Muenkel 0
Religious folk: would the discover of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe change your perception/beliefs?
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FreeflyChile, in Speakers Corner
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Of course there is life on other planets. xenu brought us here from the galactic confedercy bout 75 million years ago.
Born ok 1st time.
jakee 1,594
QuoteHere's the difference: I'm not afraid to be intellectually honest
Hahaha, let's see shall we?
QuoteI do believe in God and I do believe in the possibility of life on other planets.
Shabang, intellectual dishonesty straight off the bat. You're pretending that believing that something does definitely exist is the same as believing that something could feasibly exist. Intentionally misleading.
QuoteUnlike you, I am not going to claim that extra-terrestials do not exist because I cannot prove it. You cannot prove that God does not exist but you are very confident in claiming it.
You not only can't prove it, you can't provide a shred of objective evidence. There is absolutely no reason to think that God does exist.
(For the sake of illustration, I also can't prove that unicorns don't exist, or leprechauns, or pixies, or fairies, or the FSM. i think you'd agree, though, that I'd be justified in claiming that they don't.)
QuoteMike nailed it much earlier in this thread when he pointed out the hypocrisy of those who adamently claim the non-existence of God but have an open mind to the existence of extra-terrestials.
No, he didn't. One more time for the cheap seats, there is a huge difference between thinking that something we know can happen has happened more than once and thinking that something unlike anything we have ever seen or have any evidence for, exists.
Until that objection is addressed, the claim to have 'nailed' anything is pathetically transparent.
Quote+1 to mnealtx!
-2 to the both of you.
Do you want to have an ideagasm?
Andy9o8 2
QuoteTo those who believe in the impossibility of the existence of a god but believe in the probability of the existence of extraterrestials, please let us know when you meet and can prove one exists and I promise I will let you know when I meet and prove God exists.
QuoteI am not going to claim that extra-terrestials do not exist because I cannot prove it. You cannot prove that God does not exist but you are very confident in claiming it.
Utter nonsense. This is not just a matter of "you vote for your candidate and I'll vote for mine." The probability of life on other planets can be scientifically extrapolated from the existing physical universe. The non-existence of God, or anything else without a shred of physical evidence (like the monsters under a kid's bed), does not need to be "proven". If you want to believe in spirits, great; but don't tell me I need to prove that spooks don't exist; that's just upside-down logic. The burden of proof of the existence of anything spiritual is on the believer to prove it does exist, not on the non-believer to prove that it does not.
doesnt it say somewhere in the bible, that there are "many rooms in my house" (sorry for my ignorance, since i dont come from an english, sort of, upbringing)!?
now, if we were a little less sefl-centred, and a little less ignorant, that those "many rooms" could possibly stand for other species of (out-of-space) life!?
just a thought..
and no, i'm not really religious at all.. 
“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”
-Hunter S. Thompson
"No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try."
-Yoda
-Hunter S. Thompson
"No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try."
-Yoda
pirana 0
QuoteThe probability of life on other planets can be scientifically extrapolated from the existing physical universe. The non-existence of God, or anything else without a shred of physical evidence (like the monsters under a kid's bed), does not need to be "proven". If you want to believe in spirits, great; but don't tell me I need to prove that spooks don't exist; that's just upside-down logic. The burden of proof of the existence of anything spiritual is on the believer to prove it does exist, not on the non-believer to prove that it does not.
You do realize that a couple of the factors in those extrapolations are truely guesses, for which we have no way of knowing the real value, or even a meaningful range. The result is that the anser is that there are somewhere between 0 and billions of other locations supporting life - that is what we know for sure.
Don't get me wrong, my personal opinion is that the likelihood is very high, but without evidence everybody's opinion on this one is just a guess. Yes, it is an extrapolation, but with a range like that it is pretty meaningless.
I do agree, as any good logician would, on your comments on the burden of proof.
" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley
pirana 0
QuoteTop Gun is F'n great!
Oh come on; can you really sit and watch that now and not see how corny it is?
The mark of a great movie is that it's cornyness does not increase with time.
Very few movies are great, most look really corny, stupid, trite, horribly acted, etc 20 years later. You realize how badly you were being handheld thru the story by the writer and/or director.
" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley
Andy9o8 2
QuoteQuoteThe probability of life on other planets can be scientifically extrapolated from the existing physical universe. The non-existence of God, or anything else without a shred of physical evidence (like the monsters under a kid's bed), does not need to be "proven". If you want to believe in spirits, great; but don't tell me I need to prove that spooks don't exist; that's just upside-down logic. The burden of proof of the existence of anything spiritual is on the believer to prove it does exist, not on the non-believer to prove that it does not.
You do realize that a couple of the factors in those extrapolations are truely guesses, for which we have no way of knowing the real value, or even a meaningful range. The result is that the anser is that there are somewhere between 0 and billions of other locations supporting life - that is what we know for sure.
Don't get me wrong, my personal opinion is that the likelihood is very high, but without evidence everybody's opinion on this one is just a guess. Yes, it is an extrapolation, but with a range like that it is pretty meaningless.
I do agree, as any good logician would, on your comments on the burden of proof.
No, I disagree with referring to them as mere "guesses". Extrapolations are more than just sexed-up guesswork; they are a reasonable range of inferences drawn from an existing body of evidence, governed by known scientific principles.
