This started to look interesting until it devolved into indignation and who can play by the rules better than whom.

Nonetheless, with all the billions of billions of opportunities, it seems likely to me that life is elsewhere. Trying to quantify that seems pointless in the face of almost no data. I don't automatically assume such life is on the train to technology. This earth did fine without "intelligent" life for billions of years.

DOlphins and elephants are smart, but how long would it take for them to evolve into something technological like us, and what environmental evolutionary pressure would cause it? CHimps are darn smart, and given their close relation and their existing predeliction to tool use, given a long while they might evolve into something us-like. It happened once already. But why should I assume that would happen universally? Evolution is all about surviving and replicating. Technological intelligence is only one path. There is nothing less evolved about a whale than us. She fits her environment just fine - at least until WE destroy it.

But even so, I suspect there are other technologically intelligent life out there. But then there is the problem of getting it here for the visit. It is a mighty long trip even to the next door neighbor. It is not a given we will ever find magic worm holes to attach or space ships to - Scotty notwithstanding. The energy needed to bend space is huge, and to tear a hole in it, and a hole you can control to boot requires energies and forces of unimaginable scale. Yes of course I could be proven wrong tomorrow, but space warping and what not falls on the less likely end of the spectrum in my humble view.

But lets say ET has leaped all those hurdles. He now is here flying about our night sky appearing mostly as a bright light, but occasional interacting with a trailer park here or there. As a card carrying rural myself and one who might fall in the category of "w**** trash" I feel I can use the term. Once I get the plumbing 100% I will be waiting for ET though.

I gotta think either ET has the capability to get here but is so stunningly incompetent he gets spotted all the time when he would prefer to hide. Or he really wants us to know he is there but is so stunningly incompetent he can't figure out how.

I suppose they might be trying to lay it on us slowly to lessen the blow, but really, would even they think 50 years of peek-a-boo was an effective strategy? Perhaps young ook''lk will lose his license when dad finds out he did a bat turn and three blinks over Phoenix in the family cruiser, but I would like to think ET could do better.

But maybe they are just supremely patient and work on a glacial time scale like HArry Turtledove's lizards. So possibly the reports are true and some of us really have been abducted. All they seem to care about is our genitals. Granted, many of us are the same way. But wouldn't it make more sense to explore our other parts? When we disect something new, we look at all the other stuff too. The again maybe I am being too homo-centric. Or is that sapio-centric?

"It's sapiens to be homo." WHose line was that? Heinlein maybe?

SO if there is life elsewhere, and if it is intelligent, and if it is technological, and if it overcomes the huge problem of interstallar travel, and if it finds us, and if it is not stunningly incompetent really does want to neet us, and if it never sees the Anna Nicole show, and if they lose theur shyness in my remaining years, I suppose it is possible I might see ET.

I genuinely hope I see ET in my lifetime, and I am not so sure I have all that many years left in which it might happen, but it would be thrilling. Damned unlikey but thrilling.