Quote Originally Posted by mojoNOgo
as miniscule as our planet is , how hard is it to expect other intelligent life ?

here's a video that shows just how small our SUN is :

http://www.filecabi.net/video/plan7884.html
It's not hard to imagine. However, it is hard to imagine that their may be life intelligent enough to have the capable of reaching us.

Our Sun and main-sequence stars of equivalent size "run" for about 10~13 billion years. Smaller m.s. stars will last longer and larger ones will last shorter.

Our planet is 5 billion years old. Humans, afaik, are 2 million years old. And we are the smartest creatures on this planet. Capable of sending probes to outer reaches of the heliosphere of our solar-system.

So it took half the life-time of the sun for life as intelligent as us to sprout up.

For their to be Aliens visiting our planet, they would need technology capable of sensing our world in a manner which we don't understand. Because we can neither sense them sensing us or sense them ourselves. They would also need technology to travel to our world in a manner similar. Again, technology which we can't sense. Also, this technology would have to traverse distances greater than 4 light years (the closest star to us). And remember, they'd probably be much further away then that because we can see these stars and would probably be able to sense life around those stars.

It took our planet half it's life for us to pop up. It's taken us 2 million years to develop the means to send probes to the outer reaches of our solar system. It's hard for me to imagine that another planet some where has lasted long enough to develop the lifeforms capable of traveling distances of light years and to do it in a manner which we can't sense.

For me, at least, the idea of a species developing on some other planet orbiting some other star capable of visiting us is too difficult to wrap my brain around. However, I would gladly accept that other planets probably support life.