GeorgiaDon 379
Many of the terms in the Drake equation, such as the number of stars with solar systems, number of suitable planets in the "life zone", etc can be estimated (within a very broad range), based on existing data. However, we really don't know the probability that life will appear given a suitable environment. It seems to have happened quite quickly on the Earth, within the first 1 1/2 billion years, which suggests that it is not an improbable event, but with a sample of only one planet we can't say very much. Even worse is estimating the probability that intelligent life will appear. As far as we know, it has only happened once on the Earth, and some people (Richard Dawkins for one) have published fairly convincing arguments that the conditions favoring human-type intelligence are probably quite rare. For one thing, almost all animals do quite well with more limited (or perhaps just a different kind of) "intelligence". Our large brains require a lot of energy to keep them going, so they are a relatively costly evolutionary specialization, which probably has a lot to do with why almost all animals don't bother; pointy teeth or running fast is generally a better bet. Then there is the question of how long technological civilizations last. If they tend to destroy themselves through war, or exhausting natural resources, they may last only a few thousand years. If they don't last very long, they won't accumulate over time and the chances of any being close enough to discover, at just the right time for us to be able to detect them, may be small. If they move on to technologies other than radio, it might be hard to detect them even if they were right next door. We've been broadcasting radio signals into space for less than a century, how long will it be before we replace high-energy radio broadcasts with internet/fiber optics/whatever? So even if technological civilizations are common, it's anybodies guess how many of them we might have any chance to detect. Since we have no data set to extrapolate from, those parameters are little more than guesswork at present. Personally, I suspect life is fairly common in the universe, but intelligent life, in the form of technological civilizations we might hope to detect or contact, is likely much rarer.QuotePirana: You do realize that a couple of the factors in those extrapolations are truely guesses, for which we have no way of knowing the real value, or even a meaningful range. The result is that the anser is that there are somewhere between 0 and billions of other locations supporting life - that is what we know for sure.
Andy908: Extrapolations are more than just sexed-up guesswork; they are a reasonable range of inferences drawn from an existing body of evidence, governed by known scientific principles.
Don
_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)
For most of my 49 years living in the Bible Belt in a Southern Baptist home, I have asked myself the most common sense questions and deduced no practical nor probable answer.
How did Noah.....
a. Become a better weather forecaster than the ones we have now?
b. Capture two [male & female] of all of the wild animal creatures on earth?
c. Get all the correct food for the creatures?
d. Dispose of tons of shit for a forty day boat ride?
Got any good answers to these questions?
People are crazy. Cuz there's more of 'em.
Religious mind is just like a computer infected with viruses.
All its power controlled and ran by the infection.
Because of that, it's really hard to convince (if that is possible at all) a religious person about anything what contradicts his/her faith.
Myself is the best evidence of aliens, because everybody knows I'm from another planet
billvon 3,114
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>I do believe in God and I do believe in the possibility of life on other planets.
>Unlike you, I am not going to claim that extra-terrestials do not exist because I
>cannot prove it. You cannot prove that God does not exist but you are very
>confident in claiming it.
If we could observe no other planets in the universe than ours, then your argument that the two are similar would be valid.
However, that is not the case. Imagine two astronomers, one of whom argues that there are at least tens of thousands of planets out there based on the fact that there are a bunch in our solar system and that we have observed over 300 in other solar systems. The second argues that they are all just images projected on a big planetarium screen hundreds of thousands of miles from the earth. Every time a probe is sent to that distance, he revises the distance from the Earth to the planetarium screen.
Which has the more valid argument for his position?
>Unlike you, I am not going to claim that extra-terrestials do not exist because I
>cannot prove it. You cannot prove that God does not exist but you are very
>confident in claiming it.
If we could observe no other planets in the universe than ours, then your argument that the two are similar would be valid.
However, that is not the case. Imagine two astronomers, one of whom argues that there are at least tens of thousands of planets out there based on the fact that there are a bunch in our solar system and that we have observed over 300 in other solar systems. The second argues that they are all just images projected on a big planetarium screen hundreds of thousands of miles from the earth. Every time a probe is sent to that distance, he revises the distance from the Earth to the planetarium screen.
Which has the more valid argument for his position?
Muenkel 0
QuoteWhich has the more valid argument for his position?
In the end, the one who posesses the truth.
_________________________________________
Chris
beowulf 1
QuoteQuoteWhich has the more valid argument for his position?
In the end, the one who posesses the truth.
NOW that is funny!!!!!
billvon 3,114
>In the end, the one who posesses the truth.
We will never know that the universe is not some giant joke where the stars are projected on a screen for us. (At least, not 100%.) However, someone who thinks that is further from the truth than someone who thinks that there is actually a universe out there.
We will never know that the universe is not some giant joke where the stars are projected on a screen for us. (At least, not 100%.) However, someone who thinks that is further from the truth than someone who thinks that there is actually a universe out there.
Muenkel 0
Quote>In the end, the one who posesses the truth.
We will never know that the universe is not some giant joke where the stars are projected on a screen for us. (At least, not 100%.) However, someone who thinks that is further from the truth than someone who thinks that there is actually a universe out there.
Never say never. Your life is not over. You do not know what you will discover.
_________________________________________
Chris
DanG 1
QuoteMyself is the best evidence of aliens, because everybody knows I'm from another planet
Good point. Why are we having this debate when the world has long known about Bootsy Collins, the brother from another planet?
- Dan G
jakee 1,594
QuoteQuoteMyself is the best evidence of aliens, because everybody knows I'm from another planet
Good point. Why are we having this debate when the world has long known about Bootsy Collins, the brother from another planet?
Bootsy wasn't from another planet, the Funk was from another planet.
Do you want to have an ideagasm?
Here's the difference: I'm not afraid to be intellectually honest. I do believe in God and I do believe in the possibility of life on other planets. Unlike you, I am not going to claim that extra-terrestials do not exist because I cannot prove it. You cannot prove that God does not exist but you are very confident in claiming it.
Mike nailed it much earlier in this thread when he pointed out the hypocrisy of those who adamently claim the non-existence of God but have an open mind to the existence of extra-terrestials.
+1 to mnealtx!
_________________________________________
Chris
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