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Alone?
Does Ming the Merciless really live on the planet Mongo, or do you think we all alone in the universe?
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Anything is possible, but I suspect that millimetre would probably be an impossible boundary to cross. However, I don’t think that interstellar travel is as impossible as we might currently imagine – in fact I think Ming the Merciless visited earth thousands of years ago travelling under the alias Jehovah.
Khandro, Your question lacks clarity. If Ming doesn't live on planet Mongo he could still live somewhere else so we (planet earth, humanity?) wouldn't be alone. Someone else might live on planet Mongo or someone else might exist elswhere. Someone else might be a highly evolved super-intelligent being or an amoeba, you might say that an amoeba doesn't qualify as sufficiently intelligent to qualify as 'company' so by the same logic neither does a super-intelligent being as we would be as an amoeba to it and 'companionship has to be reciprocal. We need definitions or a re-phrased question :-)
I would guess that the chances of the cartoon character as he appears in the cartoons actually existing on a planet called mongo are vanishingly small. The chances of some other life form of any descripton existing somewhere other than on Earth border on certainty. There is of course everything between these extremities So my answer is no and no.
I suspect that just considering our own galaxy, we are not alone. I only have a vague grasp of the numbers concerned but considering how many planets have been discovered outside our solar system and then only the larger ones I can't see how there cannot be planets capable of supporting life. It seems that life will develop if conditions are right. There may even be life on some of Jupiter's moons.
The science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was quite certain that the galaxy was teeming with life of a great variety of forms, and that our race would eventually meet up with some of them. Being pretty close to atheistic, he enjoyed penning the memorable remark "The assertion that God made man in His own image is ticking like a time bomb in the foundations of Christianity".
It's difficult to know because we only have one example to draw from.
However life started very very quickly on Earth which tends to imply that life would be very common, although there are a few odd things about the Earth like our large moon, which if implicated might make life much rarer.
Be that as it may, the numbers are still heavilly against us being the only life forms.
The question gets more interesting when you ask about the probability of complex life.
That involved one form of life invading the other form to form mitochondrial cells and that was 3 billion years in the making.
For 3/4 of the Earths history the only life was essentially little more than slime - what is the probability that life eventually becomes complex - it's often assumed in the Drake equation that it's inevitable - I think there's very little reason to think that.
Complex life could be inevitable or it could be very very rare indeed
However life started very very quickly on Earth which tends to imply that life would be very common, although there are a few odd things about the Earth like our large moon, which if implicated might make life much rarer.
Be that as it may, the numbers are still heavilly against us being the only life forms.
The question gets more interesting when you ask about the probability of complex life.
That involved one form of life invading the other form to form mitochondrial cells and that was 3 billion years in the making.
For 3/4 of the Earths history the only life was essentially little more than slime - what is the probability that life eventually becomes complex - it's often assumed in the Drake equation that it's inevitable - I think there's very little reason to think that.
Complex life could be inevitable or it could be very very rare indeed
I think it's extremely possible that there is life elsewhere, but it might not be life as we recognise it. Mankind seems always to make the arrogant assumption that "intelligent" life must mirror our own species, ie oxygen breathing bipeds that communicate just as we do. Why? Just as fish can breathe in water, there must be other methods of sustaining life that the way we know. And it is highly likely that other intelligent species wouldn't be able to speak as we do. Ming the Merciless may not want to talk to us, anyway.
Jake says; 'It's difficult to know because we only have one example to draw from.' Might it not also be true that it is 'difficult to know' because we are necessarily limited by how much the the three pounds of matter behind our eyeballs is capable of understanding? Just as an orangutan is unaware of the problems of quantum theory, is it not conceivable that there are aspects of reality of which we are unaware?
Absolutely Khandro, mankind has mostly in the past just taken for granted things that it didn't understand and religion didn't help by assigning the non-understood to the responsibility of a deity. We take lots of things for granted because we just have to put up with them as they are. Gravity seems to have been one of those 'taken for granted' things. Objects just fell when they were dropped, what more could be said? There may well be life forms that are so different from us that we wouldn't recognise them as such. It is possible perhaps that the sun is a life form, it seems to have very complex magnetic fields which are perhaps the only kind of organisation that could exist at such high temperatures and there is plenty of energy available to sustain it. Also we only see processes that exist on a similar time scale to our own, there may be life forms that have much different time scales to us or are so diffuse or compact that we are not aware of them. One of them may be called Ming.
