Unbelievable

[Nietzsche]

I suspect that many view intelligent life as exactly that, inevitable, rather than the unintended consequence of an unimaginably large number of interactions. Here is a bit more useful reading.

Is that how I came off? No, I don't see it as an inevitability, it's just despite my utter **** grasping of numbers even I am aware of the vastness of space & time, and I'd argue again that it would be far more unsettling for us to be the only ones to develop some kind of sentience & sapience.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Is that how I came off?

Absolutely not. I apologize if I gave that impression.

 

[Nietzsche]

Absolutely not. I apologize if I gave that impression.

No problem, I'm terrible with how I word things from time to time.

 

[JayJayDee]

Sure as heck seems that way. If beauty is your explanation for the need for a designer, you are way off.

If I see a beautiful garden, do I assume there is no gardener?

Tell me what things you use each day that exist for no reason and have no purpose. Tell me what things you use for work that were not designed by someone for a specific task. Did the components of these things just come together by accident? Even a simple mousetrap needs someone with a measure of intelligence to put those pieces together to accomplish the task it was meant to perform.

Design needs a designer....even the simple ones need competent assembly or they don't work.

Beauty is useless without the brain capacity to appreciate it. When was the last time you observed a dog or a cat or a cow admiring the sunset or a beautiful vista? They have sight, but beauty means nothing to them.

Food is nothing without taste...taste is nothing without flavor. Taste buds are not a survival mechanism. We could all be eating grass, but we have an amazing variety of foods with as many flavors as you can imagine. All designed for enjoyment, not just our survival.

Music requires ears to hear and a portion of the brain to appreciate and process it. Music exists because humans have the capacity to create instruments to make it. It has a written language all its own so that other musicians can read and duplicate the melody. There is no survival advantage in music or any other creative activity, so where did this amazing capacity come from? Just a mindless series of amazing co-incidences? Really?

All our senses work together in perfect harmony, as do all the various systems that promote life in our bodies.....but they did not require a purposeful intelligence to put them together? Do you believe that the universe was just an accident too? You you purport to understand it?

You can believe in the series of fortunate accidents if you wish.....it is complete nonsense to me.

 

[Shad]

Thanks for the link. I am going to browse some of the other images. Already found this which is amazing with our pattern seeking tendencies

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/screen/heic1107a.jpg

 

[George-ananda]

If life came about here by chance there must be other life in the universe.

I doubt complex DNA and life came about here by chance. and if life came about elsewhere it wasn't by chance either.

(I believe in a kind of intelligent design formed through evolution by nature-spirits.)

 

[ChristineES]

That's plain cool!

 

[leibowde84]

If I see a beautiful garden, do I assume there is no gardener?

Tell me what things you use each day that exist for no reason and have no purpose. Tell me what things you use for work that were not designed by someone for a specific task. Did the components of these things just come together by accident? Even a simple mousetrap needs someone with a measure of intelligence to put those pieces together to accomplish the task it was meant to perform.

Design needs a designer....even the simple ones need competent assembly or they don't work.

Beauty is useless without the brain capacity to appreciate it. When was the last time you observed a dog or a cat or a cow admiring the sunset or a beautiful vista? They have sight, but beauty means nothing to them.

Food is nothing without taste...taste is nothing without flavor. Taste buds are not a survival mechanism. We could all be eating grass, but we have an amazing variety of foods with as many flavors as you can imagine. All designed for enjoyment, not just our survival.

Music requires ears to hear and a portion of the brain to appreciate and process it. Music exists because humans have the capacity to create instruments to make it. It has a written language all its own so that other musicians can read and duplicate the melody. There is no survival advantage in music or any other creative activity, so where did this amazing capacity come from? Just a mindless series of amazing co-incidences? Really?

All our senses work together in perfect harmony, as do all the various systems that promote life in our bodies.....but they did not require a purposeful intelligence to put them together? Do you believe that the universe was just an accident too? You you purport to understand it?

You can believe in the series of fortunate accidents if you wish.....it is complete nonsense to me.

