>Isn't human history littered with such examples? How long have we been doing physics for, and how stupid are we as a species?
Actually, no. That's a common misconception, but what tends to happen is that we observe that the models we use to describe the universe almost but don't quite work, as we advance enough to make more and more accurate observations, so we create updated models based on observation and experimentation.
What doesn't usually happen is that we discover that everything we knew was entirely wrong and we need to scrap it all and start over. Rather, we refine an understanding of the universe that builds upon what was already known.
Einstein didn't render Newton obsolete, we still use Newtonian physics, but now we understand that Newton isn't always accurate. Whatever we discover after Einstein isn't going to render him obsolete - that model has been tested so thoroughly that it obviously describes something very accurately. Whatever comes after relativity and QM still has to correlate with their observations.
We can fly a helicopter on Mars and stream it over the web. We can genetically engineer organisms. We can build pyramids out of atoms and photograph black holes. We detected the background radiation of the Big Bang a hundred years ago, and then made a heatmap of the entire visible universe. We've detected gravitational waves and the Higgs boson. We're really not that stupid.
>Also FTL doesn't seem to be necessary. An alien civilization could feasibly have sent out Von Neumann probes at sub-light speed and have populated an extremely large radius over the span of a few billion years.
Except what people claim to observe are craft that appear to violate the laws of physics, which doesn't seem like something a probe designed to drift aimlessly in space until it hits matter, consumes and replicates would do.
Also, the Fermi Paradox suggests that if a significant amount of our local space was colonized by Von Neumann machines, we'd know it. So either it isn't feasible, or it hasn't happened anywhere near us. If it hasn't happened anywhere near us, how did they even get here? Von Neumann machines replicate and launch from star to star. Why did they apparently bypass so many stars between whatever their last spawn point was, and us? And if they're here, why aren't they colonizing our planet or sun?
>It could all be CGI or ball lightning, and the burden of proof is higher than mere video, but not all footage is low-quality.
Fair enough, but most of it is.