Life in our universe

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How do we know that every form of life requires water? I always wonder if I'm missing something when I see this argument about no water and no oxygen being used to support the conclusion that there is no life somewhere else.

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Of course one can't be completely certain, but water makes for great chemistry... A look at the alternatives in our solar system doesn't look very promising.

[Borodog]

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Once a species has colonized the galaxy (and mapped its resources), I find little reason to expect that relatively rare planets meeting ideal conditions for life would be abandoned for long

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Well considering that humans will eventually exhaust our planets resources and eventually die off without the universe even blinking, i dont see how you can say that. We already have the capacity to destroy our planet (thermonuclear weapons) and are destroying our ozone layer as well. On a universal scale, we have little impact and our planet will eventually end up as a dead rock, just like Mars etc.., a lot sooner than one thinks.

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lol. Stop believing the envornmentalist doomsayers.

The idea that we will "use up" all of our resources and die out is economically laughable.

[Aytumious]

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Once a species has colonized the galaxy (and mapped its resources), I find little reason to expect that relatively rare planets meeting ideal conditions for life would be abandoned for long

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Well considering that humans will eventually exhaust our planets resources and eventually die off without the universe even blinking, i dont see how you can say that. We already have the capacity to destroy our planet (thermonuclear weapons) and are destroying our ozone layer as well. On a universal scale, we have little impact and our planet will eventually end up as a dead rock, just like Mars etc.., a lot sooner than one thinks.

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lol. Stop believing the envornmentalist doomsayers.

The idea that we will "use up" all of our resources and die out is economically laughable.

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Economically laughable?

[mostsmooth]

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Economically laughable?

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broke as a joke?

[Borodog]

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Economically laughable?

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Perhaps "economically" was too narrow a choice of wording. The idea is laughable for a whole slew of reasons.

What resources are we supposedly running out of that will cause us to die out?

[Aytumious]

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Economically laughable?

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Perhaps "economically" was too narrow a choice of wording. The idea is laughable for a whole slew of reasons.

What resources are we supposedly running out of that will cause us to die out?

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I'm not sure what the other poster was thinking. I'd never heard the phrase "economically laughable" before so I thought I'd ask what you meant by it specifically.

More on topic, I think it is much more likely that humans unwittingly alter our ecosystem in a way that is harmful to continued life than that we run out of a specific necessary resource.

More likely than that is that humans are wiped out by a repeat of one of the many ecological disasters -- at least from our point of view -- that has happened to this planet throughout its existence.

Population growth is exponential as of right now. In 50 years there will be almost twice as many people on the earth than there is presently. That is our biggest problem. More people = more negative human impact = more food needed = we are all dead in less than 1000 years

[Borodog]

Population growth is exponential in some places, but not in others. Human populations stabilize due to economic factors. Large parts of Europe are experiencing zero population growth, and have been for quite some time.

There is plenty of food. We currently have the agricultural capcity to feed the population of the world many times over. Growing food is not the problem. The problem comes when corrupt governments control its distribution.

[Borodog]

But back to the topic at hand, if you look at the history of the earth, life may be very common. It appears that life had already appeared on the Earth within perhaps 100 million years after the crust had cooled to the point where it was possible. That's pretty damn fast, in the scheme of things.

But then it took something like another three billion years for multi-cellular life to evolve, and another billion years for intelligent life.

So even if life is fairly common, multi-cellular life may be very uncommon, and intelligent life could be extremely rare.

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lol. Stop believing the envornmentalist doomsayers.

The idea that we will "use up" all of our resources and die out is economically laughable.

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do you not believe we will use up all our resources or not believe that we will die out?