Re: Alien Contact Covered Up
 

There probably is alien life - viral, protein (a la spongiform encephalopathy), perhaps even bacterial or protozoal. It is many orders of magnitude higher to have multicellular organisms in a functioning ecosystem.

Intelligent life? That's a BIG maybe.

Intelligent life? Sure, could have happened 10 billion years ago, now gone, or 10 billion years from now, we'll never know.

Wasting your time to come to our planet? There has to be better stuff out there than us.

Re: Alien Contact Covered Up
 

I wasn't contesting; I was stating.

Re: Alien Contact Covered Up
 

IMHO it's again a problem of probability, if even one in a million planets with life develops intelligent life, and even if the average lifetime of intelligent life is only one million years, that's still MANY civilisations out there. Some of them (even with the hypothesis that you cannot exceed the speed of light) might have grown to become space empires.

And considering the timescales of the universe, if there's at least one space empire in our galaxy, there's a good chance that at least some of their space probes already know about us. Now, I really doubt that if this is the case, that they will bother with all the crap the "UFO-green men-conspiracy" people pretend they do - unless, as I have stated in the IRC, their favorite form of sport is "Confuse the Earthling". http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Alien Contact Covered Up
 

There could be life forms out there that we wouldn't even recognize as 'life forms'. We seem to relate only to things we understand. Given the vastness and numerical quantities of possibilities, there is other life forms out there. We find new life forms on this planet constantly!!! [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon12.gif[/img]

Re: Alien Contact Covered Up
 

You know, the funniest thing about that was, a few decades ago, a bunch of scientists got together and formulated this idea of what life needs, what ranges life can live in, and the list of places that life shouldn't be able to live.

...then they found bacteria that lives in lava and another kind that doesn't need oxygen. Oops.