Extraterrestrial and Alien beings...your thoughts?

[MiniMerckx.22]

I saw Spielberg's new movie Disclosure Day. Beyond a short lived ... "Hmm, whadayaknow, they are real"...I don't see how it would greatly change my life or anyone else's if we had definitive proof. You still have to get up tomorrow morning, brush your teeth and go to work or school and cook dinner when you get home. They'd be much more advanced than us but if I was a kid my mom would still insist I do my homework. Your mortgage company still want that payment and all your aches and pains will still hurt. I think if they wanted us for slaves or pets we'd all be slaves or pets by now. I just can't concern myself with it.

[mr. beaumont]

Do i think we're alone in the entire universe? No way.

Do i think anybody has visited us? Not likely. My take is if any other planet had the tech to reach us, they'd also know we have absolutely nothing to offer them.

[Strat-itis]

I think Aliens are possible, but I think reaching us is impossible. You just have to know what a light year is. Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. It would take about 70,000 years to get there at Voyager speeds. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years in diameter. As an object speeds up towards meaningful proportions of the speed of light, its local time does go down. Light doesn't experience time. But this is more impossible stuff, having spacecraft reach these speeds. Sheer distance makes interstellar communication or travel impossible even approaching light speed.

But if you're just talking about the existence of life outside our solar system, of course it's possible. If you look at how life formed, there's no specific genesis where life miraculously initiates. Chemical processes just naturally further themselves at any level of complexity which is wild. The most basic form of life could be RNA which is just chemicals that remember its own makeup and reproduce, no agency involved.

[AllanAllen]

I think extraterrestrial life will be suddenly and under-whelmingly proven by the existence of microbes on Mars or ice from an asteroid. It will simultaneously be one of the greatest scientific discoveries and also completely inconsequential.