Aliens

I believe in aliens.

I don't figure they've visited us. No human can keep a secret, not really, and certainly not one that big, and certainly not a group of people. Someone's gonna leak it. Anyways, you don't travel the light years of space to sneak around anally probing rednecks and hillbillies. I think it's more likely to be top secret military jets and spy craft, or natural phenomena.

The universe is... unutterably, unfathomably, ineffably huge. The number of stars in our galaxy alone staggers the mind, but there are as many galaxies in the universe as stars in our galaxy. Many of those stars have planets. How can we be the only planet with life on it? Any life, intelligent or not.

But here's the thing. What I just said may not be true. The things we know, are not actually things we know. People used to know that the sky was a hard firmament upon which moved the sun and stars, the Earth in the center. People used to know the Earth was flat. People used to know that flies came from spoiled meat. Science changes often. Sometimes radically, major paradigm shifts. Science is relative, not absolute, and could be a laughable myth that will some day be the butt of a future society's jokes.

Conditions conducive to life are pretty narrow and specific. I'll admit we only have Earth life to study, and maybe it could take other forms. But we don't know that. Maybe the universe is not actually so ineffably big, maybe we have it wrong. Or, maybe it is big, but the dice were thrown and somehow only came up sevens here. Good ol' Earth. Possible.

So, belief or not, the belief is empty. Doesn't matter. We know very few things, really, one of which being that we are alive. We don't know about the stars or even what live is. Only that we are alive. We will probably never know of any other life. We could truly be the miracle of the universe. I guess I'm saying, let's take some care of it.

No, say not "it." Say rather, "us." We are one Life, after all.