At most, my senses can only perceive a relatively miniscule portion of the external world. My consciousness is confined to my body, and my body is confined to a single spatial area at a time. Thus, even if the physical world is exactly as geographers and scientists describe, I cannot survey the entirety of it at once. This fact demolishes the idea that a being with my limitations could ever truly know if a foreign creature is extraterrestrial or domestic to earth--I cannot verify an animal's planet of origin simply by looking at it.
If I have not traveled to all of the world and if I am not omnipresent, then I am incapable of knowing all forms of animal life on earth. There could be many animals, some with appearances I have never seen in any educational material or work of entertainment, that I have no knowledge of. Some of these animals may even seem to be extraterrestrial, though they actually inhabit my planet. Some might be extraterrestrial despite appearing to be domestic.
It follows that even if I saw an exotic creature--one that appeared to be extraterrestrial--I could never actually know if it is from my planet or from elsewhere. Since appearances can be misleading, they can only prove that things appear a certain way, meaning that a creature's familiarity to me in no way indicates its place of origin. An alien life form could look familiar, or it could look foreign to any taxonomic reference point I know of; neither is impossible.
Epistemic limitations render both the existence of extraterrestrial life uncertain, but they also render me utterly incapable of verifying the existence of extraterrestrials even if they are right in front of me. All I have the ability to do, therefore, is amass evidence that a certain creature comes from either my planet or another. But evidence is not the same as proof!
It is the facts about a topic that go unmentioned that are often some of the most foundational truths about the subject.
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