Satan was an alien, also known as a fallen angel referred to in the second Book of Enoch as Satanael, and there were other satans who tempted the other alien Watchers (Greek ἐγρήγοροι) into having sex with the daughters of humans. This gave rise to what is known as the Nephilim whereby hybrid giants were created which were probably 13.5 meters tall before the deluge. The alien Watchers referred to in the book of Genesis as the Sons of God:

Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

-Genesis 6:1-4

There is only ONE LIFE: Your thoughts, your consciousness

I still have to read ~half the thread, but very interesting stuff so far. Please keep posting.

I'd like to hear some opinions/discussion on the concept that everything is made up of an exact combination of atoms, etc and that as the universe approaches infinity, the likelihood that an identical combination exists in another area of the universe/multiverse increases. So it stands that if the the universe is infinite, or close to it, there is possibly an exact replica of myself out there. I don't want to butcher the idea by trying to explain it any further but would love to hear some discussion if others are familiar with the theory.

Also very interested by the idea of intelligence evolving to the point of being able to create new worlds/universes and observe them. So many mindblowing ideas, the profound disappointment is the realization of how unlikely it is I will get to see any of the answers to any of these things in my lifetime.

Michio Kaku believes there must be life on other planets, in other dimensions, and possibly in other universes.

Bump.

Don't have much to contribute, but was very interested in some of the earlier posts, would love to see some more discussion.

i hear somewhere

"We cant even have peace with each other, why the f does we need extra-terrestrials?"

huh?

and the way I understand it, whether or not there are extra-terrestrials isn't up to us

STJEANS, pretty sure I mentioned it before, but this book is phenomenal:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/038795...le?pc_redir=T1

convo itt may not pick back up, but that book covers the same topics

there is a theory out there that says that maybe WE are the extraterrestrials living on this planet

didnt read every single post not sure if this has been mentioned already but I believe that life has to exist elsewhere but am rather skeptical about intelligent life.

for all intents and purposes i think we are alone, I know that sounds a bit out there but I will explain.

Say mankind or another civilization figures out how to get to the nearest solar system within a human lifetime assuming such a thing were possible, human beings or other civilization then decide to expand and colonize those planets then what happens? from that world colonize other worlds. other stars. assuming it took 1000 years to colonize each solar system under this modal a somewhat conservative assumption to say the least then how long would it take to colonize our galaxy which i have heard contains between 100,000,000,000 and 200,000,000,000 stars? i will work with the larger number.

well if we assumed a new star is only reached every 1000 years then the answer would be 200,000,000,000/1000 or simply 200 million years still relatively trivial for space time. but if we follow logic once people from star system A reach star system B, then both star system A and star system B seek to expand. so it doubles every 1000 years. if you double a number 10 times you get 1024 times the original number. so within 10,000 years we would now stretch across 1024 systems. However once we go another 10 duplication's we are looking at a over a million. we go to 30 and we are looking at over a billion. so within 38 generations or 38000 years this population now colonizes our entire galaxy. I have heard that there are 200 billion galaxies. so if galaxy to galaxy travel were possible it could be 76000 years. considering that life has existed on earth for 3.4 billion years and we have only seen one technologically advanced species, ever occur yet billions upon billions of multi celled species. intelligent life is very rare in fact I think we really could be alone in terms of technologically intelligent life.

It doesnt make sense obviously we wouldnt find intelligent life yet, but surely by now if it were elsewhere it would have found us. I dont know whats scientifically possible in terms of space travel maybe it can never be achieved maybe it can. if it cannot then its irrelevant for all intents and purposes no other intelligent life exists out there.

if it can then it would have already found us by now many times over.

so either A we are alone or
B they have already found us but they/ our governments both etc decide not to reveal themselves to us. maybe we are been left alone from interference like wildlife protection etc.

there's a bunch of reasons the Fermi paradox can be explained with the existence of other intelligent life...

without spoiling all of them (though I suppose if you are reading this thread, most are probably familiar to you), and I'm starting to sound like I know the author and am touting for his book, order that book I posted. the first ~20 chapters or so are directly answering the question of "where are they?" with a different variation of "they ARE here/there/everywhere we just can't sense it".

to start, with the ability to harness the power of stars or even galaxies, do you doubt that they couldn't come up with a way to hide their existence out there, millions of light years away??

what if we're a galactic nature reserve, off-limits to tampering until we're sufficiently advanced to interact properly?

what if listening to radio signals is the universal equivalent to listening to birds chirping? do we know there's a difference in pitch/volume/intent amongst birds chirping? yes, but do we really care?

read the book, to an outer space dreamer, it's almost life-changing. hopefully masque comes in and drops a couple 5,000 word posts for us to drool over soon

not sure if i was clear I assume I was not, this bolded part is the only logical way i could conceive of intelligent life existing. it would not need to hide from us for its own protection or fear of us we would pose no threat at all and they could wipe us out without even the slightest strain. thus the only reason for them to hide from us would be as you stated. of course no reason they couldn't be invisible to us they could be having holidays and expeditions where they are invisible to us and photographing us right now. at this very second i could be been observed by invisible aliens or part of a an extra terrestrial nature documentary. in which case my room is a real embarrassment so i hope not. they can come back when its tidier.

what if they are watch me masturbate and there teenagers make silly comments?

