When I saw the title, I thought that perhaps this was a thread about immigration.......

Since the days of H.G. Wells on towards Astounding Stories magazine, its been "known" that aliens are out there.......somewhere.  Because people read all about them (in great detail) in science fiction.  Therefore: it naturally followed that it all had to be real.

Consider another possibility.  Consider that we are unique, and that the Earth itself is unique.  IIRC, I've read one or two scifi short stories where FTL travel was invented, followed by humans going out on life-seeking quests: only to find nothing but rocks, dust, gas giants, stars, and more dust.

What a boring universe.

Or, alternately, it can also be a "cute" universe, where the NASA folks assign names such as "Scooby Doo" to rocks found near the Mars rover's landing site.

I dunno -- there almost seems to be an underlying tone of desperation in the voices of those scientific types who are obsessed with finding life on other planets........much like the Spainards hunting for El Dorado in a former era.  We've dreamed it -- so it's just gotta be true!

The Fountain of Youth didn't exist, either -- but that didn't stop people from spending their lives looking for it.

Personally, I don't know whether there's life of our sort elsewhere in the current universe or not.  Frankly, it's not a matter that concerns me a great deal one way or the other.  I tend to suspect that the Earth is truly unique -- the perfect combination of factors for life as we know it are found in balance here.  Change one of those factors just slightly -- like move the Earth a hair closer to the sun -- and life as we know it couldn't exist in the form that it does.  Furthermore: I don't see how this perfect combination of factors could have happened by accident.

We can imagine lots of things.  And so we've imagined aliens -- but I've yet to talk to one of them.

Something To Do At 3:00AM