Originally Posted by Flinty_McFlint (Post 478221)

I guess where I disagree with you, and it's not by much -- I fully agree and expect that other life forms may have other ways of being "alive" that we can't contemplate right now -- but the fact that carbon based biochemical organisms exist on this planet seems to be pretty conclusive evidence that it's possible on other planets as well that have roughly the same characteristics as planet earth, i.e. liquid water, nice placement from the sun, an atmosphere, and given the relative ubiquity of stars and planets and water out there, it seems hard to believe we're the only carbon based life out there. I guess what I'm saying is that we aren't particularly special, though it is amazing the number of good breaks we've had, considering. Are we really that special to think it could only happen that way on Earth, that given there being something like 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, the majority of which may have planets according to the current thinking of star formation?

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch (Post 478223)

If I said I don't think there are other carbon-based life forms, I misspoke.

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch (Post 478224)

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 478220)

If they are gold-based beings, how does this fact affect your theory that they use the same coins that we do? Also, do you know the answer to the God heavy rock question?

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch (Post 478223)

If I said I don't think there are other carbon-based life forms, I misspoke. I was trying to illustrate that (a.) there's nothing out there that looks even remotely like earth's organisms above a single-cell level and (b.) what is out there might be so weird it's unrecognizable, even to the point of not being carbon-based (and appearing to us to be inorganic). If a hydrogen atom was self-conscious, how would we know? How do we know it isn't?

Originally Posted by Adder (Post 478226)

Speaking of which, you know you are getting old when you are at a 50th birthday and thinking you'd totally fuck the birthday girl.

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 478225)

You said it was "supremely unlikely." So, changing the subject. Let's suppose you are omnipotent. (I don't know that you are not, any more than I know what that hydrogen atom is thinking about right now. Probably fucking another hydrogen atom, or at least getting some form of hydrogen atom fellatio.) Anyway, so you're omnipotent. Can you create a rock, or an anvil, or some other traditionally heavy thing, like maybe a Radiohead song, that you can't lift? You see the problem here? If you're omnipotent, you can create anything. But if you're omnipotent, you also can lift anything. I know, I know, it's a puzzler. But you know more about religion than anybody I have anonymously communicated with online in the last few minutes, so I think you are probably the best person to solve this riddle.

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall (Post 478205)

How you doin'?

TM

Originally Posted by ltl/fb (Post 478232)

What show is that from? Stupid brain damage.

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch (Post 478230)

I am currently getting a raft of shit from colleagues for saying I'd seen a photo of Mrs. Hughes from "Downton Abbey" in modern day makeup and dress and that she wasn't half bad. So, yeah.

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy (Post 478216)

God fisting shouldn't be an anger thing, you know.

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 478225)

You said it was "supremely unlikely." So, changing the subject. Let's suppose you are omnipotent. (I don't know that you are not, any more than I know what that hydrogen atom is thinking about right now. Probably fucking another hydrogen atom, or at least getting some form of hydrogen atom fellatio.) Anyway, so you're omnipotent. Can you create a rock, or an anvil, or some other traditionally heavy thing, like maybe a Radiohead song, that you can't lift? You see the problem here? If you're omnipotent, you can create anything. But if you're omnipotent, you also can lift anything. I know, I know, it's a puzzler. But you know more about religion than anybody I have anonymously communicated with online in the last few minutes, so I think you are probably the best person to solve this riddle.

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower (Post 478167)

I'm not ruling anything out, but it seems a bit unlikely that there is this omniscient, omnipotent God who is also kind of scatter-brained and does things by accident. But I understand your impulse. We all want to see God in our image, and you see God as a good dude who sometimes takes that extra toke and leaves the frozen pizza in the oven until it catches on fire. And, like, one day, he was fucking around with lightning because he and his other God buddies were totally baked and it was even better than a light show at a Pink Floyd tribute (which they hadn't invented yet), and like, whoa, did I just accidently shoot the lightning into the primordial ooze and create what could possibly be the precursor to sentient life? I should should stop that in its tracks and pronto! But his God buddies were like, "No, dude, just leave it! Let's see what happens. I mean, like, we already know what happens because of the omniscient thing and all, but you know what we mean. Let's go get some nachos." Or whatever the God equivalent of nachos is.

Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch (Post 478200)

You need to define terms. "Life" does not seem terribly unlikely given the math involved. Once you start talking about "organisms" those numbers collapse a bit, because life as we know it, with discrete bodies that compete and cooperate and fuck every now and then, is far from a likely outcome a second time around. The precise order of events in the geological record won't have happened in those exactly the same way anywhere else. Our present condition was an outcome of a billion trillion coin flips, were even a single heads where there should have been tails would change literally everything.

I know what I think, and it's this: there is almost definitely life out there. But the chances it has organisms on a physical scale similar or identical to ours can be ruled out, as can several other quirks of our environment -- bilateral symmetry, communication by patterned disturbance of air -- hell, even being "organic" (deriving energy and accumulating mass through the rearrangement of carbon) is supremely unlikely. Billion times a billion times is a lot, but if there's a form of life capable of traveling to meet us, we will not recognize it as "living" when it gets here. And its intelligence will also be unrecognizable, because it will have evolved to make success more likely in a totally different environment.

tl;dr: Slime molds yes; gaseous energy clouds yes; bipedal carbon-based humanoids ¡absoluamente no!

ETA: And by "supremely unlikely" I'm aware of the scale of the universe, and I'm ruling out that the billion trillion coin flips all came out the same in one or more other places.