YAY! I finally get to let my Useless Degree out for some exercise
A long time ago, in a City of Sin far away, I attended a comedy show starring a gentleman named Chris Rush. One of his routines touched on this topic...
Basically, he brought up the same question as you, Christine - is there intelligent life out there, would they be visiting Earth in the foreseeable future, and did they think the same thoughts we did?
His viewpoint was that perhaps there WERE intelligent beings out there...in fact, they were probably SO intelligent that they saw Earthlings as...shall we say, a little less than mud, given all the wars, murders, robberies etc. that we commit on a minute-by-minute basis.
He said that they probably looked at us like, "Earth?!? Ewwww...wipe your feet off - you stepped in Earth!"
Now I've watched far too many Twilight Zone's, Star Trek's, and even Lost in Space's to question whether there's life out there...the odds virtually guarantee it. But I will say one thing - personally, I think that Earthlings (geez, I sound like Marvin the Martian!) are the only life-forms that are so full of themselves that they would NEED to ask these questions!
Who the heck are WE? We're nothing. A deviation in the timeline of Eternity...we're here for only a microsecond in the grand scheme of things, yet we manage to screw things up so rapidly and so completely that, if there IS a God/Allah/Great Pumpkin, they must be shaking their collective heads at the failure of their beloved Humans.
When you get to the point of considering the vastness of the cosmos, I think you need to acquire a different mindset than most people have. You need to open your mind to the POSSIBILITIES...that life is very, very different "out there". Perhaps there's a planet where all the beings look like salt and pepper shakers - no doubt they have violent wars to determine the ruling condiment. A few parsecs over, there's a world where there exists no corporeal bodies - just energy clouds bopping around.
Humans have, since time began, been underestimating their fellow sentient creatures on Earth. Animals have been domesticated and yoked to perform slave labor; plants have been relegated to the status of either "nice to look at" or used as food...all without consideration of their charges' basic ALIVENESS.
We're the Grand Poohbahs..."we're the only creatures with a soul, with a conscience, with an intelligent mind, with speech, with emotions..."...on and on it goes. This alone would make any other race of beings sick to their stomachs (if they have them, that is LOL).
Perhaps THEY are God. Ever consider that? The whole Chariots of the Gods thing...or maybe their culture is SO intelligent that they long ago solved the riddle, and know that only pure science is responsible for everything. Or random chance. Or Tao. Or perhaps the greatest, most sought-after secret of our true being, our reason for living right here, right now, lies in a little safe-deposit box on the far-away planet of HJUFTDL, and even now, they're charging admission to the local population to come in, take a peek at the whole "secret", and, ala P.T. Barnum, proceed to the egress.
Maybe we're just one big galactic joke...and through our own sheer human folly, we've created a Ptolemaic Model of things - that we're the center of it all, that there's a Supreme Being that cares for us and made us special and different from all others.
How wrong we probably are...
