Maybe I'm just crazy but there are a list of things I hope we figure out in my lifetime, and extraterrestrial intelligence is right up there in the top ten.
(Short answer: we're alone, or at best among the very first tech civilizations in our galaxy. Longer version: given sufficient time and space, even the most unlikely possibility will take place with probability near 1. If there have been technical civilizations in galactic history at a level slightly above our own or better, it's near certain that somebody would have launched a self-replicating interstellar "Bracewell - von Neumann" probe, and they'd saturate the galaxy for the rest of time. We don't see them, though.)
It would be a slap to the face though, look at these aliens that can choose to anihilate us or enslave us. (bad case). Just my thoughts, I'm nobody, no credentials, this is purely opinion/current mental maturity haha.
I don't know it's always depressing to me how massive space is, 40 years traveling at 50-150,000mph and the voyager just leaves our solar system hahaha. Crazy. (my numbers might be off depending on reference but that idea of 4 years of 9,000,000 feet per second) to get to the nearest start (dot in the sky) holy christ.
edit: haha holy crap it's approximately 984 million feet per second for like 4.6 years
edit: voyager speed ~36,000 mph, not sure how long that took to build up to that speed.
Plus new tech, new perspectives, old power structures being overthrown, etc... etc...
Things would change, and change is good for the future, but dangerous to those living through it.
this.
Muslim scholars have considered the possibility of life in the heavens as far back as the Middle Ages. Companions of the Prophet openly considered the possibility of religious beings in the heavens. It was recorded of Ibn-e-Abbas that "He even went so far as to say that they may have a Prophet like Muhammad (pbuh), a Adam like our Adam, a Noah, like our Noah, an Ibrahim like our Ibrahim, and a Jesus like our Jesus."
The Roman Catholic Church has also officially accepted that there may be intelligent aliens. So that covers a pretty large chunk of the world's religious believers already explicitly ok with it.
http://www.philipstallings.com/2015/06/the-biblical-flat-ear... Leaps readily to mind, along with the current state of Israeli politics, and you know... just a lot of politics.
You're right that lots of theologians are frankly much more impressive than the average adherent. What a pity that we're not surrounded by billions of theologians.
Similarly Zionism is not really a religious view as much as it is a political one. This can most clearly be seen in the fact that orthodox Jews oppose the state of Israel. They correctly interpret the Torah as saying that Jews have had the holy land taken away from them by God and it can only be re-established by God, not by the the act of men. Similarly the Koran says outright that Allah had given the holy land to the Jews, and groups like the Muslim brotherhood and Hamas that seek take Israel are motivated by political, not religious goals.
If anyone is going to create violence and chaos at first contact, it's not religious people but rather politicians that have a stake in a system that exposure to other, more equal or efficient systems may upend and industrialists that have a stake in the technologies that first contact will replace. There are so many other, historically consistent places to look for potential sources of revolt than mere ordinary people (in fact the majority of the human population) who are merely in search of the divine and greater meaning.
It's always these little small subsets hiding the allegedly "vast silent majority", but unfortunately they add up, they fight, and they ruin it all for the rest of us. I don't worry about the physicists with faith, I worry about the other 99.9999%.
I never thought I'd live to see the day Netanyahu was "moderate".
Do I have that about right?