Ants may not "know" we exist but they encounter us daily. We kill ants put them in ant farms and some people have even been killed by ants. They don't possess the intelligence to know things but they definitely have the instincts to know what to do when they encounter us.

@hankster

If life happens here then it happens elsewhere, unlike gods for which there is no evidence so yes is the answer to your cunningly comparative question.

"Evidence, no", and with just a nod as good as a wink you gainsay the Nazca mummy elucidated below.

Whacks lyrical about anthropogenic destruction in all likelihood however the sun will only permit another billion years of life on this planet.

My gofundme to polevault Earth out past Saturn appears to b ... ou ... onl ... hop ...

@Polemicist A billion years is a long time, we almost certainly will not last a tenth of that time anyway.

@Fernapple I'm prepared to devolve.

@Polemicist A billion years? It only took us 200+ years to bring on climate change.

@Flyingsaucesir Exactly. The fact that we don't see lots of alien cultures, may just be large distances and bad luck, but it could be proof that technological civilization is always quite quickly fatal.

@Fernapple The longevity of technological civilizations is an important factor in the Drake equation. And so far, that longevity appears to be pretty short.

@hankster I doubt it. Until evidence suggests otherwise, I don't see any reason to put much thought on it.

@hankster Take off in your rocket ship today and you can be at the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) beyond our sun in only 75,000 years. There are no habitable planets around AC, btw.

@hankster it's a matter of physics. Nothing can move at the speed of light (that we know of) except light. So with technology the best you could achieve is 99.9% the speed of light. And even then it would still take years to travel to any planet that could sustain life. In the cosmos our little planet is not special by any means so stopping here as a pit stop seems like a stretch to me.

@hankster could, if, maybe. Possibly you're right

@hankster Speculation piled on top of pure speculation. Not a shred of empirical evidence. Are you sure you're an atheist?

A recent government report stated that the government does not have any evidence of extraterrestrials ever having been here.

@Flyingsaucesir The report you reference has been roundly denounced as lying. Daniel Sheehan provided first-hand testimony directly to Sean Kirkpatrick about his having seen the crash recovery photos and yet SK later lied to Congress that he had no such evidence. He is following his orders, but still violating his oath to Congress and the American people. Dozens of other witnesses would testify tomorrow if they could be released from their NDAs, as Schumer's legislation would allow. However, Lockheed's representative is blocking the law in committee.

@racocn8 Sorry, I'm just not buying it. What you are proposing is a conspiracy theory. Not only is the government cover up unlikely to be true, but the likelihood of alien visitation is even less likely. The probability is vanishingly small. I'm treating the subject with the same skepticism and demand for independently-verifiable evidence that I apply to claims of God's existence. And it doesn't pass the smell test either.