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Originally Posted by Chris
You are confusing the concepts of "imaginable" and "plausible". Just because you can construct a sentence that describes a scenario, it does not follow that that scenario is plausible. For it to be plausible, it must meet a number of conditions - the laws of physics being chief among them.
Sorry to pour cold water on all this fantasising, but Stargate SG-1 was a TV drama series, not a documentary. As was Star Trek. Both of those shows were guilty of dressing up their plot lines with pseudo-science, giving the impression that what occurred in them might not only be plausible, but an almost inevitable future stage of our scientific development. Sadly that is not the case.
Dr Brian May made an interesting point on Astronomy Live the other week - essentially that the chances of life occurring are so utterly slim, that despite the fact that exo-planets are now known to be common, it is entirely likely that Earth is still the only place where it has taken place. Even if life is common, and has developed into intelligent life on at least one other planet, Einstein established in the last century that it would take an impossibly long time for that life to cross from one planet to another.
Holding that Earth is the only place in the universe where intelligent life exists is not "narrow minded" - it's an entirely rational approach to the minuscule probabilities involved. And neither is holding that intelligent life could not find its way to Earth.
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Don't forget Battlestar Galactica, which might as well have been written by Eric von Daniken.
I always like to keep an open mind, I like the mystery of ancient times. But if we were visited by aliens in the past, I would have thought there would be more evidence, and that they might have been back by now.