Quote:
Originally Posted by 57 On Red
Sagan didn't actually say that. He indulged in unwise speculation about remote, illiterate tribes' records of visits by 18th-century explorers, and he later regretted getting charlatans like Erich von Daniken started. He said it was improbable that any higher civilisation had visited Earth and suggested that, if it had in fact happened, we'd know about it.
Even given the number of potential habitable planets in the galaxy, the likelihood of one of them happening to produce faster-than-light interstellar spacecraft, not only within the vanishingly small time-window of human civilisation on Earth, but coinciding precisely with the American cultural fixation on that topic during Earth's last eighty orbits of the Sun, is not really worth considering.
Yes.
Also, there have been many billions of species on earth. Only a handful were smart enough to make a spear. Only 1 has made it to space. I'm not sure it's that common, even if a planet can sustain life.
Plus it might be that such a species almost inevitably destroys itself. If you have the capacity to travel between stars, you also developed nukes, killer viruses, many forms of environmental degradation, weapons we haven't dreamed up yet, AI, etc. 100 years from now, how easy will it be to make a weapon that can wipe out a city?
You also might get unlucky with sun spots, meteors, super volcanoes, etc.
And, as implied in 57's post, the distances might just be impossible, no matter the tech.
An alien life form evolving, surviving, having the means and will to come here, etc is a very particular scenario out of countless possibilities.
Then also, they kind of try to keep it a secret, but are really bad at it, and the government tries to cover it up, etc. and this leaves us with lots of rumors and hearsay and stories and blurry pictures and so forth for decades but proof never emerges. Uncannily, this creates the same scenario as if aliens were a figment of popular imagination.
The aliens came all this way not to conquer us or help us, Or if they do help us, it's not by like telling us the cure for cancer, but by appearing in the visions of people who've taken drugs and telling them that we're all one.