asyouwish72
Posts: 69
Joined: 11/2/2004 Status: offline
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Let me first state that I believe that the existence extraterrestrial life is much more likely than the lack of it, and there are decent odds that it will be found in this solar system within the lifetime of people now alive (and based on the load-out on some of the recent and forthcoming Mars missions, possibly quite soon). This is going to be on the level of microbes, though, not "little green men". As to whether there is other "intelligent" life (according to our definition of that term), well, who knows? Mathematicians like to make arguments about this sort of thing, but the fundamentals boil down to "space is big... REALLY big", and even something quite unlikely should happen more than once with sufficient iterations. So maybe there are other intelligent species out there. I doubt very much anyone on earth knows for certain. As to whether we have been "visited" (highly unlikely in itself if our understanding of physics is anywhere near correct) and the U.S. (or any other) government has tangible proof of this, I find it EXCEEDINGLY unlikely. We can't know with certainty what the odds of alien life are or what sort of technology they might possess, but we CAN count on human nature, and the fact is, no government on earth behaves in ways suggesting they are aware of any potential external threat. However meager our potential defenses might be, evidence of extraterrestrial life would have led to a massive and rapid militarization of space (probably under the guise of cold war dynamics or some such, but the fact is, it never happened) and efforts to control our emissions profile to reduce our odds of detection (after all, we've spent plenty of money on SETI while making no effort to block our own detection by potential adversaries using similar means). The Pentagon has a war plan for every conceivable contingency sitting on a shelf somewhere. The lack of any effort at defense in regards to this makes me figure that even at the highest levels, there's no hard evidence that is making people lose sleep about this. Oh... and no one ever said that just because you have a PhD you can't be an absolute nut. :)
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