Creative Speculation

Last edited Wed Apr 9, 2014, 03:15 PM - Edit history (4)

There is no place nearby to us where any aliens could be living. The nearest star is four light-years away. Even if the extremely unlikely event came true and there were intelligent life forms on one of the closer stars, that's still an unrealistic distance for any conscious critter to likely ever travel.

Any life form would have evolved to the conditions of its own planet. The chances for anyone of finding an adequately similar planet anywhere close to their neighborhood is small. The incentive to search for any such planet is low, compared to the disincentive due to the extreme costs and probable insurmountable challenges.

One would have to make the trip in one lifetime since it would be extreme child abuse to give birth in space, whether human or space critter.

The fact that we live on an habitable planet is no clue to the likelihood of there being life on an individual planet around another star. All we know is that life is possible. Any intelligent life will automatically live on one of those habitable planets, and this fact may unrealistically bias it (including us) to the likeliness of there being life on other planets.

I think there are likely a huge number of planets beyond earth with intelligent life, but the odds for an individual planet are extremely low. But since the visible Universe is probably a tiny speck of the totality of our Universe. There are a lot of planets out there with potential life

In Big Bang inflation theory, our Universe drastically expanded in an unimaginably very short period of time well before the first second of its existence was over. This caused our original lumpy Universe to spread far apart, the great majority well beyond the horizon of any future conscious creature that may inhabit a future planet. So that tiny speck of our Universe that we see has almost no lumps in its Cosmic Background Radiation, and now our visible Universe is mostly uniform.

This means there are an unimaginably huge number of planets in our Universe alone (and probably many universes beyond our own), and a lot of life beyond our horizon. Reality plays a lot of lottery tickets to create life, but you'd have to win the lottery to find life on an individual planet.