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If you have any sort of religion involving a God or gods and possibly angels and demons as well, you obviously would have to answer this question with a definite no! Whether other life or particularly intelligences inhabit other planets orbiting other stars in this galaxy or any other is irrelevant. Humans cannot be alone in a universe shared with a God or a pantheon of them.

If you are an atheist and disbelieve the existence of a creator god or gods, you will almost certainly have to concede the statistical probability that other intelligences share the enormity of the universe with us. Whether any might populate a planet close enough for any form of contact to ever occur between us at some point in the future is another matter.

So, no matter what perspective a person might have, if they actually pause a moment and consider this question rather than reacting to it on an emotional basis, they must surely respond in the negative. The certainty behind that negative will vary; faithful believers being adamant while the cynical rationalists voice it with wary caution.

Does the question matter?

For many, perhaps most it will not. The religious don't really perceive the question to be applicable to their God because they usually anthropomorphize their gods, vainglorious mankind nearly always does. Those that don't have gods based on animals, the jaguar and snake gods of the Mayans, the dung beetle god of the Ancient Egyptians who rolled the sun through the heavens and the First People led by grandfather cricket of the San of Africa being examples.

For those not religiously inclined there is life to get on with, particularly if it is a struggle and they are burdened with the responsibility of providing for their family. Only those who are financially secure and comfortably situated or the dreamers among us have or take the time to contemplate such mysteries.

But perhaps it should matter more than we think. We now live in a World Society that seems to be doing its utmost to annihilate itself, by ignoring the physical realities of the environment it lives in, in favor of an economics fashioned from imagined social concepts. How do we wish to be judged? Perhaps we need to think on that, so that we might curb our excesses and change our ways to live with our planet rather than ravaging it as though we have half a dozen more tucked away in our sock drawer. If we change, it may be future generations of humans who look back and judge us, as well as our God or instead of the archaeologists of an intelligent species that managed to spread off their own planet.

Learn more about this author, Perry McCarney.
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