Extraterrestrial life
Carl Sagan founded The Planetary Society, which supports SETI : the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Radio telescopes are scanning the heavens, searching for a signal that is not a naturally occurring burst of radiation.
Sagan certainly hoped that we would some day encounter such intelligent life. He wrote a novel, Contact, about that very thing.
On the other hand....
When Stanley Kubrick was working on the movie 2001, he considered actually showing the aliens in the movie. He consulted with Sagan about what they would look like.
[quote] Sagan later wrote about the meeting: “I argued that the number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of Man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve again anywhere in the universe.[/quote]
This makes a lot of sense to me. There probably is intelligent life out there, but it most likely looks very different from us. And that is one reason I am very, very skeptical about "photos of aliens", such as the supposed pictures from Area 51. In fact, I am more than skeptical. I am utterly dismissive of them.
However, I also reason that among all those stars out there, there is a non-negligible probability that at least one of them has a planet harboring intelligent life, whatever it may look like.
Sagan certainly hoped that we would some day encounter such intelligent life. He wrote a novel, Contact, about that very thing.
On the other hand....
When Stanley Kubrick was working on the movie 2001, he considered actually showing the aliens in the movie. He consulted with Sagan about what they would look like.
[quote] Sagan later wrote about the meeting: “I argued that the number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of Man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve again anywhere in the universe.[/quote]
This makes a lot of sense to me. There probably is intelligent life out there, but it most likely looks very different from us. And that is one reason I am very, very skeptical about "photos of aliens", such as the supposed pictures from Area 51. In fact, I am more than skeptical. I am utterly dismissive of them.
However, I also reason that among all those stars out there, there is a non-negligible probability that at least one of them has a planet harboring intelligent life, whatever it may look like.
