it need not be 'billions of light years' away, but if INTELLIGENT life were in this solar system we should have picked up signs of them so far.
Exactly. We fire out radio waves with messages far into space in the hope that some intelligent life will pick it up, and I don't know, maybe stop by for a chat.
If we picked up these waves from another planet what would we do? We'd shit ourselves.
This alien belief is just another way of not accepting that we are our own masters. Maybe eventually even this god(s) that we dream of. One day it will be us creating new life, making planets habitable...
Science has it all, all the magic you're searching for. What about the nano-world? A very real place within our own reality. The world of the very small. Quantum Mechanics, there is so much we have yet to learn and discover. We've done it well so far on our own.
Sorry closet.cult, hopefully if it does take millions of years to meet these aliens then we might treat them differently. Do you think we might hide from them and kidnap them instead for experiments, but our morals at the time prevent us from doing the creatures any real harm? What if we got seen, would we realise that the world is controlled by governments that hide things from the majority of the people, and just carry on anyway. Although, wouldn't it be also true that we would only need to take one alien for experimentation? No, we'd need more...
You see closet., if we can change so much in a couple million years, then so might these aliens already have done. Their civilisation could be a couple million years ahead of our own.
This also asks the question then, that if they are so advanced, why would they need to experiment on us in the first place? Surely they'd just be happy to observe from a distance... surely, that would be funny enough.