Is there life after death?

i'm not sure your numbers are correct, except the '66. even if they are, the odds of finding life on any of them are real small...

 

You're in luck in so far as unless life these planets is actively communicating with us, we won't be able to actually confirm life. We can only go by indirect markers like oxygen in the atmosphere, which in itself is very limited. Who's to say that life necessarily produces oxygen?

Anyway, the next generation of space telescopes will be able to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets which will give us a good idea whether or not there's life similar to that on earth. But even if we find it, you'll reject it anyway, because we wouldn't "see" it directly.

However, you might be less lucky when it comes to our own solar system. Mars is still a candidate for life, at the very least fossilized life, but possibly still active. One indication is the methane production that we detected. On earth, methane is produced by bacteria. The methane production on Mars is definitely local, since it append periodically, starting in spring and tailing off in the autumn. It could also be geological in origin, but so far we have no idea how that's supposed to happen.

Then there's the Jupiter moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. Both are geologically active and both have large oceans under an icy crust, making them also prime candidates for life.

Then there's Saturn's moon Titan, which is also a candidate for life, though life there would be dramatically different compared to what we're used to. Titan is both very similar to and very different from Earth. It's similar in that the landscape looks almost exactly like it does on the earth with mountains, rivers, lakes and oceans. It's different though in that the mountains are made of ice and the rivers and lakes are made of methane. There even is vulcanism, but not with molten rock as on earth but with liquid water. Absolutely fascinating. Anyway, there could be methane based life on Titan, if that's possible.

And then of course there could be life in all sorts of places, but it would be so different from what we know, that we might not even be able to recognize it.

There was supposed to be a mission to Europa soon, but unfortunately NASA is currently in financial turmoil and the mission had to be canceled. Still, I'm sure that we'll eventually search for life on Europa and the other big moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if we found some.
But first, on August 6th 2012, the Mars Science Laboratory will land on Mars. Among other things, it is designed to search for signs of life. So if we're lucky, the search for extraterrestrial life will have been successful very soon.

 

But God/gods put it there, it say so on the Bible/Koran/what ever religious book.

I am sure some explanation like that will come up if we ever find life on another planet.

One thing that makes me think, what if Extraterestrial life does get in contact with us and they have their own religion, will they be evengelical like the Christians and Muslims or will they be live and let live like the Jewish/Buddhist.

 

Jesus died for their sins too

But it would be generally interesting if religion is a universal thing given a certain evolutionary development or not. They might not even grasp the concept of religion.

But another interesting question is AI. Can a machine be converted to christianity? What about a simulated human brain?

 

if there's actual evidence, not simply some phenomenon that some people want to believe is evidence, i wouldn't reject it.

there are people who think that the life on earth came from some other place, but that begs the question: where did that life come from, originally. what was the actual etiology?

personally, i don't think we can ever be certain of a definitive answer to the question because there is no way to test the specific hypotheses that may be suggested, namely because it isn't possible to recreate the conditions with any certainty. it's guesswork, at best.

just because you think there is no other reasonable explanation doesn't mean there is no other reasonable explanation.

 

Do you even bother reading what you post? Your nonsense is sometimes even more outrageous than even the biggest and most famous mouths in the fundie camp. Your rejection of science seems complete and irreversible, ironically so considering the medium through which you are currently expressing your opinions.

We are still waiting for your glorious return to the Creationist thread, btw.

 

what science did i reject that prompted your response?

 

I read what he posted and it made perfect sense to me, and anyone who didn't know he was a "fundie" could never guess it from that post.

 

i'm waiting for the New Year. it's the year the world is coming to an end, and i'm hoping i can make some inroads into your totally rational thinking...

Merry Christmas

 

His third paragraph sums it up when you realize what Royal actually means. If we can't recreate the precise conditions under which life arose, no matter how close we do get or how solid a theory we eventually come up with, he'll be free to make his fundie claims that "the evidence isn't good enough, god did it".

he is crazy sauce and this "perfect sense" post is anything but.

