ET again?

[bjkeefe]

Originally Posted by operative

Haha. Nope, a far more interesting CB (and one that didn't help set the Browns back 10 years): http://www.courtneybrown.com/

For perhaps excusable reasons, I mentally expanded "CB" as "cornerback." ;^)

Intelligent life, almost certainly. The scale of the universe is still hard for my to fathom. Non-intelligent life, though? Not necessarily.

Agreed. But the latter kind is going to be hard to detect, and is highly unlikely to visit us.

It may not even be intentional malice--it may just be an issue of incompatibility, the same way many Indians were killed off not by the malice of the Europeans (though there was plenty of that to go around) but rather by Old World diseases. Who knows what kind of funky bacteria a Thing from Outer Space might be carrying? Being in the process of getting over a rather nasty flu, I'm inclined to desire to avoid anything potentially infectious.

Could happen, sure. But again, I go back to my earlier thinking, that if some species was advanced enough to cross interstellar space, they'd almost certainly be aware of something like a contamination problem.

Also, don't forget: what made smallpox, etc., so harmful to the Indians was that they were essentially the same species as the Europeans, except for not having built up an immunity. There's some reason to think, in the invading aliens case, that the bugs that infect them -- presumably, They would be a wildly different species -- would not be nearly so opportunistic when they encountered human bodies.