My personal theory is yes and I will give you my reasons for this belief.
Their are billions of galaxies out in space-the further we can see, the more there are.
Each Galaxy is made up of a average of 300 billions of stars.
If only 1% of stars have planets( 1% of a billion=1 million) that makes 300 million planets.
If 1% of planets have life on them that makes 3 million planets with life.
If 1% of those planets have intelligent life, that makes 30,000 planets with intelligent life.
If 1% of thoses planets have intelligent life equal to or greater than our planet, that makes 300 civilizatons at or past space travel.
Take those 300 times the billions of galaxies and you start to see my point. It is a pure numbers game. Save for religion, how can we think that among all the trillions of stars, billions of planets we are the only intelligent life out there........
If Intelligent life is out there, has it come over to our planet now or in the past-maybe.
We have only been sending rf (radio frequency) signals for a short time-under 100 years.
But lets say "they" detected these signals and came to investigate them-if/when we have the technology to travel space the way we do roads, I am sure we would.
OK, lets say contact was made-either through design or crashed craft-whatever the reason. Would our/any government tell their population, much less the rest of the planet-NOOOOOOOO!
Why? Ok, good question. First, think-any technology found or even given to us would take a long time to back engineer and make work/duplicate. Don't think so-take a good handheld computer-400MHZ 128Megs ram...back only 100 years. It would be magic/whichcraft. It would take another 30 years to have microscopes good enough to see the fine wires in the chips. It would take another 20 years to figure out they made transistors with those wires........
Now what if a technology was 100's, thousands evens millions of years more advanced than what we have now. That assumes they uses the same kind of technology we do-or will.
Think of the advantage that would give you over every other nation on the planet.......
Here is another very good reason, even now-many people across the planet would go crazy at finding "alien life" not of this planet. The worest -IMO-would be the overly religious ones-a large majority of the population.
How do we do this and not cause civilization to crash? Why we do it the same way people are decentisised to things that scare them-like spiders. You get them used to the idea. You slowly get them to the point where they can talk about them without freaking out. Next you work on them by getting them to slowly accept a picture of a spider. Next, you get them to see one on another room, through a window. Then in a box in the same room, then not in a box... till they are ok with it.
Now replace spider with ufo/alien and think about how over the last 40-50 years there has been more and more about ufo/aliens on tv,radio, print. Also notice how as time has gone by, the idea is slowly being made more acceptable in the mainstream, till one day we are calm enough for our government(s) to anounce that they exist.
