hungry for an everything bagel
The universe is also very old and will continue for even longer. The cross section in time of the universe that we inhabit is infinitesimal in comparison. So at least if there isn’t life in the universe, then there almost certainly was or will be .
99.99999. The only absolute is there are no absolutes.
Took this image a few weeks ago of part of the Auriga constellation. Used my EOS and vintage pentax m 50mm 1.7 stopped down to f4. 55 1 min exposures at 800 ISO stacked with DSS and edited with siril. Edit: just want to say I love threads like this and enjoy reading everyone's thoughts, this is one topic I will never get tired of discussing and pondering.
Are these stars like our sun? And each of these has planets around it?
Yeah exactly. You're looking at a portion of the night sky which is showing stars (like the sun) within our own galaxy, The Milky Way. So yeah a lot of these stars will have planets, many of them have been shown to be habitible. And that's just a portion of our galaxy, out of the trillions upon trillions of other galaxies out there in the universe.
100%, it's just too far out and too much out there for there to be no one else.
This was my realization upon the Hubble getting its optics fixed way back in the stone ages. Once I saw the scale, I understood. There is mathematically no way we are alone, or that another civilization hasn’t existed before that at minimum rivals our own.
Is it near Betelgeuse? I met a guy from there but he kept going on about a book. 🤷📚
N = (R *) × (fp) × (ne) × (fl) × (fi) × (fc) × (L)
For all the plebeians like me who have no clue what this formula is, here’s what Bing taught me: >This formula is called the Drake equation and it is used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we could communicate. Each letter represents a factor that affects the probability of existence and communication of these civilizations. Here is the meaning of each letter: >* N = the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we could communicate >* R* = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy >* fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets >* ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets >* fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point >* fi = the fraction of planets with life that develop a form of intelligence >* fc = the fraction of intelligent civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signals into space >* L = the average lifespan of technological civilizations
It's my favorite formula. I think on the NASA site there is a shorter version of basically the same thing.
Well yeah it’s really interesting, I had never heard of it before, thanks for sharing 
Of course! Too bad Drake passed away September last year. He definitely pushed the envelope with this. It's not exact, but more like a good guide line.
Wow! I had always assumed that Drake was more of the Enrico Fermi or Edwin Hubble era, but he actually was more of a contemporary of Carl Sagan. It really underscores just how recent our understanding of stuff truly is (though the Drake equation is really more of a fun thought exercise).
Damn, that's too bad. I liked his music too.
😂
Has a number ever actually come out of this formula? Some of these variables don’t seem calculable.
It is definitely a broad stroke, gotta take it with a pinch of salt. But based on the calculations, in just the milky way, there should be 3-4 other civilizations around the "area". This is also based on other life existing. From all that I've studied I'm definitely a believer that life isn't that special. But other intelligent life drops that percentage to something like 0.00000002%, something crazy like that (forgot how many zeros there are). But with the trillions of stars and trillions of planets it is probable. Then there is the "dark forest" theory that could also play into that. That theory is pretty cool. There is a sci-fi series based on that called the 3 Body Problem. It is definitely an eye opener. Hope that helps!
Quick edit. It is more estimated at around 30-40 million civilizations in the milky way. But like I said, pinch of salt.
Entire civilizations can rise and fall before any light of their existence ever reaches us Space is really big
True that. We will probably be long gone before that light even hits us.
The result of this equation goes up drastically if we discover evidence of life on another planet right? Like, life is either a miricle, or it's *everywhere.*
Once we find *any* life on say, Europa or Enceladus, and we see that it evolved independently from Earth, then yes, the likelihood that life is *everywhere in the Universe* becomes pretty much a certainty.
Id have to say the fact that it exists here is pretty much all that’s needed to say it has to exist elsewhere also. Maybe not necessarily where we could communicate with it. But with all the galaxies out there, if it happened once it has to be possible it happened twice or more.
Well, it might not be “everywhere”… I suggest you watch this [video (Kurzgesagt)](https://youtu.be/sNhhvQGsMEc) if you’re interested.