All of your examples are manipulated nature ... manipulated by man. The mere fact that it "seems" like something must have been designed does not in any way prove that it was. You are merely making assumptions based off your own subjective world view. It is merely a showing of our own flawed mentality. We see ourselves as the center of our own universe, and we tend to come to conclusions based off of this, like the universe being created for us eventhough 99.99999999999999999999999% wouldn't suppport anything.

A better example would be the Grand Canyon, one of the most beautiful sites in our country, which has been reliably shown to be caused by natural events. It is a splendid sight, just like the land bridges in Cabo or the underwater worlds we knkow so little about.

Why should we look at our fellow galaxies any differently than the beautiful natural wonders we have natural explanations for? Why would you equate a galaxy with a garden rather than the Great Barrier Reef or Niaagra Falls? This seems silly to me.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

No, I don't see it as an inevitability, it's just despite my utter **** grasping of numbers even I am aware of the vastness of space & time, ...

I think that is true of all of us. But there is another vastness to which we are far less sensitive, in part because it is less visible and in part because we seem to see ourselves as the natural culmination (if not purpose) of creation. This vastness was understood by Mayr in the Seti debate and is hinted at in Gould's comments:

Webs and chains of historical events are so intricate, so imbued with random and chaotic elements, so unrepeatable in encompassing such a multitude of unique (and uniquely interacting) objects, that standard models of simple prediction and replication do not apply.

History can be explained, with satisfying rigor if evidence be adequate, af- ter a sequence of events unfolds, but it cannot be predicted with any precision beforehand. Pierre-Simon Laplace, echoing the growing and confident determinism of the late 18th century, once said that he could specify all future states if he could know the position and motion of all particles in the cosmos at any moment, but the nature of universal complexity shatters this chimerical dream. History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points.

And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable anteced- ent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature.

Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness. To cite just four among a multitude: (1) If our inconspicuous and fragile lineage had not been among the few survivors of the initial radiation of multicellular animal life in the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, then no vertebrates would have inhabited the earth at all. (Only one member of our chordate phylum, the genus Pikaia, has been found among these earliest fossils. This small and simple swimming creature, showing its allegiance to us by possessing a notochord, or dorsal stiffening rod, is among the rarest fossils of the Burgess Shale, our best preserved Cambrian fauna.) (2) If a small and unpromising group of lobe-finned fishes had not evolved fin bones with a strong central axis capable of bearing weight on land, then vertebrates might never have become terrestrial. (3) If a large extraterrestrial body had not struck the earth 65 million years ago, then dinosaurs would still be dominant and mammals insignificant (the situation that had prevailed for 100 million years previously). (4) If a small lineage of primates had not evolved upright posture on the drying African savannas just two to four million years ago, then our ancestry might have ended in a line of apes that, like the chimpanzee and gorilla today, would have become ecologically marginal and probably doomed to extinction despite their remarkable behavioral complexity.

If we are, indeed, a butterfly effect, an unintended consequence of untold interactions, I see no reason to confidently presume that we as intelligent life are not unique.

 

[Nietzsche]

I think that is true of all of us. But there is another vastness to which we are far less sensitive, in part because it is less visible and in part because we seem to see ourselves as the natural culmination (if not purpose) of creation. This vastness was understood by Mayr in the Seti debate and is hinted at in Gould's comments:

​

If we are, indeed, a butterfly effect, an unintended consequence of untold interactions, I see no reason to confidently presume that we as intelligent life are not unique.

But why would this not happen elsewhere? It won't be precisely the same, nothing is, but similar-enough. I am talking about just intelligent, sentient & sapient life, not human-like life. They could look like Illithids or the Vampire-Squid-From-Hell(that's a real thing, people).

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

But why would this not happen elsewhere?

If you've read the Sagan/Mayer and Gould references and still ask such a question, I honestly don't know what to say short of an arduous (and probably unproductive) polemic against teleology.

 

[Nietzsche]

If you've read the Sagan/Mayer and Gould references and still ask such a question, I honestly don't know what to say short of an arduous (and probably unproductive) polemic against teleology.

