Is there Alien Life?
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth. ~ Hawking
TLDR; Most Likely.
There are Billions and Billions of Galaxies each with Millions and Millions of planets all over 13 Billion years of Universal Existence. Even discarding the first 3B years, we have looked for what 40 years? maybe 150 if you count the invention of radio itself and then some. And of all the galaxies and all the exoplanets we have observed what 6000? lets get generous and call it 100,000 (more than 15x reality)
We’re not just looking in a tiny space but also a tiny timespan. Because for someone observing earth 5B light years away, Earth has no life. Because they’re looking at the wrong time. Similarly for us we may have to look at multiple places over multiple times (how is a diff story, this is about stats)
Looking at less than half a cup of water and then saying yeah the ocean probably has no life is just Hubris (to scale by order of magnitude)
difficulty in interstellar travel
The amount of heat and radiation and the required speeds of travel would mean that at those speeds. 1 Hydrogen ATOM. Would punch through any spaceship with the energy enough to pierce through the 10 times the strongest known materials and still have most of it left over. And all that is assuming we can build a spaceship with enough shielding in the first place
And over long distances, even NASA’s Starshot project is going to get vaporised as it speeds up. (we btw have made the calculations assuming Relativity is not in play. Because with that life is FAR FAR worse)
maybe they haven’t reached out yet?
I mean thats self explanatory. They haven’t reached out doesn’t imply they haven’t arrived but also that even if they have then they haven’t made themselves known. And even if they have then we haven’t yet developed the technology to detect that. That’s like 3 different levels of technology we are unsure on.
Also no. Those strange UFO sightings don’t count as Aliens. UFO implies it is Unidentified. By calling it Alien, you have immediately identified it. It could literally just be a software glitch or a hardware error or random natural phenomena or even some state secret and we won’t know for a while at least.
notes
While the drake equation itself is not an argument for life, what it represents is. The drake equation has even log error bars so large that the US wants to build a navy base in between it, making it basically useless at making any scientific claim more useful than “Earth is Flat”. But the equation fundamentally represents the idea that the search space is so large that the probability for existance of life is very high
