In the movie Contact, Ellie Arroway posits the following: “If just one in a million of those stars has planets, and if only one in a million of those has life, and if just one in a million of those has intelligent life, then there would be millions of civilizations out there.”

So now Alan Boss, astronomer with the Carnegie Institution, believes there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy. He's written a new book: "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."

Other scientists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results. They published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology, concluding that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

So let me get this straight. These men created a god (small "G") -- the computer -- which subcreated its own new world, using parameters that were essentially man-made, and then ran it through some virtual warp-time in order to analyze the outcome. Computers only know the information that human beings feed into them, and what comes out of an experiment like this is no better than science fiction like Contact or Star Trek.

It's just more of an effort to explain life without the God who is real. I think the surest sign that there is no life on other planets is that none of it has tried to contact us.