MayaEden said:
1) Sending a man to the moon =/= changing the molecular structure of plantlife and the electromagnetic acitvity within it in a few hours
Not really.. Both require quite a bit of technology.. And to be fair, we're far beyond the tech that was used to send men to the moon (hell, even the Shuttle flew on hardware that is older and slower than my first computer I had in 1996..). So I would say that it is possible to do it.. Specially with preparation ahead of time.
With that said, do you have points to peer-reviewed/scientifically confirmed evidence that there was indeed change to the molecular structure of said plants and/or electromagnetic activity? The majority of the times, I am suspicious of things like that because at least for electromagnetic activity, there's no previous baseline measurements that can clearly demonstrate that the environment has been disturbed - you only have the 'after' measurement, so how can you say what was there before?
As much as I would like to believe that there's aliens out there trying to communicate with us to interfere with our evolution, I would expect them to act a bit more subtly than creating random crop circles and instead opt for more of an special operations approach (if you ever read the 'Culture' novels by Iain Banks, they could be compared to the 'Special Circumstances' group): slightly interfering with politics, science and culture to nudge us towards their intended end state.
And to be more specific - I do believe there's life out there simply from a mathematical point of view; whether it's intelligent/technologically advanced enough to come nag us (and with enough interest to actually do it), that's a whole different question, specially given the odds.
The mathematical argument is simple, but long. If there are for example 1 trillion stars; if on 0.1% of those there are planets that can support life, that puts us at 1 billion planets. If 0.1% of those actually have some sort of intelligent lifeforms, that puts the number at 1 million possible species. And that's exaggerating the odds quite a bit, as for example the number of planets in the 'goldilocks zone' is way more limited than that.
Then it gets more fun.. Out of all those:
- how many have gotten close to the same technological level as us but destroyed themselves due to conflict (as we've gotten awfully close a few times)?
- how may never even got close to be as advanced as us?
- how many have the same technological level as us? And how many have higher tech than us?
- And of those that are more advanced than us, how many have tech that is good enough to actually achieve communication? And visitation?
- And out of those that are advanced enough to communicate/come here, how many are stupid/brazen enough to not come up with an equivalent of the Prime Directive and/or willingly violate it?
Which leads me to believe that there is intelligent life out there; they might be watching, but quite likely they wont interfere until we get to a point where we are on a similar technical level to them and can understand/communicate with them.