Do aliens exist?

Yes. People are immigrating between countries all the time.
Now as for extraterrestrial, I'm not so sure.

It seems very likely that there is life somewhere else in the universe (though far from the "with so many planets, it's inconceivable that there isn't" that most people seem to believe. They don't know the first thing about probability) however "intelligent life" I'm not so sure about.
First you have to consider "what is intelligence?" Are dogs intelligent? Are cats? Are Humans? What we consider "intelligent" seems a very narrow spectrum to me. (So does what we consider life, actually, which is what I'm going to start talking about in the next paragraph instead.)
We, for some unknown reason, seems to think that life requires water, probably because all life we know about does. (Duh! All life we about is on Earth. It all evolved in the same environment, and possibly all from the same cell.)
I have absolutely no idea how to conclude this writeup--the beginning and middle weren't that great either--so I'll just say this: ...umm...I can't think of anything to say. Never mind.

Why do people care if there are aliens or not? I think on one level, people lust for the technology that we could take from aliens. On another level, I think some people think alien visitations would be a good way to explain myths and religion.

Jesus could have been an extraterrestrial, for example. Angels could have been aliens, too. Some people theorize that there are different alien races, and that our roles as pawns in some sort of intergalactic war between these aliens might be documented in the Bible.

But what does this really solve? So we could theoritically explain our creation as some sort of lab experiment by an alien race. Our DNA might have been dumped here by aliens millions of years ago. God might just be the name of some alien general or president who made Earth his own little pet project. So what? Does that really solve the questions brought up about creation, religion, the meaning of life, and the purpose of the universe? No. It just offsets them from human problems to alien problems. If God were an alien, then who is the alien's god? What myths and religious beliefs might these alien races have? It seems like a circular argument to me.

The possibility of life outside of our own solar system is possible, but due to our own system being a bit of a lucky fluke it is unlikely that each star system, or even most star systems, contain intelligent life.

Our solar system contains a gas giant (Jupiter) in the outer system and the third planet's (Earth) moon is proportionally larger than most planet's moons. Jupiter manages to reel in any large rogue asteriods and keep them in an orbit between mars and itself or deflect them back out into space, protecting the inner planets from any serious damage (although Hollywood will probably continue to make large-death-asteriod-movies). Earth's moon serves to keep our planet upright. If the moon was smaller or didn't exist, Earth would flip its axis every 100,000 years or so. That means that what was once a point on the equator would become the north pole, and any life that had developed in that time would most likely perish in the new environment. Hence, no time for evolution and no intelligent life.

Well, if you read the news, you might have seen this item:

A team of scientists has recovered microorganisms in the upper reaches of the atmosphere that could have originated from outer space.
The living bacteria, plucked from an altitude of 10 miles (16 km) or higher by a scientific balloon, could have been deposited in terrestrial airspace by a passing comet, according to the researchers. The microorganisms are unlike any known on Earth.

Note that there may be questions concerning the experiment, but it raises some interesting scientific and theological questions.

Looks like the answer may be yes after all.

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From API Newswire. No, this was not posted as a joke, it appeared in the November 26, 2000 Newswire.