That’s a yes from me. But I wanna hear what others think.

  • clifmo@programming.dev
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    56 minutes ago

    Yes/no is less interesting than your reasons for your answer. And most importantly, what impact does your answer have?

    For me, it’s a no. Because there’s no hard evidence. And by not believing, I save a lot of time and lose absolutely nothing.

    That isn’t to say it’s impossible. It’s to say nobody has show me where it’s probable, based on hard evidence.

    And to those here posting that animals wouldn’t count because they’re not intelligent: you’re wrong.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 hours ago

    Life on other planets? Seems likely.

    Life on earth started pretty soon once the conditions were met.

    Intelligent life (humanlike), maybe not. Most probably not. Out of millions of species through billions of years only humans have evolved to have this kind of thinking machine during a relatively short period of time.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      The universe isn’t really that old so it probably just hasn’t had time to start getting crowded yet. We should really get our shit together in the next million years or so and get on top of that.

  • Ariselas@piefed.ca
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    9 hours ago

    That depends. Yes, I believe it is probable that life exists elsewhere in the universe. But no, none of that life is building pyramids in ancient Egypt, abducting cows, or anal probing hillbillies.

  • Mantzy81@aussie.zone
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    7 hours ago

    Depends what you class as “alien”.

    Given that there are literally billions of galaxies out there and each one contains billions of stars with each one having the possibility of its own multi planetary system, it would be rather silly to assume that on our random planet of literally trillions of others, it’s the only one that life has or will evolve on. It might be not be life that has the ability to read a post on a smartphone but it might be more simple. It might be more advanced but I’m sure there’s probably some form of life.

    Whether any have been able to build inter-planetary/or inter-galactic vessels and travelled to Earth…highly unlikely. And we shouldn’t be so conceited that if they did come that they would come for us! We’ve only been around for a million years. We’re relative newcomers on the block.

  • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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    8 hours ago

    He likelyhood of this planet being the only place in the universe some complex proteins folded a billion years ago is zero.

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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      4 hours ago

      But the other planets are probably absurdly far away. The space happens to be expanding as well, so that distance is also growing rapidly. If FTL travel isn’t possible, nobody will ever visit those worlds, and they can’t visit us. Just travelling at 1c or even 1000c won’t be much help either. The distances sure truly vast.

      • andallthat@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        I mean, thousands of humans do travel 14+ hours specifically for sex tourism.

        “This is Captain Zyrqon. We have now landed on Earth, home to the finest anuses in this quadrant. Please make sure you collect all your probes when leaving the spaceship. We wish you a very pleasant stay”

  • UsernamesAreForSuckers@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I think it’s likely aliens exist, but unlikely any alien species will be what we expect. I highly doubt we will see humanoid “little green men” or anything like the majority of science fiction portrays. Each planet is vastly different in just our solar system. The vast differences in environments across the galaxy will yield vastly different paths of evolution. We are only looking for “life” that fits our narrow definition based on Earth’s species - we have likely already missed signs of alien life.

  • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 hours ago

    they definitely exist but they’ve never visited human civilization

    I specify human civilization because I think it’s possible that aliens may have visited our planet before human civilization but that their visit was so long ago that it is impossible to tell the evidence of it from random noise - like imagine if a space probe was in our orbit at some point a million years ago, I don’t think there’s any way that we would be able to tell, and declaring it to be true or untrue one way or the other is kind of a Russell’s teapot situation.

    • bertlewirth@lemy.lol
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      2 hours ago

      People are afraid of being enslaved by aliens, but given human history, we’d likely enslave them.