Do you believe in life outside the 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.

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!

It's just silly to claim that there can't be aliens. There is a near-infinite universe out there, to think that we are the only things that can evolve out of the primordial goo is just ridiculous. Unless you don't believe in evolution, in which case, you're the alien.

As for Nessie and Bigfoot. I'm not all that impressed. They're stupid little tourist attractions, nothing more, really.

And as for the Flying Spaghetti Monster... It's a joke. It's a highly amusing joke, but still a joke on religions in general.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where is the proof that aliens do not exist?

I do not believe--although I must admit I did not read every post thoroughly--that anyone in this thread claimed aliens definitely exist. I certainly did not, and for anyone to do so would be without any kind of evidence.

"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."

I am sorry but I really don't think this analogy applies. We aren't talking about a complete fabrication here--we know for a fact that life can and does exist somewhere in the universe. It exists on this planet. We have no evidence, however, of a flying spaghetti monster. It is quite a different thing to randomly imagine a creature and attempt to prove its existence than to infer the possibility that because we know life exists in this spec of the universe it might be possible that exists somewhere in the rest of it.

I do not believe I need to quote myself from earlier to demonstrate the size of the universe--we all know this but it is being overlooked. It is not a leap of faith to believe in a strong possibility of life outside of this earth. Life developed here--what reason do we have to believe that it could not have happened in the sextillion other solar systems in the universe?

"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."

Claims like this are made and we are told that we have no proof? Let me ask you this question--why do you assume that "aliens" must be intelligent life? Ok, evolution takes over a billion years, but the question asked in this thread is not of the existence of intelligence life...just plain life. Bacteria could exist on another planet somewhere and that would qualify. If you wish to believe that because there is no solid proof there is not simple BACTERIA on one of the sextillion (conservative estimate) other planets in the universe, by all means go ahead. I would argue that is a hell of a lot less likely than the alternative, though.