What do you feel after seeing this? (Are we really alone?)

So yea... what do feel when watching this pic?

Do you really understand it?

Reminds me a bit of this pic (one of my favorites):

@British_Azimio: This is an awesome pic... sometimes I just can't help it but feel so unimportant and small.

Our mind can't even comprehend those sizes and distances. Do people still really think we're alone?

An interesting article (opinion) on this...

https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/are-we-alone-universe

It's so huge out there.. it's unlimited.

I hope they find out more interesting stuff regarding space during my lifetime.

Honestly seeing images like those two in the first two post, you would have to be a fool (or religious) to think we are alone.

Yes.

is this topic about Mass Effect 4?

Of course we are not alone.

Last I checked, I was the only conscious being.

I disagree, it is /me/ : )

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"Alone" is a relative term.

I won't argue against other forms of life, yet within our own trials, we are up to ourselves for impact.

The distances are too vast for any real confirmation. I wonder what the equation is: the future vs my-own.

Pictures like this make me strongly doubt that WE - I mean human beings, the earth and the life - are unique.

So if you're asking, "Do you feel unique after seeing this ?" I'd say definitely not.

But if you're asking "Do feel lonely after seeing this? " I'd say a mentally ill, depressed man, always feels alone, regardless of how many billions of entities there are around him.

We're pretty insignificant, that's for sure. But significant in our own little world.

'are we alone'

Probability says no.

I also like this little animation. http://htwins.net/scale2/

It's pretty much a given that there's alien life forms out there in the form of bacteria or other simple organisms, but are there other sentient beings out there? The universe is still relatively young, so it's not impossible that we are the first sentient beings.

Ye this is crazy... an awesome link, thank you for sharing!

PS: kudos for Jeff Loomis signature!

pretty obvious to me we are probably the atoms that make up another universe.

Looks like I've got a lot of traveling to do before I die.

Until they come a-knocking, yes we are.

you guys should check out some videos from the Coast to Coast website, which is actually a radio program nation wide that comes on at 12 AM and they talk about weird and mysterious happenings.

Anyone who believes that Earth is the only place with life is delusional. I mean it's just impossible with the amount of planets and stars out there that we are the only one with life on it, I mean we still don't even know how many different species live here on Earth. No, it's just impossible that there isn't more life out there, however if said life is more or less as advanced as Humanity is obviously impossible to say.

I believe that planets are like eggs. That solar systems are like incubation chambers of life. Some eggs are infertile. Even fertile planets may never come across the right conditions to be 'impregnated.' If you look at Mars, it appears like it could hold or at least could have held life at one point, but never had met the right conditions like Earth has.

i had a crazy thought once that the universe was god's brain.

Yeah...no I don't think so but I hope we are left alone instead. :P

Effectively, yes. There may be more than seven billion people on the planet, but you're effectively alone if you're trapped in a septic tank and there's no one there to pull you out while you spend the rest of the week dying in a pool of filth and shit.

Not being alone sort of implies some sort of contact. Go to the park and there might be a hundred people there. But if no one knows you and they ignore your ass and you fail to make any meaningful contact with any of them, then for all practival purposes you are there alone.

So...that currently seems to be the case with regards to the cosmos. Saying "we're not alone because aliens probably exist" is sort of like someone in Peru in 1500 saying "I'm not alone because there's probably someone in Beijing." Whether they exist or not, it's so freaking unlikely that you're ever going to have contact. So you're still EFFECTIVELY alone.

That's sort of the funny thing about these kinds of posts. People make this big point about how the grand scale of the universe means that there must be someone else out there. Okay, fine. But by invoking such a huge scale, you've just guaranteed that we're almost certainly never gonna have any contact with them. So we're still kind of alone, even if they are out there. And at that point, does it even MATTER if they exist, if the grand scale of the universe ensures that we'll never get to meet them? The logic used to "prove" that they exist also does a very god job of demonstrating that yes, we probably fucking ARE alone.

It makes me feel warm and fuzzy knowing that I was lucky enough to have existed and have the capacity to appreciate the vastness of our universe.

We certainly aren't anything special.

I'm sure very few people(well people who actually think beyond their religion(brain wash)) today actually think we are alone, and are on the only planet with intelligent life, let alone life in general.

I have a problem with this too.

I mean...we've never found definitive proof of ANY extraterrestrial life, yet people find the sheer scale of the universe sufficient to state that there must be other life in the universe.

Okay, fine. I'll go with that.

But if you're willing to go that far, why stop there? The whole argument for "there must be SOME life out there" rests on the notion that the universe is so big that if it happened once then it must have happened multiple times. That's really the whole argument. And people apply that to "life", but then stop short of applyijg it to "sentient life"? Well...WHY? Isn't that kind of weird?

