Do you believe in Aliens?

[12th Doctor]

Do I believe in the prospect of other complex and intelligent beings in the Universe?  Absolutely.  I think the Drake Equation was a little optimistic, but now that we know radio waves actually dissipate completely by 1 light year out, the fact that we haven't picked up signals from another planet is no indicator that there might not be another civilization close to us (it also means SETI is a total waste of time, but....)

Now, do I believe there are flying saucers coming to Earth to abduct people and harass our planet's rednecks and cattle?  No.  i don't want to call people liars, but... come on.  Then again, I am sure many of them are convinced this is happening to them, in which case they need help.

[12th Doctor]

I just think its wrong that aliens come here to Earth just to harass paranoid people.  I mean, don't they have enough problems without being stolen away in the night to be probed?

[12th Doctor]

Two things I just randomly felt like adding:

1) Notice how the crazy of alien sightings has gone down vastly, since 9/11.  As I have often stated, I think the high level of paranoia in the 1990's was based entirely off the fact that most people didn't have real problems to worry about, so they invented some.

2) I think that a highly technologically advanced civilization could discover a way to get around the speed of light barrier, but I am skeptical first about ow many civilizations there are that can achieve that level of advancement (with all methods proposed it is way easier said then done) and what exactly any such civilization would ever want to have to do with us.

[12th Doctor]

Given what we now know about physics, we have to get around thinking of the classic Newtonian and Einsteinian models; they are important, and the basis for the macrophysical world.  However, we now know that the Speed of Light is, in fact, not a constant, and that there are no universal constants at all at the quantum level.

This leaves open many possibilities for manipulation of space/time on the macrolevel.

[12th Doctor]

Yes, intelligent lfe does exist elsewhere in the universe.  No, we are not being visited by them.  I do not believe it would be possible under any technology to travel the distance that would be required.

I wouldn't be so sure. If human beings are still around in 500,000 years, imagine what we will have done technologically; the last 100 have been pretty damn impressive, so I would trust that given a half-million years (or even a few thousand ... or a few hundred), our race could do some pretty spectacular things, including overcoming the massive distances in space. The Drake Equation may be ambitious, as Supersoulty mentioned, but even a scaled back version hints that someone out there is considerably more advanced than us and has found a way to get here.

We would be pretty foolish to say "it cannot be done" based on the scientific knowledge that we have now, even as great as it may be. Scientists thought the atomic bomb to be an impossiblity before the discovery of the neutron ... there's a lot that we don't know about interspace travel and extraterrestrial possibilities.

I think that a highly technologically advanced civilization could discover a way to get around the speed of light barrier, but I am skeptical first about how many civilizations there are that can achieve that level of advancement (with all methods proposed it is way easier said then done) and what exactly any such civilization would ever want to have to do with us.

Depends on how advanced they might be, I suppose. They could be interested in a variety of things, but we routinely dominate what we deem to be lower life forms; I wouldn't be surprised if an extremely advanced alien civilization saw us as such a low order of life that they could easily justify mistreatment or experiments.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.  Granted, any species would would like encounter would be at least something like ourselves... namely, social beings, psychologically complex, with comparable bodily structure (though with a large margin in both accounts), but they would have followed an evolutionary path that does not mirror ours, and thus we can make few assumptions about exactly what their natural disposition might be.