Alien life

It's impossible for us to visualise.

Imagine the universe was 2-dimensional, represented by a piece of paper. That piece of paper can be curved round and short-cuts thereby created. Just need a way of hopping across! The beings living in the 2D universe would be unaware of the curve.

Make any sense?

My imaginary friend Mr Hawking says that to travel forward in time is theoretically possible, but travelling backwards is not.
He goes on to say that the best way of achieving time travel would be to utilise a a Quorn powered, glucose filled gay sex van and to make it travel at the speed of light, constantly around the planet in an unbroken path.
I asked him about Ancient Astronaut Theory and he laughed a strange, robotic laugh that I'd never heard before. He then reminded me that I'd spent enough time with von Däniken's to realise that they were all a little mad to say the least.

Beat me to it...I remember watching TVAM that fateful day, I was getting ready for school and the weatherman decided to go out on a limb and state stuff about shapeshifting lizards and all that stuff...

The trouble is you're focusing on speed instead of manipulating space itself. Wormholes and warp drives negate the issue of travelling at high speed. Don't you see?

Exactly!

Wasn't Icke a failed goalie turned crap sports reporter?

YES to all

Aye i think so

The problem with this argument is that we're extrapolating from a single case. If someone bought a lottery ticket and won on the same evening, he could conclude that winning the lottery wasn't a rare event at all(assuming he hadn't any contact with other lottery players).

I don't disagree with any of your conclusions, though. I think in particular the evolution of intelligence and self-awareness is probably rare - there are thousands of other evolutionary strategies for self-replicating that seem to have worked or much longer.

I think that's being kind to von Daniken and co. Mad - no. Exploitative hacks, disingenuously trampling over serious archaeology - yes.

Not Icke, though. He's cut from a different cloth. Born without a bulls**t filter, he's doomed to osmotically absorb every crackpot theory ever conceived.

It's not even rare on this planet.

For life to exist all that is needed is for a planet to be in relatively the same position from it's sun as we are from ours for there to be a high likeyhood of liquid water. Where there is liquid water there is a good chance of life.

Considering there is about 400 billions suns in our galaxy, and 500 billion galaxies (estimated, and assuming the universe is not infinite), you would arrive at a number of stars greater than 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (150 sextillion).

This would mean that the odds of there not being life out there would be extremely slim.

But then again there is always God to consider in all this.

This is, of course, true, and I do understand the anthropic principle. However, it seems to me that the fact of life having arisen on Earth (and so led to observers) doesn't force it to have done so early, and that the fact it did so so very early is evidential, albeit somewhat weakly.

That said you could argue - quite convincingly - that the fact that all life on Earth seems to have a common heritage (e.g. DNA/RNA) suggests that actually it only arose once and therefore must be rare.

In summary: f**k knows.

I can only think of one species which is clearly and unambiguously conscious and self-aware (and certainly only one which is technological), and reading youtube comments etc leads me to have doubts about even that one. "One" is "rare" in my book.

Let's leave g_d out of it, shall we?

Again, I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I've quoted what I think is a major assumption on your part.

What evidence is there that the presence of liquid water means there is a 'good chance of life'? No. of planets known to have liquid water = 1. No. of planets known to have life = 1. So we don't know if the chances of life developing in the presence of liquid water are 100%, 50%, 1% or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001%. I'm not convinced that 'scientific' attempts to estimate this percentage are anything more than guessing. As Rick put it, in summary, f**k knows.

Evidence suggests bottlenose dolphins, some apes, possibly elephants and maybe even magpies (ripped straight from wikipedia so it must be true).

Of course this cn never be 'aunambiguous' because they can't tell us what they think!