I'm glad to see that a solid majority of the website is being reasonable about this one. 6c6f4y

While I'd have liked if there was an honest "I don't know" option, the 4th option is by far the most reasonable.

In our galaxy alone, there have been computed to be approximately 11 billion earth-analog planets orbiting in the safe range of sun-analog stars. When you expand that to other galaxies, there are countless more.

It took 4 billion years for Earth to develop "intelligent" life, 2.4 billion years after it randomly generated protobacterial life in the first place.

Many of the earth-analog planets we've calculated to exist are actually older than earth. The problem is that they're too damn far away for our radio signals (which can only travel at light speed and without enough power will disperse before they can even interpret them) to reach them in our lifetimes.

But there's rogue radiation not emanating from apparent stars that we've detected in space. It seems like noise to us, but it could be the remnants of distant attempts at radio communication from civilizations at our level or even more advanced.

The thing is, it may not even be feasible for inter-system travel to actual life. For any of these theoretical planets to reach us, they'd have to travel at least tens of parsecs without reasonable access to solar energy. Would something as gigantic as a ram scoop even survive the trek? We have no idea because we haven't yet designed a good enough one.

In conclusion, intelligent life almost certainly exists elsewhere, but we may literally never have the means to interact with it.

It's extremely likely that intelligent alien life has existed, but they've also probably gone extinct. It's much less likely that they currently exist, so I'm going to opt for us being alone because I'm a pessimist.

"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

[img]http://www.dragonflycave.com/wpay/mew.gif[/img]

I think they exist, they have studied us, looked at eachother and shaken their heads then hightailed out of here... 😎 😲 😕 😔

The universe is so enormus and old that civilisations have been and gone sporadicaly through space and time. How many, how often and how long time they exist is certainly up for debate.

the poll is interesting the choices not so much.