I think it is the height on human ignorance to believe that intelligent life could have only evolved on this tiny dirt ball. I am convinced it has to exist somewhere at sometime.
As for evidence: I just needs something as tangible as the covid vaccines... some proof that makes it believable it's not just some company trying to get research dollars.
I remember being really excited 25 (25!) years ago when a very intelligent professor I knew convinced me that evidence was plentiful (verified by high-ranking military) but it had to be kept under wraps as not to cause a public panic: they'd dole the information out slowly.
That's a tired story now. So I'd just need evidence more than just "trust us, we're high-ranking".
i.e. time and space can be as large as you like if life's everywhere you look.
What explanation do you think is most likely to explain the fermi paradox?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
[1] http://gpsinformation.net/main/gpspower.htm
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500W+*+%28distance+to+...
I think we will sooner than most people expect. And once we can do that we may also be able to start building a remote factory to build other probes and expand farther. Then it's only a matter of a few million years and we will have expanded to most stars in the Milky Way.
Is it:
1. Us finding relics on earth or else where of a long dead alien civilization?
2. Us being monitored by an advanced race of ET?
3. Them living amongst us?
4. Them influencing us, dealing with world governments?
I guess each scenario will require different types of proof.
I'm not sure how to proceed without defining scope.
However, since we've had decent tools to look for signs of life for decades and found nothing, for any one person to say they secretly made contact years ago is an 'extraordinary claim'.
I suspect that the universe, as a whole, only became hospitable to life recently. Probably many planets spawned organisms around the same time Earth did. That means nearly all of them are too many light years away for signs of their intelligent life to have reached us.