Although, I always believed it's a tad naive to think we are the only intelligent life form based on the probabilities. This doesn't make me question my belief in God at all.
Glad to hear you say that. There's no
logical reason anyone's belief in God
should be affected.
For a very long time, I've heard people say ignorant stuff like, "The discovery of intelligent alien life will completely revolutionize how we think of ourselves, of our world, of the universe, and of our place in it."
And yet, I've never heard anyone provide a coherent argument
why that should be the case.
I posed this question to a guy once, and he said, "Well, all the Christians in my town would be shocked to learn that there were intelligent life forms out there other than humans."
I responded with something like, "Hello? Angels? Pretty sure Christians have been assuming the existence of transdimensional superintelligent incorporeal aliens for 2,000 years (more if you count the pre-Christian Hebrew religion)."
Another guy said, "Oh, well, y'know, people used to think we were the center of the universe, and now we'll know we're not so important."
To which the answer is: In the medieval understanding, this made us the least important place in the whole universe. In some estimations, it made us the a**hole of the universe. As relayed by Dante in his Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio (rough paraphrase): "The material order is the mirror-image of the celestial, such that the place which is highest in the celestial is lowest in the terrestrial. As the throne of God is found in the center of the celestial order, the center of the material order is of least importance, and the standing of the lowest sphere is in relation to the celestial lights as to a peasant in a dark wilderness, looking on the lights of a far-off palace and citadel where high matters of state are conducted in majesty." Far from being self-centered, the medieval view depicted us as rural hicks-in-the-sticks.
So let's say we meet the Vulcans.
And then two very polite Vulcans with identical haircuts, white shirts, and dark neckties, remove their bike helmets, introduce themselves, and present us with little tracts.
Is anybody
really going to argue that our "whole understanding of ourselves" would be radically transformed by that?
No.
The really transformative thing is that the Vulcans have neural surgery techniques that'll give me Steve Vai's technique.
That'll be transformative.
Planets that don't show up on telescopes even though they move through the solar system faster then our fastest probe ever, New Horizons, which took 9 years to reach Pluto. It does explain the alien's obsession with bases on a cold planet like Mars though. In the outer solar system it gets cold as f***. Absolute zero cold. If you live on a planet like that then obviously -40C on Mars is a summer's breeze by comparison. And also planet X? What happened to planet IX? We only got 8 right now. And some minor stuff.