Too many people with too much time on their hands and income and or wealth and or taxpayer funding to spend that idle time on useless endeavors.
The chances are 50/50 that “alien” life will “find us” before we find them, so spend our “space” time on matters of empirical science that will be productive and useful to physically exploring space, and leave the “life on other planets” question open to being addressed BY SPACE EXPLORATION, period.
What the?????
NASA took a shot at trying to start life on Mars?
Now there’s a good idea.
If this world comes to an end, it won’t be because of someone wearing a three piece suit or a uniform.
It will be because of some knot head in a lab coat going,
“I wonder what will happen if we try this?”
It gets tricky. I was told, on this forum and by a Freeper, that trees are conscious life.
We are them, they are us.
They walk amoung us yet you don’t see them.
Or as a famous man once said, “in my Fathers house are many mansions”
Then their brains could be run like quantum computers.
Or what about intelligent beings with molten metal running through their veins. That would be gee whiz bang cool.
Once we develop superluminal flight, which I'm sure we'll have in a few decades, then we can explore all of these fantastical possibilities.
Or maybe we could spend the money here on Earth trying to figure out why what little intelligent life there is seems to be going extinct.
“Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere,’ said Morgan Cable, an astrochemist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “
If you want information about biology its always best to ask a chemist.
Here we go again... Do the math:
The universe is billions of years old. There are billions of “Goldilocks” planets. If, IF, life evolved on some of these, say 2%, then that would mean that there are millions of planets with life, certainly hundreds if not thousands IN OUR GALAXY. Some, SOME of these must certainly have begun the evolutionary process MILLIONS of years before our EARTH.
This means that there should be hundreds if not THOUSANDS of life forms in our galaxy that are MILLIONS of years more advanced than US....
WHERE ARE THEY?
Casting a wide search for ET won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap,
...
Somebody wants my money.
If life does exist elsewhere, it’s probably carbon based like our own. I don’t think it does, though.
Argue the issues with Isaac Arthur.
I remember (decades ago) a Disney piece on TV that theorized life on other planets might be based on some other element, eg, silicon, vice carbon. I’ve always wondered why we humans imagine alien life to be analogous to ours, only different: green skin, big eyes. etc.
Want aliens? Just visit Burning Man.
"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold, 'Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence' (Sagan, ed)Thanks LibWhacker.
"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher
"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher