Dr. Stephen Hawking recently theorized about the possibility of life in places other than Earth. And while lately it seems like Dr. Hawking is in the news for pop-science opinions rather more often than for actual scientific research, he brings up a few good ideas. For fun, I’d like to add a couple more. Life, in places other than our lil’ blue planet, possibly…

• …is less intelligent/evolved than us and haven’t invented any modes of transportation, communication and other technology that we’re using in space exploration. Perhaps they’re still in a prehistoric or even single-celled stage.
• …has already nuked itself.
• …is vastly intelligent and want nothing to do with our meager selves and our ass-backwards planet.
• …have a dominant species (like Earth’s humans) that share a lot of traits with Dan O’Bannon’s Geiger-inspired aliens and we’re better off not discovering them…or being discovered by them.

The universe, and what lies beyond, might be infinite – there must be something somewhere.

Religion seems to create more problems that it solves. For a moment, forget about:

• whether organized religions make sense or which one is the right one, belief in something…anything intangible is fine. For some people, they seem to need that for direction and meaning in their life. For others, that direction and meaning comes from different sources like science, family, drugs and others. To me, this is all ok; different strokes for different folks.
• Being concerned with events that may or may not have happened prior to pre-recorded history.

Organized religion seems to create too many “our supreme being(s) is/are better than your supreme being(s)” situations. On small scales, this leads to cliques and faith-based segregation. In a global sense, this often leads to full-on wars.

What if instead, people believe in themselves, first and foremost? What if people live life being the best person that they can be, simply being kind to themselves and to others? War is acceptable homicide. I can’t see it being worth starting a war with somebody because they believed in themselves. Killing someone for believing in themselves and treating others with dignity and respect would be flat out murder.