Quote:
Originally Posted by Guinness
There's life out there, I have no doubt, the cosmos is simply too vast. Both the Fermi paradox and Drake equation sound perfectly plausible to me.
As for Alien visits, little green/grey men, abductions, crop circles and experiments on cattle, I'm a total sceptic.
Can't for the life of me find it on the interweb to give the link but I'm sure I once read a paper by Carl Sagan that described an approach by an alien craft to Earth.
The crux of it was, if I recall correctly, that any aliens scanning the planet would most likely regard us as parasites and vehicles as the actual lifeform.
I'm with Eric on this one, yeah there are plenty of UFO's out there but they are all of Earthly origin
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It always amuses me that when folks describe aliens, the "creatures" they describe are not really all that alien. Most are bipeds, the early "hollywood" ones anyway. They seem to have little trouble breathing our atmosphere. Most have "human" sense organs: eyes, ears, mouth, nose etc ... they seem to adapt well to our gravity. Not only that, they arrive in machines with all kinds of neat technology ... as if, in a possibly infinite universe, the only way to get around is in some sort of conveyance. As if, indeed, the only way to be an intelligent life form is to be like us. And their behaviour is uncannily human.
There is a problem with defining aliens in terms of "intelligence" and "life" ... in other words, we define them in our terms, ones that we can understand. I think a little reification, and lots of anthropomorphization going on here.