Re: Have aliens visited earth?
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It doesn't seem almost equally unlikely that no form of intelligent life has ever formed on another planet?
Let's define "intelligence" as chimp-smart, just for laughs.
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The whole problem with any question like this is insufficient sample size (one is a pretty small sample) but, currently on earth, we have several species approximately chimp-smart. I would put the other great apes (gorillas, bonobos, orngutans) as roughly chimp smart, and elephants dolphins and whales are in approximately that range, too. OTOH, it appears that life developed (or migrated) to earth pretty quickly after conditins became suitable, but it took four or five billion years to evolve a technological species, assuming that there wasn't an intelligent donosaur or something of which all traces have vanished. It seems that life might be pretty common, but intelligence sufficient for interstellar travel (which we haven't achieved yet, and maybe never will), or for that matter even industrial technology and radio communication, might be quite rare.
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