Hmm, insomnia kicking in hard and the Relic too exciting to stop watching, so will add my pennies worth…
Life is probably not unique, the chemistry behind it is unlikely, but with near infinite planets and huge time scale it’s happened before and will happen again. So assuming we’re going to sensibly adopt a dawinistic view of evolution…
For every human on this planet (i.e. thinking, sentient being), you have a quite a few thousand high level mammals (dogs, cats, rats etc). For each of those, you get a few million invertebrates. For each of those, you get a few billion single celled ‘animals’ for want of a better word. And for all of the common ones of of those you get billions of bacteria.
In perspective, there’s more bacteria in you than cells in your body. Almost all of the worlds biomass is bacteria. They form endospores which make them extremely tough and able to travel across space quite easily, and they leave evidence that they have been around. every gram of soil contains 45 million bacteria.
So any simple look at the maths will show you that when (as I say, it’s virtually inevitable) we find evidence of alien life, it will be prehistoric (it’s unlikely to be alive given we’re dealing with every date from the start of time) evidence of bacteria in a meteorite. Not a man in a flying ship, sorry :o)
Also, we evolve entirely to do with out surroundings. Man has not been around very long, lizards dominated the world for much longer, we won;t last long either, in the grand scheme of things. We look the way we do – with arms, legs, body proportions etc. do do with things like random chance (how evolution works) and our environment. So the odds of another sentient being looking in any way human (like a “grey”) is so far off the chart that I’d suggest not ever becoming a bookmaker if you believe it.
The only argument that counters this in any way is that someone, somewhere has managed to find ways of getting our radio signals from when we first started broadcasting so they know we exist (they haven’t got that far at all – space is big, and they don’t move very fast), and can break some mathematical facts to do with how you can move through space. Possible, if very advanced perhaps – but why would they give a toss?
So for me, the maths is overwhelming, we’re going to find dead bacteria first, no flying saucers. UFO is just that, something unidentified, not aliens.
Peace, and no offence to those who feel differently x
