You wrote:

Why do people assume that we aren't worth the *visit*?
That is all I hear in this thread...we are a piece of crap *WHY* would aliens want to come light years to put silly pictures in crops?

I have made the point in a couple different ways in this very thread that there are definitely significant reasons why ET would want to travel to Earth: I mentioned water, women, and candy bars as representative of our planet's attractions, but surely, it wouldn't take much thought to come up with a few more....Lessee....reefer, rock & roll, draft beer, and NBA hoops to add to our list of attractions that, so far as we know, can only be found on this here little ol' planet.

I also noted in reply to Soc II, that water exists here in all 3 of its known states: liquid, solid, and gas. (This latter is the unspeakable water vapor which is the dominant greenhouse gas.) Next to the sun, it is the water in our oceans and the vapor in our skies (clouds) which are probably responsible for most of our climate, with ice also having a (sometimes) very significant role, but I digress.

So Earth, as far as we know, is a rarity, at least within our ability to detect distant planets around distant stars. That, admittedly, is not great, but improving all the time. So far, we've found nothing like Earth, but there are uncountable stars and probably uncountable galaxies, so our sample to this point is quite small, and we shouldn't be too alarmed or discouraged that we've found no exoplanet in our very limited search which would appear to be capable of supporting life as we know it.

An important corollary to our ability to detect Earth-like planets is that our search is pretty much restricted to relatively near-by stars - those within, say, 5 to 50 LY distance. But therein lies the rub, and it's a very big rub, because those relatively near-by stars are still a very, very long way from here.

The universe is old enough, and there are enough stars just in our own galaxy, that it is conceivable that some might support life that has succeeded in overcoming the limitations which are holding back our own species, i.e. such civilization got technologically advanced, didn't destroy itself with internecine warfare, set off for neighboring stars, and found Earth.

So it is conceivable that some ET could be here. Certainly, there are some indications of that - arguable, but there you are - but I do not consider crop circles among those indicators for reasons that I have spelled out elsewhere in this thread.

So to sum up. ET could be here because Earth might have stuff that ET might want. But would ET come here and do things that Earthlings could do, like make crop circles? I think not.

Now ask yourself, if ET wants to come here and announce its presence, wouldn't it do something that our species just couldn't do? As you've read elsewhere in this thread, there are many of us who just aren't that impressed by crop circles, or the side-effects on the target crop or field. Surely, it looks like somebody with some resources has gotten into the act, but is that more likely to be sneaky humans, or aliens who have voyaged across the cosmos?

Deploying Occam's Razor, we pare away extraordinary explanations where simple explanations will suffice.

S