Do you believe in space aliens?

It would be extremely arrogant of mankind to think we are the only sentient beings in the entire universe. So much space, too much to waste. t

Back in the early 60s, a group of High School students came up with an idea. They planned for months, then wearing blue long underwear and a "space helmet" made from styrofoam covering a football helmet and carrying a car battery in a backpack to like a crude strand of Christmas tree lights wrapped around them, they ran around the local farms scaring people into thinking that "Aliens had landed".

Are we really alone in the Universe? Who knows?

Does it matter? Not really.

Why do we care? Probably because "The X-Files Marathon" was on all this week?

If you want to believe they're exist, you're in luck! It's very likely they do indeed exist- statistically, the chances of us being the only planet with life on it are not great.

BUT:

If you want to meet some space aliens, this gets a little harder. Life might evolve somewhere else, but there's a few problems.

1: According to the "Rare Earth" hypothesis, microbial life is far easier to produce than complex life like us- even planet Earth was populated only by bacteria for billions of years. So if alien life arises elsewhere, it might not be very interesting.

2: Even for microbial lfie, the universe is a nasty place and the chances of any sort of life appearing are not great. The universe is chock-full of nasty objects like magnetars, black holes, and supergiants. They aren't the most common astronomical objects, but can play havoc with any sort of recognisable life form. So most of the universe won't have any life at all.

3: Let's suppose though, that against all odds, complex life does arise. Does that mean intelligent life? Nope! For hundreds of millions of years, Earth had animals only. We only evolved because of a very convinient set of circumstances. There is no law of nature that means intelligent life needs to arise anywhere.

What this essentially means is that the chances of complex life appearing in the universe itself might be fairly good, but the chances of it appearing anywhere near us are VERY remote. We could well be the only intelligent species in our galaxy. There may be only a few more anywhere else in the universe.

And to make things worse, nothing can travel faster than light. Even if a civilisation evolved in the Andromeda galaxy- the CLOSEST large galaxy to us, it's radio signals would take two million years to reach us, and another two million to get back. Hardly a good way to get some diplomacy going. One species might send a message, then die out before the reply got back.

any thing is possible man. anyone who says things do not exist without reliable evidence against the subject, is probably a liar. and we can't really gather that evidence yet.

and i think that there is a good chance that no matter what you believe in personally, it would be foolish to think in all of the cosmos that we on earth are alone. there is so much we have never seen, even on our own planet, why exclude the idea that there is some form or type of life somewhere in space? just don't ask tom cruise that same question

Who said it was infinite?

Space aliens, probably not.

Aliens from another world traveling here in space, probably not.

Aliens on another plant, probably.

No.

So the universe is infinite. That just means that if there are any other civilisations out there, they must be a ginormous huge distance away somewhere in that vast space, so we could never find them, and they could never find us.

It is extreme human arrogance to assume that because we exist, then others like us "must" also exist. We are not particularly special, but we are particularly alone.

Of course there are aliens out there. Maybe not in this solar system, but somewhere.

If there weren't any, it would be an aweful waste of space x

we might be the aliens to some other species out there!

we are all aliens...