 

Yeah, I didn't read into it that much. Didn't particularly bother me because he's obviously put a lot more thought into the issue than some super-Christians I've spoken with, and if the level of "proof" he demands on this issue is greater than many others, more power to him, and it doesn't affect what you or I believe.

 

if you have some way of establishing a more-than-hypothetical explanation for the origin of life, let 'er fly.

when Christians say that there were hundreds of witnesses to Jesus' resurrection, you call "bunk". there's no real proof. i completely get that.

and when i say there is no specific proof that life developed in such a manner, you say i reject science.

i don't reject science. i reject unsubstantiated claims that are based on untestable suppositions.

i happen to believe that God did it, and you happen to believe that god didn't do it.

but between us there isn't a speck of proof, and i don't think there ever will be.

tell me how you would hope to prove that life originated in a specific fashion. you could prove that we can create life in a particular way, but that's a far shot from proving that Life developed in that way.

are you so wedded to a particular bias that you cannot acknowledge there may be no reliable proof available?

 

The point being that, in the past 10 years or so, hundreds of planets orbiting stars within relatively close prximity to our own have been discovered. It is a fact that there are billions of galaxies....each containing billions of stars....logically it stands to reason that so far we have discovered a fraction of what is actually out there even in our own obscure galaxy.

The chance of earth being the only planet in the entire universe to contain life is (to me) non-existent....and anyone who believes otherwise strikes me as having an almost unbelievable arrogance.

I also believe that life will be found on other planets in my life time (I'm 63)....and I'll laugh my ass off at the "fundamentalists" of any so called "religion" when it is....

 

relatively close proximity?

that's hilarious.

OK. if the universe is 98,403,859,658 light years across, then only 600 light years is relatively close, but it's still an unnavigable distance, as far as we're concerned. it may always be effectively unnavigable...

 

What if some other life form is 10,000 years or so more advanced than our own...?? is that still an "unnavigable distance"....??

Stephen Hawking recently wrote that he thought it very unwise for us to be searching for life beyond our solar system....in case we found it...and they found us....

 

i guess if the lifespan of the other lifeform is 10 times what ours is, maybe it wouldn't be unnavigable, but i'm skeptical. look what we've done to ourselves in the last 70 years. we are well on our way to making this planet uninhabitable. it's only a matter of time.

the Cardassians and the Romulans notwithstanding, i think your faith in technology is a bit odd.

 

Depending on your point of view mankind has come a very long way in the past 100 years or so and I agree that it's quite possible that "civilisations" could indeed self destruct at a certain point....but what if "they" are different..??...what if "they" have somehow gone past the point of self destruction..??...or what if "they" are much more ruthless than we are..??

Yesterday I punched some numbers into a hand held device while driving from Shreveport to Dallas and within seconds was speaking to my brother in Portugal....had you mentioned that to anyone 200 years ago you'd have been burned at the stake as such a thing was impossible...where will we be 100....500...years from now..??...if still around then no doubt doing stuff that today is deemed by some to be "impossible"....

 

Until we find out every single one of those planets had their own Son of God redeeming them for all time to come.

I remember reading this one Ray Bradbury story about astronauts who visit another planet and find other humanlike beings there. But these beings don't really seem all that interested in the visitors from space(us) and the astronauts can't figure out why. Until they discover that this planet's own Jesus equivalent has just been there and the implications of that dwarf the impact of the visitors from space. Wish I could remember the name of the story....

 

The necessity of making the trip within ones' lifetime isn't clear.

 

i've never been overly enamored with Hawking. What exactly do we have to be scared of - that they will eat us? I'm sure they could come up with a better source of food - the dumber the animal, the easier to maintain and slaughter. And as dumb as we may be to them, I'm sure there are other more likely cattle out there. Want the planet for expansion? If they have the technology to reach us, then they likely have the technology to find us all on their own, or at least be able to determine that a habitable planet is here.

And if they did come with hostile intent? Well, I can outrun Hawking, at least.

 

They're probably already using us as entertainment.

 

So what about the following:
1) Fossilized microbes on Mars
2) An oxygen rich atmosphere on an earth like planet within the habitable zone of its star

There are people who believe all kinds of things, who cares?

