“Life” “outside of earth”
Is a loooong way from little green men in flying saucers doing anal probes and cattle cutting.
I don’t know why many (not folks here) people think that folks who’ve been to the moon have a better understanding of whether there is life or not on other planets.
the moon is a 1/4 million miles away.
That’s a drop in an ocean as for as the universe goes.
They didn’t get a much better view of the galaxy/universe because they were 1/4 million miles further out.
IF “further out” is even the right term.
In 1976 we had a 8 month old bull calf that was “mutilated”. When he didn’t show up at the barn we went looking for him. We had 40 acres that were partially forested on the slopes of Mt. Adams in Washington state. We found him down in a low spot under some trees, on his back, legs straight up, and missing his sack and penis, which appeared to have been removed clean, neat and precise. There was no blood, and no visible signs of struggle in the area where we found him.
All it would take would be an intelligent species to have arisen and develop technology a billion years ago on a star somewhere in our galaxy, and they would have been able to build sub-luminal speed capable von Neumann machines/probes packed with their own DNA to have settled much of the galaxy by now.
Gene splicing and constant refinement of whatever life supporting world would be nothing to them.
Maybe we will be the first out of the box to build von Neumann type probes. But then again maybe we weren't. Not by far.