Do you believe there are Extraterrestrial beings ?

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I can see it now, cats frolicking in 0-G and pooping/peeing all over the place. the aliens might well say to hell with us and drop us off back where we came from.

that's not to say less extraordinary claims require no evidence at all..

that's not what i meant at all, i'm all for hypothesizing, but i'm just saying citing proposed authority seeing life being probable in the context of an unproven and most likely unprovable hypothesis (multiverse) doesn't do much to 'prove' there's other intelligent life which is kind of what the guy who i was quoting was quoting was saying he'd need.
personally I think there is other intelligent life in our own universe but at a rate much lower than conventional opinion, I'd put it at less than 1 civilization per galaxy, maybe even much so.
(sry for double post but i saw someone else do it here so i assume it's not a big deal)

The Housecat's captive is definitely not a he.

If there is one civilized planet per galaxy there is at least 100,000,000,000 civilized planets!

Imagine that each penny is a civilized planet. That pile will look like,
http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/eleven.asp

Suppose that only one galaxy per 100 has a civilized planet. In other words a billion civilized planets!
http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/nine.asp

sure, and that's just the observable universe.
the problem is the hope of ever communicating with or discovering one becomes infinitesimally small.

It is true that I do not have any physical evidence of extraterrestrials. * However, the math says that they are overwhelmingly likely. Similarly, I have no evidence that there is not a penny exactly on the North Pole. However, the math tells me that it is overwhelmingly likely that there is no penny there.
* I do not believe they have visited us. The distances are too great.

Science is not about certainty. It is about degrees (probability ) of skepticism. For example, I am not 100% certain that the earth goes around the sun. I am "only" 99.9999999999% certain.
By comparison I am only.00000001% sure that Elvis is still alive. As a scientist I cannot rule out the possibility that Elvis is still alive. Tho being 99.9999999% sure that he is not alive is overwhelmingly close to certainty.

Yes. If it were only on civilization per galaxy that would mean the closet to us would be in the Andromeda Galaxy two million light years away.

Even if these Andromedans broke the light barrier (itsself unlikely) they would never be able to drop in on us, nor even phone us.

There might be a reason Elvis always seemed bigger then life...

When looking at the math, it seems pretty certain that there is life elsewhere.

And math is one of the main things that makes a civilization and then a potential space traveler or at least communicator. (On Mars... Hello, can you here me now? )

So its also reasonably certain that anyone trying to reach or contact us (or anyone for that matter) has math.

Then why are we sending out radio signals and space junk with bad CDs on them? We should be transmitting 2 + 2 = 4 and sending out flash cards.

Agreed. That is what I said 5 posts ago. It is overwhelmingly likely that extraterrestrials exist but the distances are too great for them to visit us.
I disagree with Hawking. * It is silly to believe that if contacted they will take our stuff and turn us into slaves and/or eat us. That would be like us taking over an ant colony, eating the ants and taking their stuff.
We are like ants to them. They do not love us. They do not hate us. We are so inferior and boring to them that they can't help but ignore us.

The nature of technology is exponential.
To apply our own conceptual, technological, and engineering limitations to an advanced race is even more absurd than the conclusion that they do not exist.

I strongly agree!
Imagine that our current knowledge is one grain of rice.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem
For us to understand them is like a rhinoceros understanding quantum mechanics! That is why I said "they" ignore us, we are too boring!