Was listening to an interview with a scientist working on the SETI project trying to find extraterrestrial life outside our planet. He was beginning to lose faith and starting to think that there is nothing else out there. Based on no verified visits, no background noise detectable, but primarily the unique environment of our Earth.
 
He conceded that there are billions of stars, many with planets, but the chance of having a perfect Earth environment is rare to non existent. Just the right balance of water and oxygen, atmospheric pressure, energy from the sun to create and support life.
This ecosphere may not be duplicated anywhere in the heavens. We may well be alone as the only living beings in the universe.
 
I had a Coffee House moment and imagined somewhere a hundred light years away where a scientist is struggling with the same question. Comes back from a lunch break to analyze the new data coming in from the Earth probe. Finished a satisfying meal of silicon epoxide patties smothered in hydrogen sulfide sauce. Brews up a warm cup of ammonia and starts to crunch the data.
The results are dismal. Planet Earth is a raging inferno where even the rare compound ice is melted into molten seas covering a majority of the planet. The heat so extreme that the liquified water is vaporized into clouds that constantly pour onto the planet surface in corrosive rains.
 
The atmosphere is deadly with lethal amounts of the toxic element oxygen.
 
There is however a trace of methane in the atmosphere. Methane, the cardinal necessity for life to form and evolve. The surface of Earth is too scalding hot to support liquid methane, but perhaps in the ancient past, conditions were cold enough to allow lakes and rivers of liquid methane. Earth is now a flaming inferno impossible of supporting life, but at one time, maybe rudimentary bacterial forms could have existed. The evolution of intelligent life on Earth is impossible.
 
Sometimes when watching FOX News, I doubt that intelligent life exists on planet Earth.
 
ET phone home.
 
John

Sounds like the start of a good sci-fi novel - or at least a short story.....

Have faith brother!  

Dude.......   there is other intelligent life somewhere out there.   If, "Flying at the speed of light," was easy, we would meet intelligent species from other worlds.   Every planet like, "a perfect earth," is far away - farther than anything we can fathom

What are the odds we exist at the same time?  With billions of years to work with..humans have only existed 5 million of it.  All that time for other life forms to rise and fall, maybe a hundred times over, all over the universe, and still not happen to exist at the same time humans on earth do.  
 
Everything on earth is limited to this basic set of senses to detect reality with. We already know we aren't detecting the true nature of anything.  A dog sees a red car completely differently than a human does, and neither of us are wrong, nor right.  Neither of us know the true nature of the car and all the ways it actually exists in reality.  We only know what our senses can tell us, the way they translate for our physiology.  
 
So how do we know we aren't surrounded by "alien" life?  How do we know the universe as we see it only looks the way it does to us?  Other beings could exist and occupy reality in a completely different way, detecting the universe entirely differently than we do and we can't impact each other in any possible way.  
 
Or maybe I need to put this pipe down.  

The best demonstration of the universal time scale I've seen was:
The person threw a spoonfull of bread crumbs into a candle flame. They all flashed and burned nicely.
"But which ones of the crumbs burned simultaneously? It's surely a fact there has been, there is or there will be other planets with life on them, but are there any existing on this particular universal second?"

Kalle Rantaaho
The best demonstration of the universal time scale I've seen was:
The person threw a spoonfull of bread crumbs into a candle flame. They all flashed and burned nicely.
"But which ones of the crumbs burned simultaneously? It's surely a fact there has been, there is or there will be other planets with life on them, but are there any existing on this particular universal second?"

That reminds me of when I was a kiddo I would imagine that, say, the dirt under my fingernails was a micro civilization of intelligent life in which a minute for me was like a 100,000 years to them, and when I clean my nails I was wiping out their universe that appeared as a cosmic natural disaster for them.  I was a funky little kid. 

 

Like the sands of time, each of us is a small grain in the fabric of time/space and sometimes we go back to our roots..............or try.
 

 
 

Mesh
 

Can they partake if they exist?