Are we alone in the universe?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Lol, did Xanax get the memo and that’s the reason why he started talking about aliens?

[Physics Guy]

But there is nothing to say a group could not have started out from way away from us say from Ross 128 b which is about 11 light-years away. It's a quiet red dwarf (good news for atmospheres) so about 64.7 trillion miles distance. That gives them 147,000 years to get here. But it doesn't have to be the original group which started out the journey. If they populated as they came this way, someone (assuming they survive) could easily get here who had many tens if not hundreds of millions of years to evolve in the first place, and gain an enormous amount of knowledge first. There are also clusters around 12–12.5 light-years, including:

Luyten b (GJ 273 b) about 12 light-years distance and Teegarden’s Star b also about 12.5 light-years, so it would not by any means be impossible for their later descendants to get here assuming there was intelligent life in those clusters. Proxima b is also about 11 light years as well.... and as far as difficulty of finding us? No problem, we found them already and we ain't even 250,000 years old yet as a species! We understand what it takes assuming atmosphere and water, in order for life to evolve, they, if they had 400,000,000 years to evolve and develop could easily have already known about us through their own space telescopes or whatever trips they traveled.

True, it should be possible to cover a few light years with generation ships, or even just robotic probes. It would take many human lifetimes, traveling much slower than light, but that would still be a very short time on historical time scales, let alone evolutionary time scales. In fact it's not so easy to understand why the galaxy isn't already full of everybody's robotic probes. There may not actually be a lot of motivation to send probes all over, but even just the occasional whim ought to be enough to put out plenty of probes over a billion years.

A conclusion that's hard to avoid is the Great Filter: that civilizations capable of sending out big swarms of probes are incredibly rare, because of some major obstacle that makes it really hard for such civilizations to form or survive. Then the question is whether the Great Filter is ahead of us or behind us. Is the hard part just getting to where we are now, which we have somehow already done, so that from here it's clear sailing? Or is there some looming crisis that is likely to eliminate us, as it has everyone else, before we make contact with alien species? The idea that intelligent life even at our level is extremely rare in the universe is the optimistic theory.

Another possibility that I see is that more advanced civilizations exist but simply don't care about us. They have no interest in taking our planet or anything, because they have all the resources they need, and they're about as interested in interacting with us as we would be in interacting with crayfish. Maybe their probes have been spying on us for millions of years, quietly from out beyond Pluto, but it all just goes into footnotes: planet #10209347987 has some critters at the computers-and-rockets stage, blah-blah-blah see Appendix.

[Gadianton]

My sighting had the triangle perpendicular to the ground, rather than horizontally oriented

Pretty sure we don't have any of those.

[ajax18]

Lol, did Xanax get the memo and that’s the reason why he started talking about aliens?

It's not a partisan political issue for me Doc. It is more of a religious issue with sharp divisions between different people within the church. While I'm pleased that Trump is on the side of disclosure, that's not at all what sparked my interest in the issue.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Lol, did Xanax get the memo and that’s the reason why he started talking about aliens?

It's not a partisan political issue for me Doc. It is more of a religious issue with sharp divisions between different people within the church. While I'm pleased that Trump is on the side of disclosure, that's not at all what sparked my interest in the issue.

When it comes to Trump and his total transparency promises of releasing files, I’m keeping my expectations very low. We’ll be lucky to get 50% of those extra-terrestrial files, and even then, only the parts that don’t make Trump look incompetent. And, don't be shocked when the files are heavily redacted to protect both the President’s reputation and the identities of any underage extra-terrestrials.

[ajax18]

It's not a partisan political issue for me Doc. It is more of a religious issue with sharp divisions between different people within the church. While I'm pleased that Trump is on the side of disclosure, that's not at all what sparked my interest in the issue.

When it comes to Trump and his total transparency promises of releasing files, I’m keeping my expectations very low. We’ll be lucky to get 50% of those extra-terrestrial files, and even then, only the parts that don’t make Trump look incompetent. And, don't be shocked when the files are heavily redacted to protect both the President’s reputation and the identities of any underage extra-terrestrials.

I mean if it is really going to cause people to flip out to the point that we see a huge economic bust or be put at a significant disadvantage in a global arms and technology race due to disclosing the extraterrestrial files, I'd rather the files remain sealed. As you point out, you'd never really know if everything were released or not anyway.

[Gunnar]

I mean if it is really going to cause people to flip out to the point that we see a huge economic bust or be put at a significant disadvantage in a global arms and technology race due to disclosing the extraterrestrial files, I'd rather the files remain sealed. As you point out, you'd never really know if everything were released or not anyway.

I don't have the slightest doubt that there are other sentient beings with advanced civilizations somewhere in this vast universe besides us humans, but despite that, I am even more doubtful that we have yet encountered any of them or ever will, though I would probably be glad to be proven wrong about that, if they turned out to not to be as evil and murderously intolerant of others who are not like themselves as we humans have historically and too often shown ourselves to have been.