I've always believed that there is intelligent life out there - the odds of it existing between billions of planets and millions of galaxies pretty much confirm this.

Have they been here to visit though? That's infinitely less certain.

I do know that we cannot think about things like travel time, distance, and speed limited to human terms if we really want to move forward with our understanding of possible alien life. Our galaxy alone is BILLIONS of years old, and human existence only makes up a teeny-tiny little blip on the end of that timeline.

It's not much of a stretch to think that there might be many life forms out there that have existed for millions - or even billions - of years. Now think about how much humanity has advanced in a couple thousand... or even the last 100 years.

There's no imagining what an intelligent species that's thousands of times older than us could be capable of. It's beyond even our greatest imagination, just like the technology of today could never be imagined or understood by those in biblical times.

Now when it comes to religion, the bible was written a couple-thousand years ago by humans. Those humans only knew what existed around them and as it related to the earth itself, they had no understanding of further planets and galaxies. I give the bible and religious texts a break here, and the discovery of alien life wouldn't disprove anything in that regard.

Nor would the discovery disprove that God exists; it would only prove that we weren't able to fully grasp the scale at which God created the universe a couple thousand years ago.

Now that we have SOME understanding of the vastness of the universe, it's pretty easy to say that WE misunderstood the entire time what God is and the grand scale of that he created; we were working with very limited info at the time.

I think as time goes on, religion will start to recognize this more and more and not stick so closely to their original religious texts they were founded upon. I've always been at that point anyway, as I believe in God 100% but think the bible was written as more of a "guide" to be taken as a set of morals and principles and never meant to be interpreted as historical fact of events that took place.

TLDR - the existence of alien life wouldn't make me any more or less religious, or change my belief in God. Just like evolution doesn't change my belief, God could've created it as part of his grand plan (as well as the entire universe and other life forms)