The people who believe this stuff point to everything from the beginning of life to the Egyptian pyramids as evidence of alien visitation.
We’re talking about a conspiracy theory. The absence of evidence is, in itself, evidence of the conspiracy.
However, every now and then you’ll get an ex-military general or disgruntled government employee writing a book to “expose the truth” about some “top secret documents”. It’s convincing enough to those who already believe it’s true.
This ends up being a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ argument. Anything that can’t be readily explained in the historical or geological record? - an alien did it.
Nothing put forward by these ‘whistleblowers’ is conclusive - they mostly report speculation and hearsay, and in some cases outright fabrication.
But I’m more concerned with the lack of evidence from other governments outside the US; not all of them are interested in conspiring to keep secrets.
I guess we will never know now: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-aliens.html?mcubz=0
Hillary Clinton Gives U.F.O. Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files …
I think one thing missing from this conversation is the context of the statement of Fermi’s Paradox … although Sir Charles Darwin published in 1859, his theories weren’t widely accepted immediately afterward … it took many decades for the scientific community to be convinced that Darwin’s ideas had any value and if we can assume that it wasn’t until the late 1920’s before these ideas came into the “mainstream” … then we can say that Fermi’s statement was made when evolutionary science was still in it’s infancy … so much has been discovered since 1950 that today the paradox really doesn’t hold all that much water anymore …
If we assume that the only pre-requisite for life on a planet is the existence of liquid water, then it is paradoxical that we don’t find life everywhere we look in the universe … but that’s one hell of an assumption, any variation will completely destroy Fermi’s Paradox … first we must question the assumption the paradox is based on …
Plus we need to be careful with how serious we take the jokes nuclear physicists crack over a few beers at lunchtime … or the next thing we know is we have a black hole in Switzerland …
If faster-than-light travel is possible, and these alien civilizations have millions of years to exploit it … where are all the tourists?
You really don’t want the Adjusters’ tests.
“Please provide full details of your Anal Probe claim. Include photographs and witness particulars”.
“Please indicate if you believe your Anal Probe claim can be addressed by
A)Repair
or
B)Replacement”.
Because of alien budget cuts, from now on you will be required to probe your own anus.
I personally believe life exists almost everywhere in the galaxy. The only problem is that 99.9% of this life is slime mold.
No, I take that back. Slime mold would be way too advanced.
Imagine every year you role a die to see if you get a certain type of life. The basic of life evolving from non-life looks pretty good. About 1:100,000,000 chance of life emerging from non-life per year. It sounds like terrible odds, but if you’re talking about billions of years, a measly 100 million to 1 is pretty good odds. I base this inference upon the only place where we’re absolutely sure life exists: Earth. Life on Earth began almost as soon as the earth was cool enough to support life. It seems if you have liquid water and a safe place away from ionizing radiation, you can pretty much guarantee life will evolve.
Going from single cell life to multicellular life is a very long shot. The Earth had nothing but single celled organisms for almost 3 billion out of our 4 billion year existence. If some other alien civilization visited us a billion years ago, they would have looked around, said “Ew gross” and left. Life didn’t start getting interesting until a bit more than 500 million years ago with the Cambrian Explosion. That puts multicellular life emerging out of single celled life at around 3 billion to one chance of happening.
And if you talk about intelligent life, the odds are also bad. We had complete evolution of synapsids, their destruction, a new dinosaur evolution, their destruction before we got to mammals and their overly large brains. Reptiles, Amphibians, and even the warm blooded synapsids and dinosaurs did just fine without a lot of metabolism wasting brain power. And out of of all the various families of mammals, only two families seem somewhat capable of more advanced intelligence. Not great odds, and our species may have almost been wiped out during one of the glacial periods. If the weather was a bit worse, we wouldn’t be around.
I haven’t really taken to trying to plug this into Drake’s Equation, but I suspect that the number of intelligent species in this galaxy isn’t all that much greater than 1, and great distances separate us. There’s a Goldilocks Zone in galaxies where you cannot be too close to the center (too much iodizing radiation) or too close to the rim (not enough materials) in order to form life. That means there’s only a thin band around the galaxy capable of forming life. It’s likely large distances safely separate intelligent species to keep them safely away from other intelligent species who they’re going to pick fights with. If that’s not proof for an overall intelligent designer to the universe, I don’t know what is. Galactic conquest and anal probes are out of the question.
However, as rare as intelligent life is in this universe, I bet having a large enough moon at just the right distance and with just the right orbit is even rarer. I suspect that light speed traveling aliens have seen canyons wider than the grand canyon, mountains taller than Everest, and seas bigger and grander than the Pacific. They probably don’t have too much interest in our boring little planet. But a solar eclipse like we get? That’s special. Your best bet for finding an alien among us it to go to the next totality solar eclipse and look around. And being in Missouri at the last solar eclipse, I can guarantee they’ll fit right in.
I think you’re laboring under the common misconception about the Fermi paradox.
The Fermi paradox does not assert that life is, or should be, common.
It simply states that we currently know of no reason why life could not have arisen on thousands or even millions of worlds in our galaxy, and then spread through our galaxy. The paradox is really just asking the question Why don’t we see evidence of ETs?
And the answer, might be that abiogenesis is really, really unlikely, say. But, at this time, we don’t know that.
Note that we don’t need to posit FTL travel. Even chugging along at sub-luminal speeds, a species could visit every star in the galaxy in a small fraction of the galaxy’s age.