"In August 2000, astronomers were greatly excited by the news that 12, or maybe 13, new planets had been discovered, bringing to more than 60 the number of planets knowns to be circling stars in the galaxy. Most of them, of course, are huge gaseous worlds such as Jupiter and seem totally inhospitable to life. These are the only planets known to us because we don't yet have the technology to find smaller alien worlds.
But the time will come, perhaps within decades, when we will have telescopes capable of findig thousands of planets the size of Earth. Some may prove to be worlds at suitable distances from their parent suns - neither too hot nore too cold - on which advanced civilisations may have evolved."
Adrian Barry, Spectator,September 2000
Alien life? What the experts think
"Where will we fisrt find extraterrestial life? Europa, a moon of Jupiter seems a likely candidate because recent images reveal Europa's frosty surface to be nothing more than an ice cap floating atop an ocean of water. The Galileo space probe in 1997 found brown stains on the ice that could conceivable be a mix of hydrogen cyanide and other life-related chemicals. There are stranger possiblities to to consider. For example, on Jupiter's moon Io and on Venus, life might exsist in liwuid sulfur. Though Io appears dehydrated, ;lanetologists don't rule out the possibility of subsurface water. Neptune's moon Triton, although quite cold, appears heavy with subsurface ice that was once sufficiently warm to flow over the landscape....."
Clifford Pickover,The Science of Aliens,1998
"In the end, the adcution phenomenon seems to me to be a part of the shift in consciousness that is collapsing daily and enabling us to see that we are connected beyond the Earth at a cosmic level. No common enemy will unite us, but the realization of a common Source might. Our notions of the Divine, like everything else, seem to grow along with the evolution of our conciousness. We no longer expect an Old Testiment God/bully that will part the seas and brung us where we need to go. ...
The god for this time, we seem to be learning from abductees and others, is more of a partner than anything else, working through and with us."
John E. Mack,Passports to the Cosmos:Human Transformation and Alien Encounter,1999
"What are the chances of all the necessary factors coming together to allow the emergence of complex organisms? Not good, unfortunately. As far as we know, it's only happened once. And planetary catastophes capable of wiping out life happen fairly frequently (in a geological sense at least). Brownlee and Ward describe ten seperate mass extinction events that have been recorded on Earth, and many more may have occurred. The continued existance and evolution of complex life is a fine and delicate daisy chain, capable of being broken at any point, and the longer it goes on the greater the odds against it become....
I still hope they're out there somewhere, and I still run "SETI_home" on my computer, and I still get excited whenever there's talk of life on Mars of Titan. But if we really are alone, maybe it won't be so bad if that realization helps us to truly value and cherish our own precious existance in the universe."
Mark Wolverton,"Are the Odds for ETI Worse than We Thought?" Skeptical Inquirer,Novermber 2000