Hey guys, what are your thoughts on the existence of extraterrestrial life and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Extraterrestrial life = yes. It's a big universe and the chances of us being the only life in the entire universe is slim.
Aliens visiting us = no. For the same reason as above. It's a big ass universe.
Governments being able to hide aliens from us = lol no. If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they'd have taken over the planet in an hour.
I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.
Basically my thoughts. The speed of light, while the fastest thing we know, is as slow as smell on the scale of the universe. Any race of beings able to get here, check us out, and leave, would need technology that would break physics as we understand it. Not to say it's impossible, but we've now firmly stepped into beliefs, rather than anything based on observable data. Also, the notion of a race being so advanced they can travel faster than light accidentally crashing on our planet is pretty silly to me.
The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.
Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.
Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.
The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.
Absolutely! I mean primarily that just about any sentience that humans can conceive of is likely to experience some failure, even if down to just statistics. Even our dieties are fallible. So, it seems reasonable to expect that an intellectually superior sentience could make a mistake, leading to loss of craft to primitives like us. Then again, maybe I'm too dumb to conceive of a non-fault-prone intelligence.