[MarkyBear]

I did for a long time, but I don't anymore, due to religous beliefs...

Here's a copy-paste of what someone mentioned on another board, to a similar topic...Basicaly saying that life does/could exist, but the chances of visits to us from them, where beyond remote...

Quote:

I've been a recreational astronomer for about 30 years and this is a question that gets asked a lot.

The question isn't really 'is there life in elsewhere in the universe', because given an infinite universe, life at some level is a mathematical certainty.

The question is " how close is the nearest civilization with the technological ability to communicate/meet with us?'

The answer to that lies in what is known as the "Green Banks equation"

In the Green Banks equation you take all the know variables for the advent and advancement of intelligent life (rate of star formation, percentage of those stars with planets, percentage of those planets forming in the life zone, etc...) total them up and the equation will give you the total number of intelligent civilizations (comperable to ours) per square parsec of space.

Although there is still a good deal of argument going on relative to the exact values to place on some of the variables, the latest current opinion is that there is one civilization, comperable to ours, per 2.5 galaxies the size of the milky way.

This means that given the average distribution of galaxies in the universe, the closest civilizaton to us should be tens of millions of light years away.

And keeping in mind that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe, even if there were any one else out there, they would have had to leave home during the time of the dinosaurs to be reaching us now.

So short answer is yes there probably is life out there, but the odds of them reaching us is so small as to be unimaginable.

Regarding aliens visiting us:

I find this to be a virual impossibility due to the distance involved.

Maybe this will help. There is a visualization tool called the Cosmological Distance Ladder.

The distances used in astronony are really hard to imagine. As big as a light year is what does it really mean? It's about 6 trillion miles but to most people that's just a number.

Try this: the distance between the earth and the sun (93 million miles or about 8 light minutes) is sometimes called and Astronomical Unit or AU for short. By coincidence the number of inches in a mile and the number of AUs in a light year are fairly close so if you made a model of the galaxy and placed the earth one inch away from the sun the next nearest star would be about 4 1/2 miles away. And that's the closest one.

Even using this model, just our own galaxy would stretch 4 earth diameters, and the next closest galaxy (the magellanic clouds) would be about 10 times that distance.

There is just no way that ANY technology can surmount the problem of intergalactic travel due to light speed limitations.

End Quote...

Some of that went over my head, but from what I could make out of it, does sound like commen sense...