A Simple Question...or 3!

[Whateverist]

Also, wouldn't it be possible for this unproven intelligent life to be 100's of billions of years superior to us? And actual hide from us 40,000 year old infants?

Well, it would necessarily have to come from, at least, a second generation star, much like our sun.
This requirement is there because the first generation stars only have Hydrogen in their makeup... and planets made of hydrogen are just gaseous clumps, or nebulae... not exactly planets at all! As this first generation star matures, it converts hydrogen to helium and close to the end of it's life cycle, it fuses nuclei to produce a large amount of elements up to Iron (in mass), and traces of the remaining heavier elements. The star dies when the fusion reactions' force ceases to balance the force of gravity.... which happens when the force of gravity isn't powerful enough to fuse heavy nuclei.

A second generation star uses hydrogen from somewhere else (a nebula) and the elements created by the first star will tend to clump around it, in planets.
So considering that the fist generation star had a lifetime of about 8 billion years, this second generation star will be about 5 billion years old, much like our sun.
Then you have to give it time for life to appear and then intelligent life. Here on Earth, it took too long, most likely due to all the mass extinctions we got... Elsewhere, such extinctions may have not happened and intelligent life could have developed much earlier... at best, 300 million years earlier.

So, at best, they would be a few millions of years ahead of us.... Even so, they may be bound by the physical limit of the speed of light in their travels. Also, why would they come here? The received some of our transmissions? Then they must have stated their travels some 60 years ago. If they are more than 60 light-years away (which would be very likely), then they wouldn't have even departed yet.

Nice detail. I can't help myself from saying 100's of billions is practically an order of magnitude more than our best guess regarding the age of the universe. So for any being to be that old it would have to exist independently of everything associated with the big bang. It would have to have come into existence much before the big bang associated with our universe. Such a creature would also have needed the means of getting to hell out of the way during the earliest stages of the big bang. Any being that can do all that may as well be gods for all the difference it makes.

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• Do you want to believe in God?

I do believe in God.

• ...or is [proof] the main thing holding you back?
  
• Do you believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe?

I believe in Physics, so yes. Either God specifically planted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, or life self-starts, and if life self-starts then there certainly should be life throughout the universe. Either case doesn't affect my salvation one way or the other.

Daniel, you interest me. So you do assume life is 3 billion or so years old on this planet. Are you saying you would have no problem accepting that life self starts? If so, I wonder how you reconcile that with any form of Christian faith.

Do you credit your version of the Christian God with creating the universe as we find it? Could you still make sense of God as you conceptualize it/Him if He is not the creator? Could the universe as we find it also self start? Could God as you understand it/Him also have to work within the universe as He finds it? Perhaps the laws of physics are just a given for God too with the only difference being His ability to work between or around those very laws from some higher perspective which transcend them in ways we can't imagine.

Please, do say more. Also, I wonder if you would count yourself as an agnostic? That is, I wonder if you embrace your belief without the illusion of certainty. [I don't ask because I'm eager to go on the attack. I know there are intelligent ways to embrace 'faith' and I'm beginning to think you may have found one.]