Quote Originally Posted by Rundeer View Post
...but if the universe is infinite (which it may not be), there would have to be intelligent life somewhere, as well as every possible thing that can happen would have happened somewhere.
The universe is finite, albeit expanding.

Quote Originally Posted by Crank View Post
I was looking for this thread. and yes I believe aliens exist.

Who knows... we might just be some science project for more intelligent beings other than ourselves. What we know as the big bang theory, might be their test to prove how matter is created. Anything is possible.
Have you been reading my posts? :eek:


I heard an analogy not long ago on a BBC documentary entitled Space - it was an interesting series. The narrator stated: "imagine how many grains of sand are at your local beach. Now imagine how many grains of sand are on the entire world. Multiply that number by one million. That's how many stars there are in the universe".

I know that analogy may seem a little crass, since we obviously can't measure how many grains of sand there are in the world or stars in the universe however, it should open to your eyes to just how large the universe is and how insignificant we are by comparison. Detecting planets in our own galaxy is difficult, as they don't give off photons of light and we therefore cannot see them with our telescopes. I'm certainly no expert, but I do believe scientists can locate and map planets and their qualities by measuring the brightness of distant stars (i.e. when a planet passes a star it becomes just that little less bright). However, it's a slow and painful process, and I think we're only discovering 30 or so new planets every month.

The possibility of a planet being able to sustain life is minute, and at this rate if life does exist, it will be a long, long time before we are able to discover it. We are sending and (attempting to) receive radio waves distant civilizations, but that has so far led to no results. It's not looking good with our current technology.

Even if we find alien forms of life, technology is too limited to do anything about it. The speeds we can currently reach in space aren't at all effective enough to travel to neighboring stars, let alone galaxies.