We Might Want to Consider Moving to Alpha Centauri B

Can you imagine what evolutionary pressures the Kryptonians must've faced if invulnerability, super-strength, and the ability to fly were adaptations they needed to be successful organisms?

Oh, wait. Although evolution did give them those abilities...they were only available when they were somewhere else.

Weird. It's almost like someone just made that shit up.

Depends. What kind of civilization could we build? A highly evolved, highly automated society would indeed be better off on a planet that's basically all tropical beaches with no deadly winters and crap. All vacation, all the time! However, if you transplant Neandertals there they'd likely just die unless they learned to hunt the alien laser-sharks quickly.

What if we found a world that was perfect for us, except the indigenous microorganisms were poisonous? Or the plants? Or the sea-life? Would we wipe those out to change the planet to our liking?

That's an ethical question, isn't it. Of course we don't have a problem with indiscriminately murdering the earth's ecosystem, so...

That depends, are we in a giant ship or group of ships that are desperately searching for a new planet to occupy for some reason? Meaning, we left Earth due to some disaster and our survival as a species requires we put down roots on another planet before our ships' resources run out.

In that scenario I think we would choose to wipe the indigenous threats out and set up shop. Otherwise I would hope we would leave them alone and keep looking for a new place.

Take the religious debate out of this thread please. It's distracting, gets in the way and has absolutely zero to do with the topic.

While I doubt we'd ever gain superpowers from being under the light of a different colored sun, it doesn't mean that we wouldn't suddenly discover things about ourselves if we moved to another planet that we didn't know.

For example, we might discover compounds in plants on another world which contain compounds that screw with us in ways we never thought possible. Eat a leaf, and Wham!, you're instantly addicted to the plant (which may or may not have any other noticeable effects), all because a compound, which we never evolved to deal with, whacks the right neurons in just the right manner. Or, conversely, we can taste the plant or animal flesh on that planet just fine, but our bodies can't process it, so it passes right through us undigested, the ultimate diet food. We didn't evolve to be able to take advantage of that, just like we didn't evolve to be able to read, drive a car, or most of the other things that we do.

I agree we'd probably find unexpected ways our bodies would respond to the new environment.

But I find it highly unlikely the results would be beneficial. It seems to be a rule (actually, it's the Second Law of Thermodynamics) that things tend toward disorder. Random chance tends to break things much, much, much more often than improve them...

And one of the definitions for life is that it brings order to disorder. There are only a finite number of ways in which matter can be combined, the amount of ways in which matter can combine to form life is smaller still. Its entirely possible that while life on other worlds takes a vastly different form than it does here on Earth, it shares the same amino acids in its DNA that we do.

Even if all we find are barren worlds which need to be terraformed to be habitable, the organisms which we put on that planet will begin to evolve and adapt to the conditions on that world in ways in which we cannot predict. What happens to salmon on a planet with slightly higher gravity than Earth? On a world with slightly less gravity than the Earth, do giraffes grow taller? No matter how close we're able to get that world to be like the Earth, there still will be differences, and over millennia, organisms will adapt themselves to take greater advantage of those new conditions.

It's also possible that even if they had the same amino acids they would be of the right hand variety, making us entirely biologically incompatible.

Which puts it in the "diet food" category, where you can eat as much as you want, without having to worry about gaining weight (though "anal leakage" could be a problem).

If you can't draw resources from what you're eating the result of your "diet food" would be death.

Assuming you don't have any Earth food with you.....

When I first skimmed that, I thought I read "planet full of tropical bitches" and I was all kinds of excited. But yeah, beaches. Beaches are okay, too.

Well, the bitches need someplace to cavort, don't they?

Am I the only one who has zero interest in living near a large body of water?

i think it does. western religions will be hit extremely hard when we find alien life. there goes all notion of uniqueness and in his image and stuff.

Not really.

Intelligent life is the only one that will make an impact and I'm pretty certain it will be thousands of years and humans will be spread across a good portion of the galaxy before we encounter intelligent alien life (or something we recognize as intelligent).