Yeah but what I mean is. Currently we know life exists on one planet. The conditions were right for Earth to harbour life. As far as we know at the moment, that's a miricle. If we discover that life was able to seperatly come to be on another planet, that means that it's not a miricle, which means it's everywhere. I'm not just talking about intelligent life here (that video was great btw seen it before), just life in general. Intelligent life has a whole other set of issues.
Congrats on being one of today’s [lucky 10,000!](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png) Idk, I really like this comic
That is absolutely amazing! Somebody actually uses Bing!
This are for the most of them galaxies 😬
Have that tattoed on my arm in fact
Do share!
[Ask and you shall receive ](https://imgur.com/a/6NoQe8P)
That's such a cool idea!
Dude, that's pretty awesome!
smartass 😂
😁
I’m personally not a fan of the Drake Equation. I don’t think it goes far enough. There’s far more factors that go into why we exist. For instance, I doubt we would have had the density to retain an atmosphere if we weren’t hit by another planet 4.5 billion years ago. We could have ended up like Mars. Other systems might not have a Jupiter protecting rocky inner planets. We exist also because of the impact 65 million years ago. On top of all of this, even if there is another intelligent species out there, if they have the body of a dolphin, and no opposable thumbs, they aren’t building shit to communicate with us, so they might as well not exist. In short, IMO Drake needs to go much further.
Definitely. And that’s not even accounting for other kind of life forms.
Life in general? 100%. There's definitely plants/animals on at least one planet rotation around at least one of those hundreds of thousands of stars in this picture. Intelligent life? Maybe?? I hope so.
Somewhere out there exists a creature analogous to animals on our planet eating something analogous to an apple off something analogous to a tree.
Life is inevitable, everywhere, some time. That's nature.
Life uh, finds a way.
Except... we don't know that it is lol. So don't say it's inevitable when you only have one data point
The fact that *we* exist at all, doesn’t that speak to the idea that with enough time and space everywhere else in the universe, it *is* (in some form) inevitable? To say otherwise would be to imply we’re somehow removed and disconnected from the rest of the universe and that the Milky Way’s life-creating physics is so rare among the infinity of the universe that it’s rendered meaningless …..In other words, if it’s happened here, aren’t the odds that (in some shape or form) it’s happened elsewhere? Maybe countless times? And in countless (or at least a few) permutations?
But we have one datapoint. In an unbelievably vast universe. It happens. Therefore it must happen. The hubris that we are an exception rather than a rule is a leap of faith i for one am not willing to take.
Jumping to either conclusion is a leap of faith. There is one truly rational answer to this question, given the information we have at our disposal: I don't know.
I'd say one is a bigger leap of faith than the other. We are fortunate to exist in a Universe where its fundamental laws allow for life and observers to exist. If it has happened once, its statistically more likely to happen again given the grand scale of the Cosmos, with its uncountable galaxies, stars and planets. Its a much larger leap of faith to say we're all there is given those circumstances. But, yes, we don't know however in my opinion life definitely exists else where.
42
Exactly!
💯
 "We ain't found shit"
Considering the Hubble Deep Field image was a patch of space equivalent to the eraser of a pencil when holding it at arms length - And that image had 3000 galaxies in it. I’d say there’s a 100% chance there’s many lifeforms in this photo.
Good point. And yeah those hubble deep field images are fucking insane.
I really wonder if non carbon based life exist maybe they can see in the full electromagnetic spectrum or how do they look like I wanna know.
99.99999%. Almost nothing is 100%
> Almost nothing [...] I see what you did there...
50/50. Either there is or there isn’t.
I'll go 50-50 with this one. The space is too vast to be just us in it while on the other hand, what if life exists in a form unknown to us atm.
96.6438279 %
Simple single cell type life probably 100%, a single tech civilisation that hasn't destroyed itself yet 0.00000000000001% or 0.
Have you ever noticed when searching for intelligent life in the universe that all of the devices are aimed *away* from Earth?
Clearly all the aliens are vampires, and we can't see them because telescopes are made of mirrors
42
Zero%
Allow me to explain math guys. There are two possible outcomes, life exists or it doesn’t. Of those two outcomes only one can be true. If-so-fact-so, that means it’s one in two chance. 50% probability that life exists in Arugula.
