Hello, everyone

I know nothing in UFOs or extraterrestrial life.
Anyway, at school - about 10 years ago - I've studied that ET life was looked for only on planets which were like the Earth (temperature, presence of water, atmosphere...).

I expressed my disagreement towards that attitude.
What do YOU think of that ?
Do you really think that we can only find life on planets comparable with ours ?
Can't there be kinds of ET who don't need to breathe, to eat or to drink ?

Bye

Olivier

sure. If you say ET, does't need water.. then maybe
ET does't need watr.

Perhaps you didn't understand what was being discussed. We aren't actually looking at any planets in particular. We have only been capable of detecting the presence of planets till now, and only very recently been able to actually catch a glimpse of a little white dot on a picture that we suspect of being a planet. We aren't actually investigating the planets themselves. Perhaps this is not what you meant, but it sounded like it, and I wanted to make sure that misconception was put away.

When people refer to looking at Earth type planets, what they are doing is basic scientific speculation of looking for the most likely possibility. If a planet has the same qualities as Earth, then the chance of life on it is greater than in a planet which is not. The reason for this is because we know, from the life here on Earth, that a planet of this type has everything needed to support life as we know it, and planets not of this type cannot support life as we know it.

Could they support any other sort of life? It is possible, however only in the sense that nothing is impossible. Since we haven't the faintest idea how such a thing could come about, we would have no way of detecting if life actually came from there. It is a bit like saying that ghosts exists. Whether they do or not is hard to tell because we haven't the faintest idea if ghosts are real or how they are made. Since we do not know anything about them, we can't really look for them.

This is a little difficult to explain. Basically, it is a matter of looking for something that you know about in the place where you would expect to find it. If someone asks you to find an apple, you would check a tree. You can easily narrow down exactly what kind and the most likely place to find it. If, however, someone asks you to find a fruit, you are left with a bit of a dilema. What kind of fruit? How is it made? Without knowing these things, you cannot narrow down the range of possibilities at all.

As for not eating, breathing, or drinking, well, creatures like that live on Earth, so it isn't too difficult thinking of them on other planets.

This deserves 2 cents of a different currency.
what if life is merely controlled by a magnetic field? (aka conciousness) then would it not be possible for life (as a magnetic field) to exist within space? I mean, all a magnetic field needs to exist is a movement of electrons, and sunlight provides quite the flow, not to mention all the other particles zooming around in space which our atmosphere deflects. While this sort of radiation is detrimental to our material vessels (bodies) it could be quite the opposite for a vastly different type of life which is composed of something completley unkown to us, like magnetic fields (as we have little understanding of this subject).
anyone have any thoughts on this idea?