OK, there are two different questions at work here, the first one is I think what the OP meant, which is:
Why don't people believe it to be possible there is life elsewhere in the universe
but what some people are interpreting it to be is
Why don't people believe that UFO's and other supposed extra-terrestrial sightings are aliens and that these sightings (or at least some of them) are true?
I think for most the obvious answer to question 1 is yes, while the answer to question 2 is along the more conspiracy nutjob kind of question that makes people question your sanity.
On July 08 2009 00:50 IdrA wrote: whats it like being insane?
My ability to research a topic certainly doesn't make me insane.
please show me your research on fallen angels
I read some stuff on the internet, that is how I researched it. It's not like I found remnants of fallen angels or something man. Anyways I do believe trolling is against forum rules and your first post was trolling. Maybe even this one but we can't prove that.
do you not know what trolling means?
if you honestly believe that aliens built the pyramids and that there was a group of superhumans with space flight centuries ago and all that religious stuff then you either do not think about your beliefs at all or you are crazy.
It's all but guaranteed for alien lifeforms to exist. You would have to be naive to actually believe the Earth is home to the only lifeforms in the universe. The universe is of a magnitude no human can fathom, period.
Just think about this...there are more galaxies (There are billions of stars in a galaxy) than grains of sand on the earth, and this is only what we can see (We can't see from one end of the Universe to the other).
Have aliens visited Earth? Hell no. If they have they would have made themselves known and or blown us to kingdom come. No sentient lifeform capable of interstellar travel is going to fly in and out of our atmosphere abducting what amounts to such a miniscule amount of people for what purpose? Just because?
TL:DR Aliens exist, mathematically proven. Aliens have never visited Earth, nor even been in our solar system.
Of course I believe in aliens when I see one. Just like I believe in anything else only when I have seen myself. Of course it´s highly probable that there is aliens, the world is that big.
I actually took an entire course on extraterrestrial life.. and there's actually a decent chance that we will discover signs of life (probably microbes) within 20 years. People are discovering new planets around other stars at a rate of about 1/day.. you don't hear about them anymore because it happens so often. Right now its mostly the giant ones (size of Jupiter) but in 10 years or so our resolution will be good enough to find Earth-sized planets.. give it another 10 years and we will have found most of the planets in our area of the galaxy. and once they're spotted it's pretty easy to look for chemical signatures that indicate life.. so if there's any kind of life we'll know about it soon. Considering we are looking at thousands of planets like Earth the odds are not bad at all.
no doubt other life forms exist. but maybe billions years ago? or even billions of light years away.
but the chance of there BEING NO extra life forms somewhere in the existing universe sometime during its existance, is about the same as humans EVER in its own existance EVER encountering them. if that makes sense... so yes to some life form exist outside of earth, but no to the UFO sightings or... any kind of alien sighting on this planet.
Trez: honestly we don't have enough knowledge to quantify the odds of intelligent life happening one way or the other, or for humans to have happened specifically. It's very possible that you are right - if one of the evolutionary steps was far less likely to occur than we realize. Odds are that if it is indeed the case, it's one of the earlier stages, simply because the later developments were occurring more and more rapidly - though the same argument can be made for them, it's just less likely to be correct.
For instance, if we find out that the expected time it takes for DNA based life forms to emerge from whatever organic compounds preceded them on earth's environment as it was then, is about say 10 ** 25 years, then intelligent life as we are familiar with is a freak chance -- and may very well not exist anywhere else in the universe - even if there are trillions of other earth-like planets in it.