What about other life?

I wouldn't be surprised if we discover signals from an alien civilization in our lifetimes. Would this affect your religious beliefs?
I know the more liberal believers wouldn't be affected, but the more conservative types (fundies) I've talked to insist that extra-terrestrials aren't even a possibility because their existence would contradict the Bible (I'm not exactly sure how).
What do you think?

I think that is would have been silly of God to create this whole universe and only put life on one planet. I think that most would not feel that extraterrestrial life conflicts with religious beliefs really, just those that think very small thoughts.

I got no problems with the possibility of alien life. In fact, it seems almost unimaginable that some form of life does not exist out there.

I'm pretty sure that most of my fellow Baptists would have a hard time really weaving alien life into the Biblical view of things. They take the Bible too literally and "westernly" thinking.

It would be interesting to see input on this topic from a non-christian religious point of view.

To your main question, I don't really have an answer, as I'm not religious. I do however like the topic of other life and signals from them.

I don't think we will discover signals from alien civilizations in our lifetime or any time soon after that. Here's why I think that:

Life has been on Earth since the Pre-Cambrian ~1 billion years.
Intelligent life has been around 50,000 years to maybe a few million years (if you count intelligent life as being self aware and the ability to use rudimentary tools.)
50,000 years equals 0.005% of the time.
Intelligent life that's been on Earth that could send a signal is ~100 years or 0.00001% of the time.

We've already started to move away from broadcast signals to cable/directed signals/fiber optics...

In for about half of the time we've been able to send signals we've also been able to destroy ourselves.

My thoughts are that you need to find an intelligent species that's in the same window as us regarding sending signals, that hasn't destroyed themselves, and that's relatively close by. Add that to the stars that we think of now as being able to support life. I conclude that while life is most likely abundant in the galaxy and even our neighborhood, we won't be finding it anytime soon.

Andreas