That depends on you definition of certainty. No we can never be absolutely certain about the origin of life (or anything else for that matter) but we can have a high degree of certainty.
For example, while we can't rewind time, we could for example prove for all intends and purposes that a naturalistic origin of life is possible (and we're on a pretty good way there, as you very well know). But even without that, given everything we have learned about nature, we already have an extremely high degree of certainty that life arose naturally. To deny it is to deny millennia of human knowledge accumulation.

This is probably the most disturbing sentence in your post, because on the surface everyone would probably agree. They certainly should agree if they don't. However, from your mouth it just shows how twisted your perception of reality actually is, because you use it in order to make your position appear more reasonable when in reality your entire world view is based upon rejecting explanations left and right and on the argument that since you can't think of any explanation, you therefore are justified in asserting god as explanation. You're doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming you do.

Science on the other hand is based on exactly that, taking as much possibilities into account as we possibly can, questioning everything, always double- and triple-checking.
And science is not satisfied with merely high probabilities. A hypothesis is not granted the status of theory when it's observed 70% of the time, or 80%, or even 90% or 95%. No, the scientific community will only accept it as theory if it can account for 3 standard variations or 99.7% of the observed data (and the number isn't arbitrary either, see here). Though some scientists are even more rigorous and demand 6 standard variations or 99.9999998%.

Unlike your flavor of religion, science is open to change, it's willing to accept new evidence, to reevaluate previous held beliefs, to come up with new theories, all based on the evidence. That alone is prove positive that unlike you, science is (intellectually) honest.

And what good would that do? You have been pointed towards actual scientific evidence (no theory though, I grant you that much) many times. You never bothered to reply, so I can only assume that you never bothered to read them either. And it's not surprising, you're not interested in facts, all you're interested in is the absence of facts, so that you can plug your god into the gap.

It's really simple: You don't have any evidence other than a story in an ancient book. That's not the kind of standard of evidence that anyone can honestly accept, and neither do you with any other such claim, which makes your position hypocritical to begin with.

And BTW even there I'm not aware of the Bible stating that hundreds of people witnessed Jesus' resurrection, in fact I'm pretty sure they made a point by stating that nobody witnessed it, all they found was an empty grave.

What you're going is that you use different meanings for the same word. Philosophically, there can be no proof for anything. But that's a useless definition of the word proof, because it would turn it into an oxymoron. We work with probabilities, given a high enough probability we accept it as proof, both in real life as well as in science (although the threshold in science is much higher).

So no, only because we can technically never know anything with 100% certainty, that does not make all claims equal. Your claims are extremely weak, they're not supported by much evidence and the little you have is rather bad and biased, with a clear agenda and still does't account to more than hearsay.
Science on the other hand is built upon openness and repeatability, on evidence and logic. Every step on the long path of amassing knowledge can be checked, it can be tested. If you doubt the sciences, you can study up, go to university and recheck whatever you're skeptical about and when you gather enough evidence, you will change what's being believed. That's why the overall evidence in science is so extremely strong, it incorporates literally EVERYTHING we have ever observed. To say that science got it fundamentally wrong is to say that all our observations are fundamentally wrong (and all of them in the exact same way).

Science is like a giant puzzle. Every piece is a piece of evidence, a fact of nature, an observation we have made, and they all fit together nicely. At a certain point, given enough fitted pieces, we'll know which picture is on it, even if there are still gaps.
For example, we can observe how atoms decay under all kinds of conditions in a laboratory. Then we find a bone with a certain level of carbon decay and we can tell that it's 10,000 years old according to our knowledge of physics. Then we find a fossilized tree in the same geological layer and it yields the same result. We compare it with our tree-ring database and we can see from there, that using that dating method, it also comes to 10,000 years.
The sediment where the bone was found in itself has formed in a way that makes it compatible with the 10,000 year timeframe from a geological position, and so on. It all fits together and it all makes sense. And this is just a tiny part of the whole thing that contain's EVERYTHING that has ever been observed. And it's all interconnected, from the you using you computer, to mankind inventing the telephone, to airplanes, to pharmacy, to biology and evolution, etc.
Sure, there are some gaps, but the puzzle is huge and every piece that we have fits in nicely.

