Aliens and common sense

[Martinaturnman]

This is a request for explanation on why some people truly believe aliens do not exist. Now, before you label me as a conspiracy theorist, I'm not talking about the aliens which are supposed to wander among us in disguise or are supposedly hidden away at Area 51. I'm talking about the Idea of alien life.
To me, it seems rather arrogant of us to believe we are the only forms of life in this vast, immeasurable universe we have only just begun to understand. We have fancy telescopes that can tell us the makeup of a planter, but we will never know if life exists elsewhere until we've actually visited these planets. I think it's fair to say that we will never visit EVERY planet in existence. So don't we have to assume that out of the uncountable planets we've already been able to identify as real, at least one or two must be able to support life. No conditions will be identical to ours here on earth, but no one said every form of life requires water and other things that hold true to life on earth.
The truth is we just do not know.
So this is me asking genuinely for someone to explain the logic behind denying all alien existence. Please, I'm truly very curious. And please, leave religion out of the discussion (positively and negatively)

 

[Hadoblado]

It seems to me that common sense is misunderstood. From what I understand, it's not that common sense is a sense of what is that is common, but the sense of what is common. Aka experiential predictions, or inductive logic.

If people use common sense as defined above, they are essentially saying that they've never seen an alien, and therefore there are no aliens. This sort of reasoning works for a lot of things, I see no reason to blame people for its misapplication to ET's.

 

[Martinaturnman]

I do believe you're right. I titled the post before I wrote it and hoped no one would notice that I strayed from the 'common sense' aspect. I guess I forgot what site I'm on.

While I got away from common sense in my post, your explanation of it does still answer my question. Personally I find the 'believing is seeing' concept to be flawed, since we know that many things exist that we have not personally seen. For example, I live in California and have never seen Africa with my own eyes, but I know it is real. Given, knowing a continent exists is much simpler than believing there must be life in the universe.

 

[Absurdity]

Just read an article today about why some biologists think there aren't any ETs in our galaxy.

 

[Wolf18]

I do believe you're right. I titled the post before I wrote it and hoped no one would notice that I strayed from the 'common sense' aspect. I guess I forgot what site I'm on.

While I got away from common sense in my post, your explanation of it does still answer my question. Personally I find the 'believing is seeing' concept to be flawed, since we know that many things exist that we have not personally seen. For example, I live in California and have never seen Africa with my own eyes, but I know it is real. Given, knowing a continent exists is much simpler than believing there must be life in the universe.

I'd say it goes the other way, too. We haven't discovered most of the universe. Therefore it is illogical to assume that there is no ET life in the universe. It was be an extrapolation.

SW

 

[Black Rose]

This video is crazy but interesting. I do believe in extraterrestrials

http://youtu.be/bkK2JJr1ia4

 

[QuickTwist]

Wikipedia has some info on Exoplanets that helps determine whether or not a planet has a chance to have life on it. I remember from some nature show or something that talked about this. From what I remember they gauge whether a planet could have life based on the star it orbits. One thing I remember is that they look for movement from the star going to and fro from the gravitational pull of the planets. This indicates that there is probably a gas giant that can somewhat protect a smaller planet like ours from asteroids and the like through its gravitational pull. I don't remember much more than that sorry.

 

[Anktark]

One of the few rational ideas behind us being alone is that our universe might be young and we are (among) the first ones to emerge. Other than that, lots of people claim there can be no aliens because the idea is ridiculous (and then they don't bother to explain why).


Now barely on topic:

1. Life may not require a planet. We might be looking at whole species in fotos of space and not realize it. Or is it just me thinking we are bent on discovering other carbon based humanoids?
2. We don't know what we are looking for- what exactly is life? Depending on description, computer programs might be considered alive. To quote Dr. Manhattan "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts."
3. Does evolution always produce sentient life forms? There could exist worlds of self replicating/energy to matter converting and information processing crystal-like things that are literally unable to give a damn, because they are not sentient. Our expeditions could be wiped out by things who wouldn't understand how beautiful, shiny and scary they are.

 

[Cognisant]

When it comes to the Fermi Paradox it's worth considering the relative cost of colonizing space, I mean right now we have the means to create a colony on the moon or Mars, but we don't and the reason we don't is that it's incredibly expensive and we're not really going to gain anything from it. Sure the colony could be a huge success and perhaps Mars becomes as densely populated as Earth some day which is a large step in securing the future of the human race, but when do the people on Earth gain anything for this massive expenditure?

The problem is we may never colonize Mars or industrialize space because most everything we need and want is already here, we may never leave Earth again unless some technology comes along that makes it easy and perhaps no such technology is possible. We're already beginning to construct things on a molecular/atomic level to exploit quantum phenomena and sure our technology could become much more sophisticated, but the underlying principles, the atoms and molecules we work with, they're not going to change.

Maybe it never becomes easy, maybe we never leave Earth.
Maybe nobody ever leaves their home planet.

 

[Perfectly Normal Beast]

maybe this:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

 

[Pyropyro]

Wikipedia has some info on Exoplanets that helps determine whether or not a planet has a chance to have life on it. I remember from some nature show or something that talked about this. From what I remember they gauge whether a planet could have life based on the star it orbits. One thing I remember is that they look for movement from the star going to and fro from the gravitational pull of the planets. This indicates that there is probably a gas giant that can somewhat protect a smaller planet like ours from asteroids and the like through its gravitational pull. I don't remember much more than that sorry.

There are Goldilocks planets (not too warm and not too cold) which carbon based life may exist.

 

[NiceRuby]

In our galaxy are billions of stars. Hence also the billions of planets. So life on other planets is.http://intpforum.com/images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif

 

[Valentas]

If you're interested in this, then you shall read Joseph P Farrell books and purchase a ticket to secret space program conference. I watched livestream it was AMAZING! Farrell, however, does not attribute UFOs as ETs tech. He attributes it to human technology developed in black projects. There has been trillions sucked out of global economy over the decades, estimation by Catherine Austin Fitts is at least 40 trillion. Money is like current - if you divert the flow, it ends up somewhere. Speculation is rampant, some say that elites stole the cash to live big when in reality it is research projects that got trillions of funding. You cannot explain all this hardware flying around the world just by ETs theory. Too many of them are seen around the world. Anyways, the conference that ended yesterday was truly fantastic and some of the hosts said 'Mr Farrell, I am definitely jumping on your bandwagon as I heard your research'.

There is something going on in the world in technological arena, the UFOs activity spiked after we detonated first nuclear bombs. I believe that those UFOs were actually off planet. National Security Act was brought into law in 1947, the year that is full of UFOs activity. However, Rosewell was most likely not a UFO crash but human tech. Who were the humans? Check out Farrells books titles to say 'wtf?'. ETs exist, universe is too large, the question is what WE developed over the years. That is frightening. Not ETs.