There are, however, more realistic and relevant considerations of the possible existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. One is the ongoing efforts for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Serious work has gone on in this area for a few decades now, using sophisticated scientific equipment. For some SETI folks, the lack of any convincing electromagnetic signal thus far from outer-space is discouraging. The hunt has become ever more technologically advanced and sophisticated, but still no contact. Maybe we are alone. Maybe the distances and time scales are just too vast for us to ever find alien intelligent life this way. The search continues, however, because it may be our only way to verify life out there, and the consequences of finding it are so momentous.
Then there's a recent study by a consortium of astronomers and universities, suggesting that although we've not yet heard from an ET out there, maybe some of them have heard from us! This suggestion is bolstered by the fact that, in just the last few years, we now know there are hundreds of planets within a few light years of us, and billions of them farther away, just within our galaxy. Computations in this recent study show that our TV and radio signals emitted over the last century could well be detectable at some of those closer planets. That's a rather unsettling thought: they could know that we're around, while we are as yet ignorant of them.
Some of these planets are even Earth-like. Could there be beings on those planets who have been watching our TV programs? If so, would it lead them to doubt that these signals indicate their origin as coming from intelligent life? So many questions and speculations, with no definitive answers!
Yet another viewpoint suggests that we may be expecting the wrong kind of visitation. The likelihood of meeting living beings who traveled here on an interstellar craft is quite remote, given the fact that the distances to be traversed are simply too great for any living creature to cover—given that travel times would probably be on the order of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Despite the fact that those brilliant adventurers in the Star Trek TV series travel at warp speeds and visit several star systems in a few months' time, there remains the strong likelihood that spacecraft speeds greater than the velocity of light are simply not possible. If so, travel times between star systems won't be measured in weeks or months, but in eons.
It's hard to believe that any biologically-evolved alien beings could live for eons. It’s hard to conceive that their life spans could be so long, or their metabolic rates could be so incredibly slow. One thing that science has demonstrated is that conditions around our universe are quite uniform. The laws of physics and biology that reign locally are probably similar across the cosmos. But that might just be another ignorant assumption.
Yet there's nothing to suggest that alien intelligent life (if it exists—which seems increasingly likely, though probably extremely rare) at all matches our technological skill level. After all, those ancient earthly humans had no hint of the nature and vastness of the universe, let alone what a flying craft might be. Moreover, we can't begin to imagine the technologies of earthly humans, even a couple of hundred years from now. (If we don't manage to create our own extinction in the meantime, due to our current technological foolishness.)
So life “out there” could currently be at the stage it was, say, three billion years ago on Earth: single-cell, microscopic critters. Or it could be three billion years further evolved than we are. In either case, we’d probably not be able to even recognize it, let alone receive its radio signals.
This last possibility I've described (life elsewhere as primitive or unimaginably advanced) may well be the most likely one. If so, and if the distances are so vast that interstellar travel requires tens or thousands (maybe millions!) of years, what's an intelligent species to do, if it wishes to explore the cosmos? Rather than send out spacecraft containing living beings, it's more reasonable that they'd launch spacecraft containing machines—robots that could easily go into stasis for the interminable length of the trip. Robots in suspended animation require no food, create no waste, and need no entertainment.
I have wandered here through time and space, as I address the fascinating subjects of UFOs, space travel, and life elsewhere. As of this date we have far more questions than answers. When might we get those answers? Will we ever? The enigmas of our universe—viewed from the tiny speck that we inhabit—are boundless. How many of them will we ever fathom?
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