ANSWERS: 6
  • I've seen it several times, and I do believe in life elsewhere in the universe. It's just too big for life not to exist elsewhere.
  • Yes, and possible.
  • Yes and Yes
  • 6 billion stars just in this solar system alone, the odds are YES!
  • Yes I have seen ET and I do believe there's lifeon other planets.
  • I've seen the movie, but it didn't appeal to me very much, honestly. It's highly unrealistic that an extraterrestrial life form would have evolved some sort of healing finger, let alone that it would work on humans. It's also highly unrealistic they'd not be poisoned by any Earth food, or by our atomsphere. We are to imagine that the one lucky time that an alien crashes to Earth, it just happened to be capable of eating what we eat, breathing what we breath, and being roughly humanoid in shape? Too much of a suspension of disbelief for me. As for life on other planets, I think there's some anecdotal evidence to suggest that we will find very simple life on other planets (things similar to bacteria), but that it is very unlikely that we will find anything with the intelligence of a jellyfish (which can only feel pain), let alone a sophisticated species like humans. The evidence for life on other planets, so far, is confined to just one planet - Earth. It's bad to base any significant belief on a sample size of one. However, Earth's all we have. My thought that we may find very simple single-celled type life on other planets comes from the fact that Earth's earliest simple bacterial life forms developed about 3.8 billion years ago, almost immediately after Earth cooled enough to allow for them. Now, we do know that Mars once supported oceans, and we also know that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has oceans of liquid water underneath its surface. I would say our chances of finding life on other planets goes down dramatically if we don't end up finding at least micro-fossils of ancient life on Mars and/or on Europa. The reason I think more complex life forms, such as anything multicellular, including jellyfish, trees, algae, and humans, are probably not out there is also based on one planet - Earth. From the fossil record, we see that although life emerged on Earth almost as soon as it cooled enough, it was not until about 800 million years ago (3 billion years after the first bacteria evolved) before anything coming close to the complexity of a slug or jellyfish evolved. Why so long? To me, this is a strong sign that this development was unlikely. Furthermore, we forget how special Earth is. Specifically, what it makes it so special is our Moon. Without the Moon, Earth's axial tilt would be such that seasons would be terribly vicious and violent, and life very well might not even possible on land, let alone very complex forms like us. The odds of an Earth-Moon system forming are very low - based on the leading theory that the Moon formed from the debris of a Mars-sized planetary body colliding with Earth shortly after it formed. As for the existence of other civilizations at out level or higher out there, we have the big question: where the hell are they? For decades now (or has it been over a century?), we've been blasting out coherent radio waves into space in all directions, ever since we started listening to radios and using them to communicate with one another. On a daily basis, we blast "space noise pollution" all around us in the form of radio and TV broadcasts. And yet we hear nothing coherent when we look for such signals. Also, because of the time scales involved, it's far more likely any civilization we MIGHT encounter would either be vastly more primitive than we are, or vastly superior technologically. If they even had a thousand years on us, we would have expected them to start making their presence felt in the galaxy. Such an advanced civilization (1000 years more advanced than we are today) would already be embarking on planetary and stellar engineering projects, and have explored many of its stellar neighborhood. And yet, again, we see no signs of this. Our equipment may not be sensitive enough, that's true, but even if only 1 in a hundred million stars in our galaxy developed advanced civilizations like ours, we should be able to have some clue of that.

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