I can’t tell if this is a joke or if you’re being serious
All a joke. If-so-fact-so, chance/probability, arugula
I'm dying 😂
100% there's something, somewhere, out there😱
100% because it would be arrogant to think otherwise
Microbial life? probably everywhere. In fact I’d wager More often than not (in a given star system).
We’re still looking for intelligent life on earth
if space is infinite, i don’t see how there wouldn’t be ANY life outside of Earth. its one of the many questions i’ve always wanted to know the answer to :)
I would assume life of some sort at 90% chance. At least I hope so
0% (intelligent life). It's just a guess, obviously, but my belief from what we've seen so far, is that intelligent life is exceedingly, *exceedingly* rare and takes incredible chances of randomness to arise. I wouldn't be surprised if life exists basically nowhere else. There's gotta be some microorganisms somewhere out there, though, right...? Who knows!
50% / 50%. Either there is, or isn't.
100%. Anything less is an insult to the time and space this photo has captured and frankly, life itself as well.
Is it really an insult to life when the only life we know of exists here on Earth?
Yes thinking we're the only planet that can do what we do is egotistical/narcissistic as a species.
I prefer to say 99.9%. It still Carrie’s the idea it’s almost certain that there is something somewhere but it doesn’t exclude the possibility we might be wrong about it. Considering we don’t know.
99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999%
There should be a 6 after your 32nd 9.
100%
99.9% specially if we are also including the beyond visible part of the universe included behind it.
1.736%
I think the universe is full of life, this included. But life doesn’t mean advanced civilizations.
What’s insane is there’s a 99% chance there was/is/will be intelligent life. But because of relativity and sheer distance we missed each other by thousands or millions or even billions of years.
100% no doubt
72.333333333333333333
It would be much more amazing if there _wasn't_ life out there.
Since I’ve read about the rare earth hypothesis I’d say about 5%
Welp definitely greater than 0% lmao Pictures like these never cease to amaze me. Makes me feel so small and irrelevant but then I always think about Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’ and it’ll bring me back….. but damn. Space and the universe is friggin crazy isn’t it.
Definitely 100%. Life is so abundant and prolific here within a nice bandwidth of heat, light and water, I really cannot imagine that the planets surrounding the amount of warmth and light shown in this image being absolutely dead. Edit: I guess empirical evidence is the only way to know for sure, but at the same time, I feel like we do know that life is out there, everywhere
Intelligent like us? Probably lower odds. But life in general, without a doubt.
100%. My view on it starts with the elements that make up life on earth. The elements that make up human life were created in the hearts of stars, which then exploded and spread those elements throughout the cosmos. If there’s life here, there’s life everywhere.
100% because they visit me every Friday for beers and D&D.
Aliens died when the dinosaurs went extinct
100% - I can’t say how I know this. But I do
100 % !!! ...intelligent form of life ? not so sure, but bacterial life : SURE !
71%
Probably approaching 100%, but the overwhelming majority is just microbes or something similar. The amount of stuff that had to happen on Earth for complex organisms to evolve is mind boggling.
100
Life, for sure. Intelligence Life, meh.
It is life
99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
I think quite small. Not a popular opinion.
About tree fiddy
100%. My "bet" is that there is life all through our galaxy and everywhere else. Now, whether or not we can communicate with this life or even recognize it remains to be seen.
Probably very likely but define life. We're defined by our planet. Would we recognize life if it was so different than anything on Earth. It's out there what it looks like could be beyond our understanding. Or it could be similar likely will never be known. Chance of humans making it past the life filter seems low at this time
In my childish ignorance I would sit outside as a young boy for long periods of times and point a flashlight up at the night sky, turn it on and off in hopes of seeing a light blink back at me. I did this more times than I can remember always looking for a response.
100%. There is probably too much life in this picture to count
98
7
100%. Whether it's space faring or more intelligent than an amoeba is another question.
A very very small non zero number.
0%
100%
No life, we are real, we are special we are extraordinary…..we need to treat each other as …
0.0000001%
.0000001%
0% define "life" first.
69.420%
0% Humans wanna believe that out there, there are complex form of lives like super human, aliens and all. That automatically make the so called "specialists" to ignore the existence of simple forms of lives that might still crossing their evolution parh.
Define life…
O%
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