Earth is the equivalent of Bugfuck, Montana. Population 3.
Just because you rarely see another car drive through…doesn’t mean other people arn’t real. And the ones that do drive through arn’t there to see you but to get some resources for their travels.
The majority of arguments for and against alien life are wrapped up in human personification. (as is mine to a degree). But, IMHO aliens are real…they have been here…but it was just to get gas. And a bit of sightseeing and a bit of poking the monkeys and their adorable flying craft.
My theory–out of the thousands of planets we have discovered, not one of them is a good match for an Earth analog. And we speculate that life might could form from wildly different building blocks, but we don’t know that–the only example we have is made from proteins and nucleic acids. Planets in the right size range in the right position around the right type of long-term stable star conductive to life as we know it seem pretty rare. So technological species are likely incredibly rare. Our nearest neighbor might be 50 thousand light years away. Our nearest neighbor might be 50 million light years away.
I the common trope is that humans are the young, emergent intelligence in this local area of our galaxy. We are awaiting contact with the elder intelligences. Why haven’t they contacted us? Where are they? They are hiding, or avoiding us for some reason. This idea is taken for granted as self evident.
The complete opposite is likely to be true. We are the elder race. We are the first emergent, technologic, intelligence in the local area. We will never meet another intelligent being in our neck of the woods because we are it. There isn’t anyone else out there.
11. Earth is deliberately not being contacted. On Earth, we have policies about contacting indigenous peoples; it’s possible that the same thing could be happening with us. Advanced alien societies may enforce rules that limit contact only to species that attain a lofty degree of technological or cultural evolution.
They arn’t communicating with us because they can’t anymore then we could communicate with a wasp. Same reason they don’t just land in the middle of Yankee Stadium, they may be superior in some ways, but we’re still dangerous.
As for other tropes like ID4…it could be completely possible they don’t even have or see any need for defensive weapons.
Telemark was right about one thing, I’m starting to wander into random musings.
I don’t think we’re a zoo…or a particularly fascinating species…just a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
The majority of arguments against alien life is that there is no evidence for it. Zero. That does not mean it cannot exist, but it means that those who believe that it definitely does are entertaining a fantasy, not dealing in facts. There is statistical spitballing that suggests it is likely that there are other planets that can support life, but even so, the distances involved are infeasible to bridge without some new laws of physics that we don’t know about yet. If aliens have actually been here, they have left no physical evidence. I am talking about like dead alien bodies, artifacts from a crashed space ship, DNA (not evidence by inferential reasoning [i.e., weird pictures carved on cave walls] or that Erich Von Daniken bullshit).
Even if someone occasionally drives to Bugfuck, Montana, for gas, sooner or later someone would run their car into a tree, ditch a dead battery, or drop a cigarette butt there. We got nothin’.
I find it more likely that various craft chased by American aircraft*…that exhibit much greater abilities then those of American aircraft, are in fact alien vessels then Chinese or Russian pilots in possession of super-advanced aircraft.
Supposing there is “life” somewhere else–it’s just too far away.
Let’s be honest, and put down the sci fi books, and get real. It just isn’t worth it for us to go that far, and for whatever life there may be elsewhere, the same applies to them.
So let’s say you live in Bugfuck, Montana. They only reason YOU don’t see other people is because you don’t leave Bugfuck, Montana. If you did, you’d eventually run into other people. If Bugfuck Montana is earth, we can’t leave it. Not really, yet.
Now imagine the only OTHER 3 people on earth are in Bumfucking Egypt. You could travel the world and still never run into these people.
If we could easily get off planet, and could go anywhere we want, we could, maybe, run into aliens eventually.
I think there probably is other intelligent life out there, but I personally think that intelligent life is pretty rare and that we are completely out of range of anybody that we could reach, or could reach us. Sort of like going from Bugfuck, Montana, hitting the a coast and being unequipped to travel the ocean (i.e. FTL travel) and reaching BFE,.
