Seems like a topic that doesn’t come up so much in popular discourse now that we have AI taking up a lot of air time. I personally do, but I wonder if some of you have some thoughts about it
Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#2I think it would be absurd to believe we're the only place life is has happened. But I also think it's absurd to believe that life has come here.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#3I'd be curious to hear a few more details for the question.
Does it matter whether the aliens have visited earth, or only that life exists elsewhere in the universe?
Do they need to be intelligent aliens, by some definition of intelligent?
And do they have to still exist today, or is it enough to think life may gave existed elsewhere at some point?
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#41. Do I believe other life has existed, does exist, and/or will exist elsewhere in the universe? Yes, with pretty close to 100% confidence.
2. Do I believe other intelligent life forms visit earth in their flying saucers, abduct people, anal probe them, abduct and slaughter cows, build pyramids, and - apparently - crash often? No, not really. I mean, I can't rule it out, but my personal subjective Bayesian prior towards this notion would probably be something like 0.001 or so. But that's actually up from years past, as we learn more about more possibly inhabitable planets that are closer to Earth than was previously known, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#5Reading "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry", albeit a bit dry, changed my mind on the topic - I now believe with reasonable confidence alien visitations took place.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#6I'd be curious to hear a few more details for the question. Does it matter whether the aliens have visited earth, or only that life exists elsewhere in the universe? Do they need to be intelligent aliens, by some definition of intelligent? And do they have to still exist today, or is it enough to think life may gave existed elsewhere at some point?
Let’s focus specifically on aliens that exist somewhere in the universe, regardless of intelligence. My one criteria is that if it was seen by an average human that they would think “yep, this is definitely life”
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#7No. I think the appearance of life on Earth was the result of a long series of coincidences. If even a small part of that had been different, life wouldn’t have emerged.
I’ve come to believe in the Great Filter theory more and more in recent years.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#8I assume that the universe is almost infinite, so I belive that almost every creature that I can think of has existed, does exist or will exist somewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#9No. I think the appearance of life on Earth was the result of a long series of coincidences. If even a small part of that had been different, life wouldn’t have emerged. I’ve come to believe in the Great Filter theory more and more in recent years.
Just thinking opposite direction: if you were to spawn a new planet with life somewhere in the universe, how would you do that? Micro manage every detail, or rather prepare proper conditions, and see what happens?
Wouldn't the "proper conditions" eventually look like series of coincidences?
Re: Ask HN: Do You Believe in Aliens?
#10Intuitively it seems likely that alien life would exist elsewhere in the universe, but I tend to favour evidence over intuition, and I haven't read any compelling evidence. The Wow Signal might be the most interesting thing we've observed in that regard, but it's still not enough for me personally.