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Originally Posted by yves
just a silly question....if there is another earth, would it be inhabited by homo sapiens? ed: eek:
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Aboslutley not, unless somehow we have colonized other planets and broken off contact sort of like in Battlestar Galactica.
All an Earth like planet means is it would be a planet made of rock, (not gas like the bigger planets like Jupiter and Saturn because you really aren't going to find life on huge gas giant planets) relativley the same size, orbiting a similar sized star in the habitable zone. The habitable zone is the area in which a planet orbits and water on its surface can stay in a liquid form. Get to close to the star and the water evaporates, get too far away and it freezes. So we're lucky to live where we are. To find another planet with life, it would have to orbit at a safe distance, because without water, not much is going to live. At least, thats what we can assume now. Perhaps other creatures can live in different environments that don't have water. Who knows.
With these characteristsics is it probably very likley that a planet like this would harbour life. This doens't mean they'll have people or apes walking around, it could be simple forms of bacteria or alge or things smaller than that.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that if a species has grown entirley independently from us as inhabitants of planet Earth, they will probably look nothing like anything we've ever seen. Almost every mammal has a face with eyes and a nose a mouth, and hands or fins etc. Don't get to cozy to this idea. Who says other beings have to have faces? Or hands or eyes? There are plenty of other ways to survive and adapt to an environment without these things. We took one course out of an infinite amount of possibilities in evolution. The chance an alien species would look anything like us would be astronomical. And throw all the preconceptions hollywood has goven you out the door. Giant bugs and such won't work. Ask a bioliogist, they'll tell you no way thats going to happen.
Finding intelligent life in the universe in my opinion will be extremly difficult. Intelligence, to many space scientists, is defined as being able to build a radio transmitter. We've only been able to do that for about 100 years, and we're already 99% of the way to destroying ourselves. 100 years isn't a lot of time to find someone out in the cosmos. If we were to come across another intelliegnt race, they would probably be millions of years older than us, and would have probablt stopped killing each other because they realized they wouldn;t last long if they did.
Thats my take on it anyway.