There are lots of lesser adjustments that western religions will make between now and then.

Unless alien life comes to us, I think religion as we know it will be extinct by the time we encounter it.

No it won't be extinct. It won't be like any religion today however.

More like Church of England.

You There! Cake or DEATH?

It adapted after Galileo was able to prove that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, it may well be able to do so if it bumps up against ET.

Religion on Earth has survived quite well thank you very much for 4,000 years and staggering technological and social changes.

I feel certain it will manage another couple of thousands years and more changes. .

Religion is far older than that. But you didn't read what I actually wrote: religion as we know it.

Maybe. But the religions that are practiced today will decline and fall by the wayside, or evolve into nearly unrecognizable forms. Maybe others will arise and take their places, but if so I imagine these will be more spiritual, less dogmatic, less institutional, and much, much less based on supernatural claims.

Religion has never faced the pressure of modernity before and where modernity waxes, religion wanes. The dynamism in Islam today comes largely from a reaction against modernity. In western society, although there remain a great many people who can still nominally be called "believers," the numbers that are actually engaged in any meaningful way with an organized religion are dwindling. And the same forces of modernity that have and are reshaping western society will eventually reshape all societies.

If you could come back in 1000 years, I imagine you would probably find people who worship some vaguely recognizable Christ or Allah; but I expect that religion would be a far smaller part of cultural life than it is today.

I think that religion/spirituality are also moving where they belong: into the private realm. I had to go to a Catholic Mass lately and even though it was a 'special occasion' (with a double christening and first communion), the place was half empty. It was also so embarassingly backwards I cringed in my seat along with other visitors. While the new pope seems quite capable and willing to shake things up as planned (*) I wonder if he'll be able to keep a paying flock in Europe. On the other hand, home made spiritualism with very esoteric elements is on the rise. Fortunately most keep this crap private lest I'd have to ditch a few friends for sheer stupidity.

Obviously I can only speak for what's going on in Catholic circles because I have a. an interest in the organization and b. even Protestants are scarce here.

(*) Interestingly enough I had a conversation with a Catholic press officer a few years ago who predicted what would happen after the death of JPII almost to the comma. First, they'll vote for another conservative (Ratzinger) to soften the blow of the loss of 'THE' pope. Then they'll vote for a reformer who'll decentralize and give power back to the bishops. It's exactly what is happening.

I doubt it. The question of the origin of the universe is not going to have a universally accepted answer. There will always be people who believe that a God created it. It's as sound a theory as the universe just appearing out of nothingness, at least it is if you remove the "God" and replace it with a life form billions of years more advanced than humans.

Again, didn't say religion would be gone, just that religion as we know it would be gone. Christianity and Islam seem like they're here to stay, but so did Zoroastrianism, the Olympian gods, and the worship of Amon.

People will always look for answers to unanswerable questions or for hope in the face of their own mortality, but I would be surprised to find out there would still be significant numbers of young Earth creationists, Biblical literalists, Islamic jihadists, etc. several centuries down the road. If there are, I'm not sure we'll have to worry about going into space and encountering alien life...

I imagine that a religion of the future will be more/fully compatible with scientific thought, not rely on a priestly caste for direction, not be based on fairy tales, and, if it have any foundational books, that they will be subject to debate and personal interpretation. I'm thinking of a kind of impersonal Deism with an ethical code built around it...

The key difference between Christianity and Islam vs. Zoroastrianism, the Olympian Gods, and the worship of Amon is that we're not in an era where the fall of an empire would wipe them out. They are global, and we're recording history like never before. So without an effort to purge them there is little chance of them fading from dominance. I hope they evolve into something less hateful then their current state (both of them).

This next paragraph is pretty much in line with what I believe you were saying in your last paragraph. As far as religious views go I would expect to see creationism rise, though not the Earth is 5,000 years old kind, but rather just a belief in a "God" type being that kickstarted the universe. Any decline in numbers from Christianity and Islam is likely to coincide with the rise of that Intelligent Design view point.