I don't think I'm getting this across very well.

If we look at the conditions by which life occurred here, and we factor in the size of the universe, isn't there bound to be some other intelligent life? We are not special. We're made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen & iron. There's more but those are the most important bits. Those are also the most common, most abundant (known) elements in the (known) universe.

Factor in our utter cosmic average-ness and you've got a recipe that can repeat. Will the life be the same? No. That life may look like the Blob. It may look like a Xenomorph. It may be so freakish that we wouldn't even recognize it as life. But odds say it's out there, somewhere. We'll never see it, or perhaps even learn about it, but it's there.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

If we look at the conditions by which life occurred here, and we factor in the size of the universe, isn't there bound to be some other intelligent life?

To argue that there is bound to be intelligent life because there is bound to be intelligent life is unconvincing.

Life got interesting roughly half a billion years ago. This means that for over 3 billion years very little was bound to happen. Intelligent life looks very much like an unintended consequence of an unrepeatable complex of events evolving over the subsequent 540 million years.

We are not special.

No, but that does not mean that we are not unique.

 

[Nietzsche]

To argue that there is bound to be intelligent life because there is bound to be intelligent life is unconvincing.

13 or so billion years and we're it? That's all? Nigh-countless other stars, effectively countless planets around them, and the only things that show up...are us? That's all at once underwhelming and horrifying.

Life got interesting roughly half a billion years ago. This means that for over 3 billion years very little was bound to happen. Intelligent life looks very much like an unintended consequence of an unrepeatable complex of events evolving over the subsequent 540 million years.

On earth. We don't know how much longer things have been churning elsewhere.

No, but that does not mean that we are not unique.

We aren't even the only sentient & sapient life to show up on earth. Look at our cousins who we drove to extinction. Neanderthals, ect.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

13 or so billion years and we're it?

Pehaps.

 

[Sees]

It's fun to think we could be extremely far on the outskirts of a universe with real life Star Wars and Star Trek stuff going on....thinking we may be the only intelligent life

Maybe like a small island culture here on earth, tucked away in an exotic location, with never more than 500 people and no advanced technology...thinking they may be the only intelligent life.

 

[Sunstone]

If there is intelligent life out there, then it seems to me there is little reason to believe its intelligence is very similar to ours. That is, why would we expect it to have, basically, a primate's kind of intelligence?

A million ways it could differ from us and still be in some sense intelligent.

 

[gsa]

Just the product of random chance? Psalm 14:1

This fool says it is neither the product of "random chance" nor the product of a personal deity. Galaxies, like life but under very different conditions and constraints, form and evolve over the vast canvass of deep time.

The effects of gravity may not be properly called "random chance," but gravity doesn't really fit the traditional definition of "God" either.

 

[Circle_One]

So, I voted yes, but I feel the need to clarify. The universe (all universes, really) is so incredibly vast, that I think it would be exceptionally egotistical of us (us, being humans of the planet earth), to think that we are the only living organisms in it. I think the possibility of another race of "humans", or "human-like" beings is absolutely plausible. However, I don't necessarily believe in the concept of "aliens" as we know them (a race, or races, of hyper intelligent beings who want nothing more than to come to our planet and abduct people). But, the idea that in one of the many universes out there is another race of "humans", just going about their life, wondering about life on other planets, is totally plausible, in my opinion.

If that makes any sense.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

To argue that there is bound to be intelligent life because there is bound to be intelligent life is unconvincing.

Life got interesting roughly half a billion years ago. This means that for over 3 billion years very little was bound to happen. Intelligent life looks very much like an unintended consequence of an unrepeatable complex of events evolving over the subsequent 540 million years.

No, but that does not mean that we are not unique.

True, nothing happened here for a long time, when it did, only one species in millions developed intelligence, that's on a planet that was already extraordinarily lucky. The size of the universe does not make it inevitable that this happened twice, it seems like it's the uncomfortable implications that are the only thing that demands that it did.