Do you believe in life outside the earth?

My bio prof tried to convince my class through all this population biology calculations that the lochness monster cannot exist. i believe him!

however, i really believe that other forms of life exist outside of earth. It's such a huge universe--it's kind of ignorant not to believe that life other than humans are nonexistent.

What about dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals?! Are they all truly extinct or are there some left on earth and in hiding? I mean, the coelocanth was discovered a quite a decade ago, and most scientists believed that it was long ago extinct!

I believe it is nearly impossible that we are the only species capable of intelligent thought (talking, writing, etc.) in the entire universe. Space is vast beyond our imagination. Conservative estimates place the number of galaxies in the universe at around 120 billion (although there likely are 3 or 4 times as many). Our Milky Way Galaxy has 193 billion stars alone. If you do the math, there is an amount of stars in the universe that probably exceeds the sextillions. That is, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This isn't how many planets, this is how many STARS, like our sun. One would have to guess that the number of planets is much higher.

What is the likelihood that none of these planets formed intelligent life of any kind? Not very high in my opinion.

http://www.spacespot.com/module-Reviews-viewarticle-24.html

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Basically it is saying that the possibility of a planet able to sustain life is rare enough, let alone one that can support sentient life.

How do we know that the conditions able to support human and animal life are the same that would be able to support life of some other lifeform in which we have ZERO knowledge of? The Drake equation is worthless...it relies on far too many assumptions on which humans know absolutely nothing about. If you read that wikipedia entry you'll see that everything is estimated. We have NO idea how many planets there are that could support life.

The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to calculate whether or not there is other life in the universe. Only time will tell.

i believe in psychic phenomena in general so im very much inclined to believe in life outside earth... it may not be physical though. just because the only things we can verify exist live on our plane doesnt mean they dont exist on others. if there were advanced forms of life outside earth im betting it would be transdimentional.

NO, that's not what the drake equation says. besides, it's pretty outdated anyway... but it does not predict the possibility of life of earth to be slim to none.
regardless, frank drake is actually a proponent of the existence of life outside of earth.

LIfe outside the earth is highly likely given the size of the universe. But for the same reason we are not likely to get in contact with alien life except maybe in the form of very simple organisms within our solar system.
Nessie is extremely unlikely, because no lake has been seached as much as Loch Ness and nothing has been found. Bigfoot could be real but I strongly doubt it. If you look for undiscovered big animals, the tropicla rain forests or what is left of them are the most likely place.

I think it'd be pretty naive of us to consider earth born organisms to be the only ones in existence, or to even consider our definition of life to be the only one.

We need to search for life with an open mind, not just limiting the criteria for life to what makes "life as we know it" possible.

So yea, I think there's definitely life outside of the earth, but given the vastness of our universe it's highly unlikely we'll ever come into contact with any extraterrestrial beings.

I've always considered the likelihood that other forms of life would exist on a vastly different time or size scale than our own. For instance, look at a rock. Perhaps the lifespan of a human is one rock's microsecond. Even if they were alive we would never know it because the beat of a slow-moving object's heart would take centuries of human time to be accomplished.

Taking the converse of this, I suspect that on an atomic level intelligent life exists that we will never perceive because a microsecond of earth time is a lifetime to them.

I've been looking at all the posts and people are very hopeful and I suppose the title of this debate could inspire hope the with words in the context of "believe", however for debating purposes I'll ask the obvious question: Where's the proof?

Many of you think that aliens exist without any creditable evidence at all, that's is really quite amazing! Well if we can all make bullshit claims like that then, shit, the flying spaghetti monster must be real. Yes I get it, space is big perhaps infinitely big so our logic tends to shift to...other organisms existing?

Here's my take: Evolution takes billions of years, and I am sure "aliens" will sprout one day but they will not come to fruition in our life time, our era of existence. The other thing is, I am sure organisms lived before us as well but because space is so vast, we will never come to learn about their existence. Could I be wrong about that statement...sure, but it's what I believe.

Do aliens exist outside the earth? Not in our lifetime, I am sure mathematical probabilities will back me up. Prove me wrong, I dare you, show me the evidence.