To use the analogy again, let's say that we can make out an image of Mickey Mouse. There are some pieces missing in the left ear and the right shoe. There might be a lot more to the puzzle than that, as it's potentially infinite in size. The whole picture might be a lot richer, but we can be very sure that at least Mickey Mouse is in it.

Now you come along and you say that while the individual pieces certainly exist, they don't form an image, in fact they're not even a puzzle to begin with and them fitting together is only a coincidence. The real image is not attained by searching for more puzzle pieces, but by believing an ancient book which claims that the real image is a crude crayon painting. Maybe you go so far in accepting that we can fit a couple individual puzzle pieces together, like a yellow patch within the left shoe (e.g. "micro evolution" in real life), because that could be matched with a yellow portion of your crayon picture. But we certainly can't put that yellow patch to the end of Mickey's leg, even if it fits.

It's absurd really.

Nope, you reject science.

Again, there's no proof in the 100% sense. But on the scientific side, there's exceptionally good evidence, while you only have exceptionally bad evidence.

All claims are not equal.

Again, you're missing the point. Showing that life can arise naturally would utterly destroy the only actual argument you have to support your claim, the argument you previously claimed you don't use, the argument of ignorance.

Would that be proof for how life on earth came about? Of course not, but that's not the point. It shows how it could have happened. With your entire argument being based on the claim that it could not have happened, you'd be left with nothing.

Your argument is terrible and you'd know that if you'd try to actually contemplate about what you're saying.

For example, we know how lightning can appear. An atmospheric electrostatic discharge will cause a lightning. And we also know how exactly that can come about.
Does that proof 100% that lightning actually is an atmospheric electrostatic discharge? Nope.
It could also be Zeus, throwing down lightning, because he feels like it for some reason.
But are these two claims on equal footing? Of course not. There is no reason and no evidence to believe that Zeus is responsible for lightning, but there's a lot of reason and evidence to believe that it's an atmospheric electrostatic discharge, based on the fact alone that we know it could be atmospheric electrostatic discharge. But on top of that, this is again only part of the puzzle and it fits in nicely with the rest. Say this is represented by Donald Duck and he fits perfectly next to Mickey. That makes it all the more likely, because for Donald to be wrong, Mickey would need to be wrong also.

1) We wouldn't need to go there (or they come to us) in order to communicate, we'd only need to send light back and forth.
2) We going there, or they coming to us doesn't necessarily mean that biological beings would travel, after all, robots could be sent instead.
3) According to the theory of relativity, time is dependent upon your speed. Assuming a highly advanced species could accelerate a space ship to speeds close to that of light, they could easily hop between worlds and only age a couple of years (maybe even much less) on a 600 light year trip.
4) The process of biological aging itself might very well be something that can be overcome with enough knowledge, so with an eternity ahead of you, a thousand year trip might sound like a great proposition.
5) Unlike with religion, belief in technology is actually warranted, because it yields measurable results. You typing on your computer is one such result. The fact that we came up with stuff like the computer proves (again not to 100%, but very, very close) that science works and that belief in technology is warranted.

 

Maybe they will have their own religion and will want to "share" with us, like the Europeans did to Africa and the Americas.

 

This is an interesting question, but I don't think the question is would they "literally" eat us for lunch as I said in an different thread, but rather would they squash us like we do ants.

If you look at the history of the evolution on Earth for example, the animal with the biggest brain always is a predator. We for example are currently the top predator on this planet with instincts to kill others animals and go to war with each other.

The question I ask myself is, if we ever encounter beings from other planets will they also be the "top predator" with instincts to kill other species and to go to war with them. Further more, is there some selection bias for the being that are most likely to do this, also being the ones the one to over-run the more passive neighboring civilizations.

If there is such a selection bias, maybe we shouldn't be so eager to send out "Hello we are here" messages until we understand the nature of what is out there. But the catch-22 is that you cannot find out what is out there without first sending out such "Hello we are here" messages.

This has nothing to do with "Is there life after death", but I just needed to get that off my chest.