[BoomBully]

I know it is abit of an old thread, but I feel I must post. I do beleive there is life beyond our own solar system. How advanced it is or whether it is intelligent, we cannot say. There are over 500 000 million stars in our galaxy alone and our galaxy is one of millions within the universe. To say ours is the only one is a little conceited IMHO. We also think as life must exist in our norms for life, an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, when life could evolve in another type of environment. Just because our level of genetics and understanding of life is not that advanced it doesn't means that it cannot exist.
As for contact with life beyond our solar sytem. Think of the following; we have been beaming radio signals out into space for about 100 years. If there is life within 100 light years it must been at a stage when they could hear our radio signals. It would then depend on whether they would think about answering. would you answer a random radio signal? If they did answer they would then have to send it back to us. Even at the speed of light it would take years. Maybe we have been detected and answered, it just the fact we haven't recieved the answer yet.