Do aliens live among us?!?, do aliens live among us?!?!? [creepymusic] Options

[Warlord]

do any of you think aliens exist from what i can gather LOTS of people claim to have seen a UFO
http://www.mt.net/~watcher/carorbTH.jpg
this pic could be anything really because the darn blob is so small but still could it actually be one
http://www.alexnolan.net/articles/&ufo6.jpg
... now this pic is just stupid to me
that could be just a disk someones tossed in the sky for their dog to catch it or something

but you decide in the poll

[Clazzy]

Aliens exist, it's closed-minded and stupid to think otherwise. Considering the size of the universe and the number of stars in the universe (10^11 in the Milky Way alone) it's HIGHLY improbable to not have life at all. Alien life visiting Earth, however, is highly unlikely. Stars with the conditions for carbon-based life (don't argue with me about "other forms of life", carbon-based is quite simply the only likely way considering the composition of the universe and I can go into detail about it) are a relatively recent thing, being 6 billion years old or so. Let's pick a random star near to us, Tau Ceti, for example. For sake of argument we'll say it has a rocky planet that supports life. Tau Ceti is about 10^10 years old while the Sun is about 5x10^9 years old, so it's twice as old as our star. If sentient life similar to us formed there it was 5x10^9 years ago (assuming their solar system formed at the same rate as ours) and, unless civilization survived five billion years there, will have died out by now. If you did the hypothetical scenario with most stars you'd find that life has yet to form or is probably already extinct.

Now, what if they were still going or are at the same level of intelligence as we are now (perhaps even more advanced)? There is still a speed limit (i.e. the speed of light). It's 12 light years away. That's just over 12 years if travelling very close to the speed of light. Now, what about acceleration/deceleration? Reaching relativistic speeds requires a LOT of energy and since there's no form of friction in space you'd have to have twice the energy in order to slow down again. It's safe to say that, unless the ship can somehow be diffracted as a wave towards this planet, we won't see it in twelve years. Therefore, they'd probably travel at speeds maybe 0.0001c at maximum (about ten times faster than current space shuttles) it would take 120000 years to reach us. That long ago, there was no sentient life on our planet so aliens wouldn't have really been interested in taking the time to visit. If life is there now then they're just about figuring out we're here and if they're sending out ships (invasion fleet or whatever) then we'd have to wait a long time to welcome our new Tau Ceti overlords.

Life is out there, but we'll probably never meet it. That's what I think anyway. Just remember that the universe is quite literally massive and is already 14 billion years old, human civilization rose in the space of 10,000 years which is a pathetic time span really. Not even worth mentioning.