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.
If an alien wanted to visit the Earth, they would actually die hundreds to thousands of years before they would ever get here.
It’s simply just not worth the trip, when only your thousandth generation descendants would actually survive to make it.
Now, if aliens actually had warp drive technology, millions of years in the future from our technology, they probably aren’t even going to bother visiting us because we’re so archaic.
