While life could form in other places in the universe, the chances of there being civilisations that have reached our standard of knowledge and engineering experitise will be very limited. Almost zero.
We should now act as if we are alone (I guess we do) and plan to expand into the Galaxy and beyond.
We should go and populate the universe with life from this planet. We should send seed ships to planets that are Earthlike and plant our bacteria and other life to enable them to develop like our own.
See interesting article below and link.
Why life begins and ends on Earth
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/stev ... Earth.html
Then again, why bother when we are all doomed...............Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday reminds us of his celebrated claim that, given the thousands of Earth-like planets outside the solar system, on purely statistical grounds life almost certainly exists somewhere else. The celebrated SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) programme assumes that living things will inevitably evolve to get smarter and smarter and may be sending out signals to be picked up by their distant fellows. So far, alas, it has heard nothing but noise.
At 1.15 today in a public lecture at University College London, the biochemist Nick Lane will pour a dash of metaphorical cold water on that notion. He argues that advanced life (and that stretches from amoeba to us) is unique: that the chance of its origin is so remote that it happened only once, and almost certainly has no equivalent anywhere else.
Stephen Hawking once said: “When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.” Whatever the reality of that simultaneously dead and alive feline, in 1943 the German scientist gave a series of talks in Dublin entitled What is Life?, which set out to define just what that state means to a physicist. He saw that what unites all living things is that they have an inside and an outside. They need energy to keep the two apart; without it, they die. Within their walls they make their own environment, safe from the random chemical noise all around. Life is no more than a local patch of order.
To keep the cruel and chaotic world at bay needs a rampart. Simple membranes can be made in the laboratory in conditions like those of four billion years ago, and will form globules that can trap other chemicals within. Other experiments hint that small molecules able to copy themselves, albeit inefficiently, can also be made – and many of their raw materials are floating around in the universe, occasionally falling to Earth in objects like the Murchison Meteorite. Such steps to the earliest life must have been slow indeed as natural selection, that series of successful mistakes, fashioned the first simple cells.
However, that earliest existence stagnated for a billion years – and their descendants, today’s bacteria, are still pretty torpid. They went nowhere because they could not generate enough energy to impose a decent dose of order on their internal being. Evolution proper did not really get going until the appearance of proper cells, with nuclei. These “eukaryotes” at once set off down a variety of paths, culminating in ourselves. Even the least elaborate versions are far more sophisticated than what had gone before.
I raised this idea about 8 years ago on SSSF and was poo pooed. I had an original thought.... now I know you don't believe it but.....
Not enough hours in the day? Scientists predict time will stop completely
Time might feel like it is running away from us as the pace of life increases but according to scientists, the future will stop completely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... etely.html
The theory of time running out was devised by researchers from two Spanish universities trying to explain why the universe appeared to be spreading continuously and accelerating.
Observations of supernovae, or exploding stars, found the movement of light indicated they were moving faster than those nearer to the centre of the universe.
But the scientists claimed the accepted theory of an opposite force to gravity, known as dark energy, was wrong, and said the reality was that the growth of the universe was slowing.
Professor Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raul Vera from the University of the Basque Country and the University of Salamanca said the deceleration of time was so gradual, it was imperceptible to humans.
Their proposal, published in the journal Physical Review D, claimed dark energy does not exist and that time was winding down to the point when it would finally grind to a halt long after the planet ceased to exist.
The slowing down of time will eventually mean everything will appear to take place faster and faster until it eventually disappears.
Professor Senovilla told the New Scientist: "Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, for ever."
Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist the University of Cambridge, told the news website RT that the idea was not as absurd as it sounded.
"We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang and if time can emerge, may disappear as well as the opposite effect," he said.
