There’s definitely other life out there, but given a basic understanding of space and light speed travel, there is a zero chance we’ve made contact with non Earth life. The government has a direct benefit in claiming aliens or UFOs when testing their super military tech so our enemies are mislead on our militaries capabilities.
Like when trump posted a classified satellite image. Our population and all other governments had no idea we were capable of such clear satellite surveillance.
Swarms of von Neumann probes traveling at 0.1c would cover the galaxy in a very short timeframe…in galactic terms.
It also makes zero sense to test craft in a navy training range.
I still vote we are some sort of experiment for aliens to observe, and have been under the microscope as they watched us evolve from primal creatures to the death of the world as we advance with our destructive technologies.
there is a zero chance we’ve made contact with non Earth life
Yeah! Because heavier than air flight is impossible, and there’s no way aliens could hold enough helium to fly to another planet!
(Our ideas about what is possible change as our technology advances)
People tend to misapply this argument frequently. It is definitely a bit excessive to say there is zero chance, but still.
It’s less about what is possible, and more about what is likely. Our understanding of physics (and by extension, reality) is extremely advanced. There isn’t much that is going to surprise us going forward. Even relativity and quantum theory didn’t make Newtonian mechanics obsolete, they simply covered the fringe cases.
I just hate when people imply that we might suddenly learn that we were completely wrong about everything. It’s dismissive of the scientists who have given their lives to bring humanity to this level of understanding the universe.
I think when people imply we might suddenly learn that we were completely wrong about everything they are actually talking about how fast science seems to evolve these days, at the very least the public’s understanding of science.
I have coworkers with who i can talk about 3+ dimensions, quantum mechanics, time travel, uap and while none of us are experts in any of those fields it no longer feels like we should be wearing a tinfoil hat simply for being fascinated by such topics because we now understand these are real (nuanced) scientific topics and not “something from the movies”.
If an alien civilization was developed by the same survival mechanism as on earth, they’d value survival and expansion over things like discovery. So if an alien civilization had gotten to earth, it’d be advanced enough to have strip minded or taraformed the whole planet by now. And why wouldn’t they, since we’d be the intelligence of ants comparatively
Why would they strip mine earth when there are so many other planets around? There’s no point
Well I’m a Star Trek fan, and I’m optimistic that maybe the community between the stars is less narrow minded than the people on Earth today
Maybe climate change is the reason why. It’s a great filter that requires long term thinking and global cooperation to overcome. Maybe all the species similar to modern humanity end up polluting themselves back to the stone age and have to try again.
On the contrary, I’d recommend looking up the Fermi paradox. It exists because if we assume that ftl is impossible, both in a literal and effective sense, a civilization with the capability of long-range subluminal travel would still have the ability to colonize the galaxy within a few million years.
Now, you might be tempted to think, “okay, so a few million years from now is when we’ll start seeing them”, but that’s assuming they took as long as we did to evolve intelligence. If I’m not mistaken, there’s some speculation that dinosaurs were a significant contributor to delaying the rise of mammals, and those were around for over 100 million years. What if a civilization skipped the “oppressed by giant lizard-birds” stage? The result is that they’d potentially be millions of years ahead of us technologically.
Also, because I regularly see this question pop up in any conversation involving aliens,
“why would they come to our world? They’ve probably got everything they want!”
Why does a human want to explore the ocean? Why does a human want to explore space? Curiosity. Maybe they want to see it for themselves instead of looking at pictures that their friends posted on Spacebook. Maybe we’re small and adorable to them. There are plenty of reasons why they might check our world out that don’t involve conquest, genocide, slavery or other symptoms of rampant capitalism and authoritarianism.
Why would they send a probe to inspect ships from a visible distance? They could fulfill all their curiosity from lightyears away
No? If you think that’s actually an option, then you need to go outside and touch grass; and I mean that seriously. If you really think that looking at something from so far away that it literally takes light years to reach you is a suitable replacement for being there in person, then you desperately need to touch grass.
The government has a direct benefit in claiming aliens or UFOs when testing their super military tech so our enemies are mislead on our militaries capabilities.
They technically are UFOs. They are objects, they fly, and they are unidentified.
They’re not really unidentified. Someone knows what they are, just not us.
These are the sorts of things where the line between zero and practically zero gets blurry, so people feel the need to emphasize that it might not be zero. Like, the chances of me finding a winning lottery ticket on the street without buying one might not technically zero, but the odds are low enough that not only is it not going to be part of my financial plan, but I also don’t feel the need to justify why.
The odds of hyper drive aliens being on earth is zero. There might be an error bar on that number, but it doesn’t practically matter
