Am I right in saying that scientists have succeeded in creating basic life in laboratory conditions?

In a word, no.

Amino acids have been created from scratch, as has RNA and the fatty substances which form cell walls, but there's been no attempt at assembling enough different amino acids in the correct sequence to form proteins within a metabolizing and replicating cell. Or at least none that's come to my attention.

There was a story earlier in the year that some Californians(?) had succeeded in getting a bacterium to accept DNA of a different kind to that of our own and every other living thing. It sounded a bit Professor Denzil Dexter-ish out of The Fast Show to me, but I suppose it demonstrates that Life Not As We Know It is possible. But there is zero evidence of such an organism appearing naturally in 4 billion years on Earth, even though we now know it's viable.

The occurrence of life, whether like our own or otherwise, still appears to be an event too mind-bogglingly complex ever to have happened more than once.

Of course aliens exist. These astonomers that say otherwise disappoint me! Space is infinite, and time has no beginning. Need I go on?

Aliens whose presence relies on infinite time and space to have arisen are also by defintion infinitely distant both in time and space, i.e. they don't exist from your or my point of view.

If you need to travel or live for an infinite distance or period to encounter something, then it doesn't exist in your universe.

Very interesting thread. I guess I'm agnostic with respect to aliens.

The critical unknown is certainly the probability of life spontaneously forming - what SFBTW claims to be of the order of 10^-260. Personally I'm not convinced by this number - there could be other, easier ways of forming life, or shortcuts we don't know about, but certainly the idea of life having arisen elsewhere in the Solar System, for example, is absurd.

SFBTW, am I correct in thinking that the anthropomorphic principle gets us out of any problems associated with too low a probability of life having arisen? I mean, even if we discover that on average, it would take 10^25 years to happen once in the universe, the anthropomorphic principle should still be a valid argument against creationism, shouldn't it?

Are some sitings of Aliens in reality visual hallucinations.

man is incapable of grasping the full picture, so waste of time. Like a dog shown a card trick. why bother, we wont even come close for 100s or years maybe 1000s

Life may have sprung up more than once, but you have to explain why there’s no trace of it. It may have been eroded away, subducted, just very very hard to find traces of. It may also be true that it was out-competed before it got anywhere, leaving virtually no trace. It may also be the case that it doesn’t arise anew now because chemical conditions are no longer right for anything other than the sustaining of established life. Or it may be that it never gets the chance to begin because established life has earmarked all the energy for itself and is an old master at using it.

Until someone discovers otherwise though that is just idle speculation.

And I don’t see why you think the simulation argument is laughable. It is the only really credible example you gave, because it is at least a logical deduction based on our behaviour and technological development, the others are just speculations with zero evidence to back them up.

Is man likely to survive until technological maturity? Yes (for a number of reasons). If he does so, will he lose all interest in simulations? Unlikely, given that we are obsessed with them, from novels to actual AI. So we are likely to become at some point (it doesn’t matter when) technologically mature and we are likely to make simulations, then it could already have happened. By the way, it’s not REAL people creating simulations only, but simulations creating simulations too. Why? Because with no way of knowing if you are in a simulation the only possible way you could do it is to see if you can create your own simulations who are self-aware but don’t know if they are simulations. If they come to the conclusion they might be, because of their own emerging simulation argument, that confirms that we (the simulators) are just as likely to be simulations ourselves.

As for our own universe, Everett’s Many-Worlds explains why this universe is perfect for conscious beings. One at least had to be, there are plenty where everything is just wrong.

By the way, not one of these ideas I necessarily agree with, they are however interesting to ponder from time to time.

Lastly, SETI I think is now looking for CFCs and other evidence of industrial activity in the atmospheres of planets. So if the aliens ever went through a fridges and aerosols phase, we may spot it.

...he discussed how unlikely it is for two single-celled organisms to combine and produce more complex life, which is what happened here on earth but didn't raise SFBTW's point about the almost non-existent chances of life spontaneously arising in the first place.

There is no life anywhere else in the universe because it is impossile for there to be  life.
It is also impossible for there to be life on earth.

The question is, is it a good thing that there is life on earth , and on balance I think
the answer is no. Not if you look at the reality of things.

The aim of man should be to bring human life on earth to an end within a few
generations by stopping reproducion, and probably animal life as well leaving only
plant life.