the question is: is alien life visible to us? http://zone.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/tut/infrared.png
we dont even know if we can recognize it
also, if alien lifeforms live in dimension > 4 it will be hard to recognize them, because you image them like humans... another theory is that there is nothing else than human consciousnes. if that is true and you see an alien, maybe its a "human" from the future --> through the fractal structure of time it should be possible to accomplish that task.
also, if its true that all is one and interconnected, they might be on earth - in fact, they might be IN you :]
so, i think its absolutely useless to discuss this topic, because we know nothing
Very true, we don't really know what to look for.
Some of you gamers here I'm sure are too young to remember this, but one game I played on the C64 many times over, years back, was a game called StarFlight (and the sequel as well). It was well before modern 3D graphics or Internet, but the story and plot was extensive, well-thought-out, and
deep, not to mention very well done.
In StarFlight, superphotonic (faster-than-light) engines are powered by a mineral substance discovered and eventually mined from planets, called Endurium (sp? It's been a long time...). In the very end of the game's story, when the player escapes from a whole planet made purely of the stuff, it is revealed that the "mineral" is actually life, a type of peaceful, intelligent life that simply has a verrrrryyy slow metabolism, so slow that they are mistaken for a rock-like mineral. They turn out to have been forced to create the primary threat the player races against in self-defense, simply because so many other races in the galaxy burn them up in the engines of their spacecraft.
So... What if things we mine from our planet are really alive? Like metal? Iron, copper, nickel, etc. have been on this planet longer than us, and have interesting properties that can vary - how do we know they aren't different breeds of some type of life? I'm not arguing for that idea, and I wouldn't bank on it as true, but my point is we don't know what to look for, as Ain Soph Aur pointed out.