I will not have invisible alien teenagers secretly watching me masturbate, but guess i do not have a choice.

sorry sometimes i cannot avoid been really silly. I guess this is the only rational explanation as to how intelligent aliens could exist but its a bit far fetched.

well, if they're anything like me...

and there's many more in-depth ways to explain our lack of perceiving them beyond simple invisibility. I dunno if the idea of invisible, snickering alien adolescents can be proven through physics or not, but many other reasons can..

but we live on this planet. we are not extra-

maybe we are the most advanced.

maybe more advanced civilizations killed themselves off before spreading from star to star, galaxy to galaxy.

maybe the more advanced societies have found us and we can't even perceive them and for whatever reason they don't want to make their presence known.

Much appreciated. Will definitely check this out.

+1 to more Masque posts.

First of all we have to eradicate this word 'belief', there is no 'belief' in the realm of physics, cosmology and astronomy.

You simply have to look at the maths, but considering the extraordinary magnitude of the universe, there is (almost) definitely intelligent life existing at this present time, if not before.

There are even two moons on Jupiter that hold the potential for life, Europa and Titan. So considering the trillions and trillions and trillions of stars and planets in the universe, it would be foolish not to think that there is intelligent life elsewhere, even humans are exploring the idea of worm-holes, at least in theory. It seems that the more intelligent we become, the more possibilities unfold.

Regarding the Fermi Paradox i think one should try two major ways to understand what its about. Either try to see it literally as paradox and attempt to creatively imagine what might be going on as a civilization gets advanced to explain the absence of evidence or one must be brave enough to see it as a statement about our world, not a paradox. A statement about how big the universe is and at the same time how rare life is as a phenomenon and how even more rare is for life once formed to survive the events that take place in a system over billions of years and evolve to reach the levels of an expanding civilization, before the star ends its cycle or the planet's atmosphere/water is depleted or a runaway "environmental" disaster takes the system to an extreme where life cannot adapt fast enough or is forever held restricted to uninteresting complexity levels etc. If you can survive all these and reach a technological civilization, things happen fast after that, the game (to evolve complexity to remarkable levels) is essentially won for that system and a vast number of other systems around it that will experience the expansion of that life and its AI. In fact probably it is won for that galaxy and the system of galaxies around it within the next 10-100 million years also.

There are many levels of arrogance and audacity you know. There is the audacity to think we are special and so unique, rare and maybe the first or alone, and then there is also the audacity to take life so much for granted that we fail to realize how remarkable it all is (the epic of life), how the fact we still dont know how it starts is evidence for its nontrivial character and what our immense responsibility and role in this universe may prove to be to protect it from extinction after appreciating how lucky this system got.

So i have started to think that maybe it all proves a statement involving the scales for both life and the universe. My point is we possibly lack the perspective to recognize what the current state we find ourselves in the universe as observers is telling us. We are failing to recognize the mathematical extremes in place that are so radically different from our daily intuitive understandings of the concepts of big (size) and very small (probability). The universe is an enormously large place that within say just only 10 bil light years (some depth of observation say that still allows the most distant places to be mature galaxies with second generation stars) can involve potentially 10^24 systems like earth (rocky planets or satellites of reasonable temperature or possibly other creative systems suitable for radically different forms of life). This number is so big that it can only imply life is super rare, precisely because if it isnt we should be experiencing a remarkable observational impact of that life in all possible directions observed. It is that big of a number that the statement where are they is not simply a good question, it is also probably part of the answer.

Something extremely rare as complex life, that requires many early critical steps under very particular conditions (abiogenesis) may be very hard to attain indeed, even if so many out there tell you its so plausible to have it so often given how many systems are available for billions of years each, with billions of sites in each system experimenting with interesting organic Chemistry and Physics in possibly favorable conditions. These people look at the solar system and see many interesting places (with presence of life related molecules in many of them) that would not necessarily look horrible (as environments) for our version of life. But is that enough? Life may be easy to adapt in nearby (not exact) to standard (earthlike) conditions, even some wild extremes, once it is introduced there. That is entirely different though from getting started. None of these guys will show you in proper detail how life starts to make it possible to establish some probabilities by appreciating the nature of the conditions and sequence of events required to quantify the route to the miracle. I hope we get lucky and have the answer in our lifetimes.