I see Intelligent Design as a desperate measure to infuse religious belief with scientific credibility in a culture that increasingly values the latter over the former. It's a strategy ultimately doomed to failure, though, because science is going to provide simpler answers that don't require supreme beings. Religion cannot prevail by arguing on science's turf. (And, on the very remote chance it should, its ideas become science and cease being religion.)

Yes, the final question--did some intelligent being create the universe?--is fundamentally unanswerable. But, presuming such a being did, if he does not communicate or interact with us in some way, he's irrelevant. Maybe we are a simulation in someone's computer, but if that someone has no involvement with us, no requirements of us, no plan for us, no goal for us, then that someone may as well not exist.

When religion gets to this point--there's no personal god, no "plan" behind our existence, only some unfalsifiable idea of an impersonal creator of the universe--religion will have surrendered all of reality to science. No person can speak of God's will or His plan for us if they concede he's only some first mover that doesn't interact with us.

Very well put, and QFT.

I agree with you that the question of whether or not we were created by an advanced being or if the universe just kind of came into existence is irrelevant to our lives. That's why I'm not religious. I don't know how things started and it really doesn't matter to me one way or the other. I've settled on the fact that I will never really know.

Maybe I'm interpreting Intelligent Design the wrong way. What I thought it meant was a creator built the universe and then essentially pressed play. That creator is not all knowing but would likely be all powerful at least in respect to dealing with his creation. The creator probably has the power to simply pull the plug in this theory, after all if you can build it you can probably destroy it. But that part is certainly up for debate. Obviously a being capable of building a universe would seem all powerful in comparison to us. They would even seem all knowing, but that doesn't mean they can predict every single thing before it happens. So to me that doesn't seem like a desperate attempt to force religion into science, just an alternative theory to how things began.

I personally believe in the universe just kind of came into existence at some point billions of years ago. I suppose the big bang theory is as good a theory as any other. I do also believe that given the size of the universe there is certainly other life out there, as well as other intelligent life. In our lifetime we will not likely find it though. Without the means to travel at FTL speeds or create wormholes to jump from point to point we can't explore enough to even have a good ballpark idea of how common other intelligent life would be.

Ultimately the real question is when intelligent life forms, will it survive long enough to leave its solar system and expand to other parts of the galaxy/universe. That is probably quite rare, so rare in fact that we may not ever join that group. If we don't wipe ourselves out some other kind of catastrophe could take care of us.

It's an alternative theory, but one that has an agenda: namely, to provide scientific rationale for its proponents already-existing beliefs.

This idea isn't really new. Many people in the 18th Century--including several of our country's founders--were deists, people who believed in an impersonal clockwork God, who created the universe and set it in motion, but who doesn't intervene in its operation.

The problem with this belief is that it assumes an element--namely, God--for which there is no evidence and for which we have no need to explain the phenomena we encounter in reality. Some would say that because we can't explain why there is a reality, that we need God as an explanation. But that's no solution, since the logical mind immediately asks why is there a God? Better that the existence of reality go unexplained than that it be explained by the assumption of a deity whose existence is unexplained.

I think those are all pretty supportable beliefs.

Wormholes, due to the huge energies required to create them, are probably not forthcoming. FTL transportation may--emphasis on may--be possible, but our only plausible means of achieving it still rests on some unproven assumptions and some daunting technological requirements. It's possible that humans will eventually build generation or sleeper ships, so I suspect, some day quite a few centuries from now, humans will become an interstellar species. As you saw below, if we don't wipe ourselves out.

Indeed. There are so many impediments to contact:
1. We can't be certain intelligent life exists at all anywhere but Earth. It's not impossible that we're IT.
2. We may be separated from other intelligences by immense distances. If there's an intelligent race in the Andromeda galaxy, we will never be able to contact it.
3. We may be separated from other intelligences by immense times. It could be intelligent life occurs all over the place, but that it only does so every hundred million years or more and doesn't last long enough to encounter others.
4. We may eventually detect other intelligences but, due to the vast distances between us, contact between us is impossible (e.g., we send a message, they get it 5000 years later).
5. There may be other intelligent species that, for whatever reason, do not want to contact us.