Mark, considering that we are the only life in the universe is not by any means being close minded, rather, it is based on all the statistics related with life, its complexity, it's fragility, and the fact that just as no two things in the universe are repeated twice, it is possible that the first cell which all things came from 3.7 billion years ago was perhaps the first, and even only occurrence of life. Life isn't like an element, it isn't spit out of the stars, it requires complex structure, energy, and basic elements. Because of this, it first sprouted somewhere in the universe, and it isn't like DNA with organelles and cell walls, membranes, and cytoplasm just float around ready to be given life. I'm not close minded, I use logic that I have carefully thought about. Searching for e.t life in our universe is the only 'scientific' thing we do in which we have no evidence of it's existence. Just look at it, our earth is within the magical spot for life, and in our whole solace system, we are the only ones with more water than a swimming pool. If life exists 5 billion light years away, that means that would should have signs of life everywhere in mars, and on the moon, but we don't. How could the closest life be say 10 million light years away, with distances this great, it would have to be abundant. Our star is so far away from the nearest promising earth-like planet, Kepler-22b, which is 600 light years away. That is 2,421,964,800,000 miles away, and it is incredibly hard to believe that if life exists there (Kepler-22b is in the habitable zone, but we have no idea what it's like) that somehow it made a trek that long and far from out earth, or from ours to theirs, or from in between without perishing. Life, on an asteroid or comet going only between 40-100,000 miles per hour, it would take over 1 million years for that to get from earth to Kepler-22b traveling at 100,000 miles per second (twice as fast as an average asteroid). Plus distances could be greater, but even if they were one-eight the distance, that would be 127,000 years, too long for those cells or basic organisms to survive the almost absolute-zero temperature of deep space, and then somehow arriving on that planet alive.



CoolP wrote on Aug 5^th, 2012 at 9:55am:

Mark, you shouldn't allow the misinterpretation of the folks to distract you. In science, you will hardly find two opinions being the same. Often enough, and especially on the topics with a lot of assumptions included, they will even contradict each other. That's the very nature of science.

This is not why I think, but why I know that this global warming hysteria is a load of B.S. if you have all these scientists in agreement about something, it isn't natural, it means there's only greed for funding behind it.

“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.”

- Michael Crichton