Nobody knows yet for sure how the first nontrivial self replicating or self sustaining level of complexity begins. What if the chance to the first cell is only 10^-10 per bil years per system and the chance to evolve to multicellular is 10^-4 and the chance to get to higher animals 10^-4 and the chance those become substantially intelligent is 10^-3 and the chance they manage to eventually create civilization another 10^-2 (completely speculative number examples), where part of these probabilities emerge by the rare nature of the combination of processes needed and fine initial conditions in each step and the other part is by the strict requirement that the planet/solar system doesnt face something very risky (that could span many different risks actually) over the millions or billions of years that those life evolving steps naturally take to produce very creative and resilient forms. As you see the above quickly multiply to bring our probability of occurrence to something so small that it requires billions of galaxies to happen. And why not? Any other more frequent result instantly implies we are already born in a universe with others already aware of our system and yet somehow they hide everything they did and wait billions of years for us patiently leaving everything in pristine state! Are you kidding me? In a universe without major physics surprises that the only way to expand is by going to others systems, something we will do with like 99.99% certainty in the next 2-4 centuries, the chance to eventually colonize and even convert an entire galaxy, within the first million of years of a major civilization, is so close to 1 that we can call it inevitable (in the absence of a very rare intelligence triggered cosmic or local catastrophe i have talked before). And we would have had 100 say like us within this galaxy alone or the next 1000 around us (ie within 10-20 mil light years) and they simply did nothing with a head start of order hundreds of millions or billions of years already? Its simply insanely unlikely and hinting of the real legitimate possibility that we are indeed the first locally. Simply said guys, the first wins everything within their own galaxy in less than 1 mil years even with current technology and physics only. The "first" doesnt sit and wait hundreds of millions of years for the others to catch up. The first is first by a huge time margin (in the local time sense of that galaxy or cluster of galaxies) vs the random future ones.

But if a universe is large enough such things will happen eventually somewhere with some decent overall probability and maybe ultimately that goes to 1 or gets extremely unlikely that it wont happen in a global sense when you consider the entire future. So in that sense we may be locally special but not globally special and still have the system be so huge and life so rare that it appears we are isolated from the millions/thousands of others who are so far away that we cannot even see the impact of their presence in the past very ancient light. And what we would be seeing anyway from so far would be the impact of their AI not their own impact. I consider the next step after intelligent life (ie what comes next, AI, then what...) to be so dramatically impressive and unimaginably complex that its presence and effect on environment would have to be some remarkable deviation from typical nature. It has to be part of nature by the point in time (like a cosmic scale new nonstandard phenomenon) it is spotted, given the enormous time periods available for it to evolve so that we can observe it at some random point of our own epic history. Nobody is waiting anyone else from such vast distances. You simply wake up as a civilization in the universe others have already made for you all around at some distance if not already in your own location. Can you imagine our future 1 mil years from today? How about 1 billion? The possibilities are remarkable to imagine. What routes complexity can take in 1 bil years?

One of course is found shocked of realizing how lucky this system proves then. But naturally the shock is unavoidable and eventually not anything other than observation bias. Its what happens to any such system that gets lucky and reflects on itself after first examining how many conditions have had to be met for it to happen there. It is not different than imagining all the sperm cells that competed for you to finally start your life(hundreds of millions). What chance is it that you among so many would happen? All other sperm cells "failing". No matter how rare we are, the first locally is always there to be shocked at their own presence and loneliness and incredibly lucky birth as a system and still it couldnt be anything other than that if certain probability per system conditions are met. It will always tend to look like what we see if the numbers are right.

Its not completely unreasonable to claim that the universe is so big and yet the chance per system is an avg <10^-24 to give all this or something like that in the most generalized way imaginable (to avoid being anthropocentric or very conformist regarding what life is)

If indeed life has to pass a <10^-24 barrier per system to reach civilization levels, most out there would find themselves lonely at the moment of their first large scale awareness regarding their position in the cosmos. A galaxy could still have hundreds of places of some primitive forms of life that stressed by unfriendly conditions are destined to never become very complex.

So on one hand i start to see a low number like 10^-24 or less (that number is now an estimate forced by observation, not a wild guess anymore) and on the other i still try to imagine what is the remarkable thing that happens to a civilization to abandon this universe or to evolve into something unobservable. Could we be really looking at only a tiny aspect of what is available out there that is vastly more interesting? Or could we be indeed the first locally (within billions of light years)? Or is it so important that each one emerges alone and unobstructed? Are we even an experiment? I will take the <10^-24 number for now and keep speculating regarding the other things.

Our focus as a group in this thread should be to try to study how life forms (all current proposals and what they require in terms of conditions) and how we go from simple cells to multicellular systems and how plants emerge and what is the cambrian explosion. In those steps life has taken (and the ways it did the same thing independently ) there may exist hints about how rare the steps are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

(what happened 540 mil years ago that resulted in such dramatic change in the appearance and properties of life in this planet in only 20 mil years frame)

Consider also things like (to appreciate how life is forced to take certain paths by changes in the system)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth


and the path regarding plants;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_plants

and as always keep checking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

for potential new entries. Once abiogenesis is settled it will become clear how wrong or close that 10^-24 number may be.

Another project we might want to engage is to try to see how lucky earth got by a number of events after say the planet's formation (eg how important the moon proves or the magnetic field or volcanism or lack of any nearby supernova/gamma ray burst event etc). We should try to identify all the lucky steps that played a role to get us to intelligent animals.

See also this brief video for other ideas about why actually finding life in the solar system may prove a bad sign for our future.

He agrees with some of what i said also;

yeah, last 2 minutes explains why it could be bad...what I would give to be in the room with that guy for a few hours...

makes sense though, the less chance that the filter is before us means the more chance that it's after us.

Good video.