I believe in the possibility that there could be other life out there, I also believe in the possibility that there isn't. I'm open to either, until there is proof of one or the other, I think you have to be open to both possibilities.
But that's just it, there's
no possibility we're the only planet in the
entire universe consisting of
a billion billion stars with life in it. The possibilty of this being the case is so small and so remote that it might as well be impossible. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning twice on the day you win the lottery on the day an astreroid hits the earth and ends all life on it than there is of Earth being the
only planet in the universe with life on it.
There's 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on the planet. Every. Single. Grain. Of sand. 100 stars.
And you think it's even
remotely possible that only 1/100th of one of those grains of sand represents the one star in the universe with life around it? Ours? That, I'm sorry, isn't the definition of "remotely possible." A 1 in 10^22 chance doesn't qualify as possible.
That logic is unsound. If there were only one planet in the entire universe whose inhabitants wondered about such things, then that would be us. More simply, you might be holding the only winning lottery ticket, so claiming that millions of other people must also be Mega-Jackpot winners doesn't have a sound basis. We have a sample size of one, from which no inferences can be drawn. Sure, we can recite big numbers with lots of zeros, but we have little more to base it on than medieval monks arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
It's a matter of odds. If you had a 1 in 1x10^21 chance of winning the lottery if you sold everything you owned would you take it? Of course not, such a risk would be stupid to take the odds are far, vastly, greater that you'd lose!
How
anyone can look at a number like 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and say, "Gee, only one out of that represents a planet with life on it!" Even if there's only 1000 planets out there with life that still 10 sextillionths of the potential stars in the universe.
The universe is
fucking huge. The Hubble stared at a patch of the sky no bigger than a tennis ball held 100 meters away from you and it found
3000 galaxies! Each one of those galaxies being made of
millions of stars and each of those stars likely having at least one planet around them.
Even if that, and ours, were all of the planets in the universe that'd still give us 3001 x 100 million potential planets out there (assuming one planet per star.) But some people want to think that it's "possible" that in all of that, in all of
everything that is out there that we are the only planet with any kind of life on it?
That, to me, is just not rational thinking. It's no different than taking a single, tiny, drop out of the ocean, scaning it for life and finding nothing only a single cell of bacteria and declaring that that is all of the life that exsists in the ocean.
No reasonable person can look at the numbers we're talking about when it comes to planets (and moons) in our solar system, stars in the galaxy galaxy and galaxies in our universe and say that we're the one place with life on it. To borrow from "Contact" if that's the case, it seems like an awful waste of space. Why is all of it out there? What is it doing? Is anything so rare that it can only happen once in sextillions? There's
nothing else out there except for us? Nothing as simple as a scrap of bacteria out there?
Forget the notion that alien civilizations are coming to earth, crashing their ships, ass-raping hillbillies and all of that. There's possiblity that life in any form isn't all-that rare in our very solar system. Scientists believe it could exsist on many different moons and could have exsisted on a couple different planets. But, no, in the vastness of the universe, something so big it'd take light 92 billion years to cross it, something with incomprehensible ammounts of planets and places in it we're the one place with life.
Why are we so dammed special?