Zoombael said:
Flilix said:
I think there's very little we can be 100% sure of. I'd even argue that there isn't anything at all.
As unlikely as the existence of unicorns is, what about them would make them impossible? You didn't define 'magic', but it is technically possible that there are animals (whether they live on our planet or not) that have abilities that contradict our current scientific beliefs.
Scientists have proven that it's impossible to go faster than the speed of light. So unless the aliens are able to travel for thousands, maybe millions of years, it's not possible for them to reach us according to our scientific system.
Although everything is technically possible, we should not consider the possibility of all of these things. The chances of them being true are just way to small. Another example: my bed can suddenly start attacking me (because of reasons that I cannot understand, since I don't know absolutely everything that there is to know about our universe), but that doesn't mean that I need to be afraid of my bed (since I know enough about our universe to safely assume that the chances of this happening are extremely low).
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That's not a good example. You know what your bed is comprised of, you can examine it thouroughly. How common life is in the Universe/Galaxy is something we don't know and can't say for certain, since we are incapable of observing and exploring adequatly.
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To which extent can I trust my senses and my knowledge? I can think that my bed is made of wood, and I believe that wood can't move, but I can't be sure of either. It looks and feels like wood to me, but that idea is created in my head. I can never tell something with absolute certainty about the object itself. I can only tell things about how it appears to me. And even if it is actual wood, I can't know for sure if it's able to move or not. According to science it can't move, but I'm 'only' 99.9999...% sure that I can trust science.
You could argue that aliens visiting the earth is more likely than my bed moving, and that's probably true (although there's no way to actually calculate the likeliness). However, both are so unlikely that it makes absolutely no sense to believe either.
