Sorry for bringing up such an old thread but I feel there's still room for it to grow providing intelligent people add to it with new ideas. That, and I've been MIA off and on for 2 years so I'd rather not try and jump into the new threads. BRING BACK FLAME FORUM!
Do I believe in some form of life outside our atmosphere? Yes, like many others have stated I believe it would be quite ignorant to assume we're alone. I believe we're just one form of life and there are countless planets which support life at different stages of evolution from single cell to millions of years more advanced than our own.
One of the biggest things we need to think about when talking about life on other planets is point of view. Like carl sagan said, we're stuck on this one little planet so our POV is rather skewed and biased. In order to understand life on other planets we need to forget EVERYTHING we currently know except for the basics such as elements (not how we class them but the actual visible structures), physics and math. Those are the only things that are absolute throughout the universe. To say life rely's on the existence of water is quite ignorant, it's this way on earth but other lifeforms could have evolved on a planet or yes even point in outer space that rely on the existence of other elements as their basis.
Another thing which we're biased on is our perception of life, and what constitutes life. Personally I don't believe life can be defined finitely. I believe it could be thought of as anything which is capable of adapting in order to advance it's evolutionary progress. I honestly believe extremely advanced forms of life have changed from an organic matter into something closer to pure energy. This would be much less dependent and more efficient for traveling throughout the universe because without the existence of wormholes the only chance we have to get between points is going to be traveling close to the speed of light and that is no easy task. Thinking of life in this form may seem foolish but think how far we've evolved technologically in our existence. We evolve at an extremely rapid rate, not much had changed technologically 10,000 years ago up to a few centuries ago, then in a few short hundred years (less than a blink of our universes age) we've conquered spaceflight, computers, and nuclear energy. Imagine whats capable over possibly hundreds of millions of years.
What really interests me though is life which as at a similar pace to our own. There has to be other forms of life out there right now pondering the same questions that we are right now facing the same dilemma's we are. I truly believe the only thing that's going to right our wrongs is having a higher civilization intervene.
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