Quote:
Originally Posted by Rausch
This topic is truly one of religious fervor.
There is no middle ground.
Grandma Pawtucket's cow WAS abducted by the aliens and they carved ole' Bessy up.
Dr. Knowledge says there's no life anywhere else in the universe. It is sterile.
If you entertain the idea you get lumped in with Grammy Pawtucket.
If you are skeptical (meaning requiring more evidence and reluctant to jump to a conclusion) you get lumped in with Dr. Knowledge.
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I am firmly in the "the human mind simply cannot grasp just how unbelievably large the scale we're operating on here is" camp. And then throw in the whole 3 dimensional thing (which the human mind has a notoriously hard time conceptualizing) and you start to understand that even if we're looking for the right things and with the right tools, the odds of us looking at the right place and at the right time are almost infinitesimally small.
When people say "Man, how hard could it actually be to find Planet 9?" and then you listen to someone smart explain EXACTLY how hard it can be and why there's a really good chance that we just never find the thing even though we can see its wake, you get just an inkling of an understanding of the void we're dealing with.
These scales are just so far beyond our comprehension that it makes me think that A) it's virtually impossible that life doesn't exist SOMEWHERE but B) it's nearly as unlikely that we'll find it or it us over any appreciable timeline.