We know that SENTIENT life occured here on Earth. We have PROOF that it happened at least once. So...isn't it just equally absurd to think that Earth is the only planet with SENTIENT life and that all of the other life-bearing planets out there are populated by slime and mold and bacteria? Isn't that still placing us as being SPECIAL when the entire scale of the cosmos says that we probably are not? If sentient life can exist (as seen on Earth), then why the f*** would Earth be the only planet in the entire cosmos that has yet been able to produce sentient life? That's simply a more modern version of saying that humans were created in god's image, or that the universe revolves around Earth. That's still making us out to be fucking special, when the whole argument rests on the idea that the uiniverse is so freaking big that you'd be an asshole to think your situation is unique. If we can use the sale of the universe to invoke the fact thst life must exist elsewhere, then why stop there? Doesn't that same scale sort of mean that SENTIENT life almost certainly occurred elsewhere as well? Hell...there are probably a shitload of alien civilizations that are UNIMAGINABLY more advanced than us. It's jsut that we don't f***ing know it because the universe is too big for us t ever have contact with them.

Breathe

:p

That small speck. Yeah....I fought someone over that once. And won. I know I know I'm a total badass.

There are many hundreds of billions of civilizations in the universe and anyone who says otherwise is clearly an idiot.

Why are you so certain we're not gonna have contact with them? I mean sure it won't happen tomorrow or in 10 years but how can you be sure it won't happen in 100, 500, fucking 1000 years from now?

First of all I think you'll agree with me that we're just at the start of technological 'boom evolution'. In the last 60-70 years we've achieved more than humanity could do for 500-1000 years. That's a huge leap, and we've just started. We just now trying to understand and decode DNA, our Brain... true Artificial Intelligence is still years away but eventually it will happen and the quest for it just begun. Some say that by 2025-2035 we'll have our first colonies on Mars. Internet... that's our global network and we just started experiencing it 20 years ago, today no one can imagine life without internet. Advancements in medicine health care fields like prosthetic limbs or laboratory grown organs. Even Transhumanism... and the list goes on and on... but whole point is that our technological advancement is rapid and it will only continue developing. So why shouldn't I believe that eventually we'll discover SOMETHING, SOMEHOW that can help us making interstellar travels and even colonize other planets, and why not even getting in contact with some of those civilizations? For some of them we might look like gods (them being undeveloped yet), while for some others we might look like parasites.

Watch this guy... Michio Kaku... if you don't know him, he's a futurologist and theoretical physicist. In this video he explains his theory about types of civilization that could possibly occur in the universe.

PS: Sorry if you're struggling to understand my text, I'm not native english speaker.

We all know the potential for the existence of other civilizations are very high. I would like to see some indicators at least. So far I've seen none and I'm saying that as an astronomy nut.

I felt the same way about black holes a long time ago. I knew they may exist theoretically. But, until I saw photos of indicators like Centaurus A, there's always going to be a degree of skepticism from me.

got another one

@4myAmuzumament said:

@Riverwolf007 said:

pretty obvious to me we are probably the atoms that make up another universe.

i had a crazy thought once that the universe was god's brain.

I am quit sure that the universe is a cell in some organism.

amazes me how they can see all this specially different galaxies

There is a high probability that we are not alone.

First of all we can see only a fraction of the universe.
We have better equipments now... but still most of those galaxies that we can see is simply radiation. For example all those beautiful colorful nebulae that you might have seen on pictures are simply radiation and the different colors they have is because of different radiation types.

Dude universe is huge, and now they're talking about multiverse and the string theory. It makes me mad when I realize how little we know... we are totally and literally ignorant about most of it.

welll thank you for explaining that.

I agree that we hardly know anything. Hopefully not too much longer we be able to build some hyper drives or something

It makes you mad, but the fact that we know so little actually pushes me to want to try my best to find out more, and I am so glad we know so little(well I wish we knew a little more to help people that can't be helped currently) because the means there is so much to discover. To tell you the truth if we knew everything, or almost everything I'm not sure I would even want to live in that world(universe whatever). I'm not sure I could find much meaning to live on.

Light speed barrier, dude. As far as we know, NOTHING can travel faster than light, and light only travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When you consider how absolutely freaking HUGE the universe is, this means that it takes the fastest thing in the universe a LONG ass time to get to even relatively close locations.

So...unless there are civilizations out there which have found a way to travel faster than light, we're PROBABLY effectively freaking alone in the universe.

And sure...I'm not CERTAIN of this. MAYBE it's possible to travel faster than light. There have been hypothetical proposals which MIGHT allow for bypassing the light speed barrier, such as wormholes. But I'd like to point out that none of this stuff has even been established to be physically POSSIBLE. Establish that it is possible within the realm of physics to travels faster than light (either through space or by bypassing space), and then I'll entertain the idea. Until then, I'm confident (although not CERTAIN) that we are effectively alone. I feel it's a pretty safe assumption that any civilization, no matter how advanced, must obey the laws of physics. And until physics have established that it's possible to travel faster than light, then that places a BIG limit on how far away any civilizations can be while still having an effect on us. They'd have to already live EXTREMELY close to us (in cosmic terms), and once we come to that conclusion it is very plausible that they aren't in existence at all. Because even if there are billions of intelligent civilizations in the universe, we're talking about THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That doesn't invalidate the very real possibility that the LOCAL area is entirely dead except for us.

This is one of my favourite animations; always makes me feel really small, but not insignificant =) Kind of mind blowing =D

We can't find life on Mars because the people there are tiny