cyberdad wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
There could be zillions of exoplanets with bacteria. No one denies that. But its a far cry from that to saying that one such world has beings a million years ahead of us who can travel here from the hundreds of lightyears away as easily as we can catch a subway train.
It would be quite incredible in a universe with "zillions of exoplanets" with earth like conditions that advanced life arose once (i.e. us) and across billions of years of history.
Again..you know full well that that is irrelevant.
We are talking about specific incidents observed in recent week here on Earth being evidence of ...advanced beings...not only existing...but of traveling to our planet. Existing on distant planets (on one hand) and crossing space and visiting us (on the other) are two different things.
But if you're gonna play that game ..."billions of years" is actually a short time span. It took life on earth four billion years to get from the bacteria stage to the jellyfish stage. It was a miraculous dumb luck that allowed us to get from jellyfish to creatures able to build space ships. And even that final dash to us from the jellyfish took more than half of a billion years.
Life beyond earth may exist, or it may not. But even if it does in most cases were life arises it would be primitive microbial life. Creatures equivalent to us evolving would be rare and few and far between.
And even though we have recently invented space travel even we still havent gone beyond our own solar system. If alien visitors of lore were real they would likely be from exoplanets hundreds of light years away.
Most exoplanets that get to the bacteria stage probably stay that way forever, or they get snuffed out by supernova before they evolve beyond that.
The few exoplanets that do evolve intelligent high tech civilizations maybe so few and so far between in both time and space in the vast universe that they would never interact with us or each other.
The point is "whether life exists elsewhere in universe, or not" is not the issue.
Saying "ET life must exist" ergo "that ufo sighted must be an intelligently piloted alien space craft" is like saying that "you, Cyberdad, really exist. Therefore we should convict you of killing Jon Binot Ramsey and give you the chair".