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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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UFOs have always been real, they've never been alien. It's just an unknown object of phenomenon being detected.
An alien civilization sophisticated enough to travel to earth would be emitting radios waves for hundreds if not thousands of years prior. Earth is covered in a wide array of telescopes pointed at space and we haven't heard anything yet. In fact some suspected cases turned out to be microwaves in the break room and oscillating black holes, none aliens.
It's likely we are the first sophisticated civilisation able to travel to another planet, and we are no where near travelling outside our solar system never mind our galaxy.
We probably wouldn't know the signals when we see them.
It assumes that alien civilizations would be broadcasting regular repeating signals at high power. In my lifetime we've moved from high power repetitious analog signals to much lower power digitally encrypted and compressed signals.
Encrypted and compressed signals look random to an observer who doesn't know the keys/algorithms. On top of that, we've moved from individual huge transmitters (e.g. TV stations) to a plethora of tiny transmitters (e.g. cell phones). In a single human lifetime.
If we don't scorch our civilization out of existence, we'll adopt even lower power communication systems: point to point lasers, CPU-intensive encoding systems, and probably even more exotic stuff. Our signals will disappear into the background noise of space.
We don't know what to look for.
I'm in full agreement with this one.
You realize humans have only had the ability to search for aliens using electronic equipment for less than 200 years right?
The universe is ~14 billion years old. The earth is only ~4 billion years old. Humanity is only ~200,000 years old.
You need to read about the Fermi paradox. The likelihood of extraterrestrial life existing is a mathematical certainty. We just haven't seen any due to a multitude of factors.
If it existed within our observable limits we are likely to have heard of it.
The Fermi paradox doesn't imply sophisticated alien life exists on earth.
Of all observations we have have only found one species able to leave their planet deliberately. That's humans. There no evidence of any species leaving their solar system. Humans have never went beyond the moon, other than robots. Only one of which has reached the end of the solar system, but not entering another.
We also have no evidence of life on another planet to base any calculations on. The best estimate of life existing anywhere else is zero. You need another observation per planet to make any realistic estimate.
People are biased even physicts by the desire for extraterrestrial life. It adults looking for a father figure, we had god but once we went beyond the clouds and developed the ability to explain most phenomenon people look for a replacement. Someone to explain all our problems and give us solutions.