Well, it's pretty obvious that we are making great strides in finding planets that could support life (as we know it) and that, at some point one of these planets will be settled on by Earthlings. If they find that the inhabitants of that planet have little/no intelligence then a new breed will develop on that planet (maybe even some outcrossing). They will have to be careful to avoid any planet where more intelligent life already exists. How life ever started is still a mystery but, if we accept this migration to another planet as a certainty (or even a distinct possibility), we would have to be very conceited to believe that everything started on this planet. There is plenty of reported evidence that aliens must have been present on this planet at some stage.What makes you think we were created by aliens Ron?

The trouble is Cyc, most people will only believe what they can conceive or what has been proved. Guess what prehistoric man would have said was impossible. Or even civilised people in the last century or so.
I want to start a new thread but I just don't know where to start or even what to call it.
I think what you are saying Cyc (correct me if I'm wrong) is that what we know is what is and what we don't know can't be - until we know it.I think we need to place our faith in what we believe to be the most probable. Sure others in the past have come up with all sorts of strange stuff to explain the world around them, but as we became more advanced, we better understood reality. There was once a time when the sky was believed to be toted upon the shoulders of Atlas. We now know this to be false, but as they had little knowledge of the real world, this was what they came up with. It's understandable. Sadly though, the world is full of bullshit beliefs. And I'm not suggesting that your opinions can be among them, but there are folk out there who actually believe that lizard people actually exist. Public Policy Polling published information suggesting that some 12 million American people believe lizard people control politics, and 47 million of them think the government is using mind controlling technology emitted from our televisions, to put them under their thumb. I don't think I want to go down that path, I'll take what a more reputable source can offer.
I'm absolutely fascinated (and have been for over 40 years) about the prospect of life on other planets, beings more intelligent than us (either now or in the distant past), aliens landing on this planet a long time ago, us doing the same and starting life on another planet in the future.
I often find that when my back itches it is in the one place I can't reach. Surely we should be able to rotate so that the back can be scratched just as easily as can the front. The fact that the back will itch far more often than the front just highlights the design fault.
That's very true QM. Sorry, I didn't really mean start life in the general sense. I was meaning start our lives (as in emigrating to another country). Whatever life might exist there would co-exist with humans. There could even be some interesting results from inter breeding. Who's to say for certain that didn't happen here?I would take exception to the notion that we would go to another planet for the purpose of “starting life”. If we were able to travel to another planet that was habitable to our species, it is reasonable to conclude that a form of life, similar to some of the vast array of life forms on this planet, would have evolved there already. We could land on a planet akin to Jurassic Park or one that is more advanced than ours but with no interest in the conquest of space.
Of course it's logical Ron. If that was the case you could ask why are we born to die? The Earth is no different. The planet just happened to be among the right conditions to spark life here, and one day it will cease. They know the fate of the Sun, millions of stars die every week, the Sun will be no different. And it will destroy the Earth with it's collapse. We're just lucky to be here at the right time.
At the moment we could well be alone. But we don't even know when time started. We are a mere dot in time. Advanced life could have existed on a planet in another Galaxy billions of years ago. What do you reckon they would have done long before their planet expired?