I just spent about an hour writing a response to Martin's comments on the infeasibility of alien visitation. When I hit save, I got a timeout error, and the entire thing was erased. I'm posting again to ask if anyone here would even be interested in a conversation about that topic. If so, I'll retype it later.

I wrote to Matt about this a while back. I guess he didn't have time to reply:

I love the Atheist Experience. A couple of quibbles about this week's show, though: When you and Mark were riffing about the absurdity of alien visitation, you guys were making a lot of assumptions about hypothetical alien civilizations that were shaky. Example: why would you assume an older, advanced civilization would need to spend a large percentage of its resources to explore space? With advanced technology and/or novel forms of economies it may be very cheap to explore the universe with automated machines. Like you, I don't believe the Earth has been visited, but it's not because I think it's unlikely--I don't believe we know enough to make that assertion yet--I disbelieve the claims because they lack credible evidence. Keep up the good work!

Zed, A comment of mine once disappeared because of timing out, but that will not be happening again. Just prepare your comment in a word processor program. Then when you are finished, copy and paste your comment into the box on the web page.