I hope the Phoenix lander finds absolutely no life on the Red Planet or any signs that life had once ever been there. If it did find life it would state the obvious that there must be life through out the galaxy and thus through out the universe in various forms of advancement such as tiny organisms only visible through a microscope too creatures similar in intelligence to humans and also those far beyond our intellect. With that said people would have to ask that question which was first asked in the 1950’s “Where is everybody?”

In our galaxy alone there are millions of stars which are hundreds of millions of years older then our own sun which would mean that in all likely hood a large number of them would also have had the building blocks to start life and thus have hundreds of millions of years head start on earth and our sun sol. At least a few of these maybe 10 000 would have developed intelligent life equivalent to humans and thus be millions of years more technologically advanced then us….. So I will ask that question again “where are they?”

I had never looked at finding life on other planets at this angle before until I read Nick Bostroms (my favorite philosopher/futurist) article he wrote on finding life on Mars and the “great filter”

https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20569/
http://www.reason.com/blog/printer/126239.html

The great filter

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

To summaries the great filter is an observation which tries to explain why we have not met any intelligent life forms who live else where in the galaxy. This filter halts the advancement of life at a particular stage of advancement, whether or not that stage is ahead of us or behind us is the question

“There are probably planets that are billions of years older than Earth. Any intelligent species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a thousand times before they succeeded, they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.”

From the christian perspective there wont be any life from other worlds coming here in the near future...not within the time frame of "Adam and Eve til the Second Coming of Jesus Christ".
The action is already here (mostly unseen) with the huge spirit war spoken about in Ephesians chapter 6...i.e. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm".
Earth (the battleground between God and satan) is situated far from other worlds for a reason...i.e. so there can be no distractions from the spirit war thats going on, on it.
Carnal, fallen man generally doesnt accept this great spirit war because he cant see it, therefore it doesnt exist to him, unless he comes under direct demon attack.
Then he believes:)
Same with the man or woman who sincerely! approaches God is prayer; and invites the Saviour Jesus Christ into their lives.
Instantly they become saved and born-again and they receive The Holy Spirit... and He confirms the great wars' existance.
Thats it.
No big deal wondering about green men from other worlds.
Its all happening here.
Holy Angels helping men and women...coming and going all of the time...all of the time Holy Angels doing warfare with fallen angels over the souls of men.
Its all happening...all day, every day.
If UFO's one day did appear...you can bet they will be manned by men (see "The Cosmic Conspiracy" by Stan Deyo) as part of a deception.
Nothing is going to interfere with the great spirit war until Jesus returns and satan is locked up.
Poor NASA...what a waste of time and money and mens lives.
It was always... all happening here.

Some quotes from the article which caught my eyes -

"if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form--some bacteria, some algae--it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, certainly--but a bad omen for the future of the human race."

"If a probe were capable of traveling at one-tenth the speed of light, every planet in the galaxy could thus be colonized within a couple of million years (allowing some time for each probe that lands on a resource site to set up the necessary infrastructure and produce daughter probes). If travel speed were limited to 1 percent of light speed, colonization might take 20 million years instead. The exact numbers do not matter much, because the timescales are at any rate very short compared with the astronomical ones on which the evolution of intelligent life occurs."

And if Mars was found to be barren -

"In this scenario, the entire history of humankind to date is a mere instant compared with the eons that still lie before us. All the triumphs and tribulations of the millions of people who have walked the Earth since the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia would be like mere birth pangs in the delivery of a kind of life that hasn't yet begun. For surely it would be the height of naïveté to think that with the transformative technologies already in sight--genetics, nano­technology, and so on--and with thousands of millennia still ahead of us in which to perfect and apply these technologies and others of which we haven't yet conceived, human nature and the human condition will remain unchanged. Instead, if we survive and prosper, we will presumably develop some kind of posthuman existence."

"What has all this got to do with finding life on Mars? Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars (or some other planet in our solar system). That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. If it happened independently twice here in our own backyard, it must surely have happened millions of times across the galaxy. This would mean that the Great Filter is less likely to be confronted during the early life of planets and therefore, for us, more likely still to come.

If we discovered some very simple life-forms on Mars, in its soil or under the ice at the polar caps, it would show that the Great Filter must come somewhere after that period in evolution. This would be disturbing, but we might still hope that the Great Filter was located in our past. If we discovered a more advanced life-form, such as some kind of multicellular organism, that would eliminate a much larger set of evolutionary transitions from consideration as the Great Filter. The effect would be to shift the probability more strongly against the hypothesis that the Great Filter is behind us. And if we discovered the fossils of some very complex life-form, such as a ­vertebrate-­like creature, we would have to conclude that this hypothesis is very improbable indeed. It would be by far the worst news ever printed.

Yet most people reading about the discovery would be thrilled. They would not understand the implications. For if the Great Filter is not behind us, it is ahead of us. And that's a terrifying prospect.

So this is why I'm hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look. It would keep alive the hope of a great future for humanity."

I Put these quotes in for people who did not want to register with the technology website or did not want to read the entire SA.

Below is a link to the actual Phoenix lander homepage.

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

Well, this does make a refreshing change from moaning about dead kangaroos and a couple of photographs.

Everyone has their own ideas about what lies "out there", but I suspect we will learn absolutely nothing about the bigger picture from one tiny neighbouring planet.

Given the timeframes involved (I am aware that this is where I lose the Creationists, and possibly a few IDers as well) it is entirely possible that "maybe 10,000 would have developed intelligent life equivalent to humans", but also that none of those has actually survived.

Our own lifespan here on earth will probably be only a tiny speck in "time" as we know it and measure it. So it is entirely conceivable that many other life forms have appeared, flourished and died out in exactly the same way.

The chances therefore of actually finding one of these existences in the short time we have available must be mathematically infinitesimal, given both the minuscule number of possible locations and the tiny timespan of their existence.

In my view we should keep on looking, simply because we can, we're mankind, and "that's what we do". Just don't be disappointed when the astronomical odds against finding anything remotely useful play themselves out.

For me, I feel enormously privileged to be alive at all, and to be able to write this post.

Wow Gibo,

you really have quite the fantasy world in your head. I personally would like life to be discovered on other planets just so religious people acutally have to consider the consequences, that maybe humanity is just a simple drop in a huge ocean of life that is likely out there.

Easytimes, I too am interested in this question, although I have always understood Earth's remoteness to be a key reason why we are yet to make contact; the distances are mind-boggling, and for us to recieve radio signals now they would have probably had to have been sent millions of years ago. Any response we would send to another star system would then take millions more years to return. In that time civilations may have been destroyed, or no longer care or whatever. We have been around as a society capable of hearing such a message for perhaps a hundred years at most.

Also consider that the universe is quite capable of wiping us out in an instant - read up on Gamma-Ray bursts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray_burst) to discover how a star collapsing 1000 light years away could instantly wipe out all life on Earth. Such a burst could have already happened and would not know it.

Probability tells me life must be out there somewhere, and we just dont know it.

Gibo - It is the greatest Hubris to think that our civilisation, which has been around for the merest fraction of a second in relation to the rest of the universe has any understanding of the true nature of the universe, and our place in it. You call your lack of understanding 'God'.