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Comment by oldstrangers | Hacker News Reader

Also a reasonable take. If you're sufficiently advanced to cover interstellar distances, avoiding detection (for the most part) is probably trivial in comparison.

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You don't need to be much more advanced than we are. You only need time - perhaps the alien civilization is millions of years older than ours. That would allow them to use peer-level technology to travel here.

That would mean they use rockets and jet engines. Which, if we're accepting (for the sake of argument) UFO sightings as evidence, they obviously do not. Naively, and as described, they demonstrate traits which strongly suggest technology far in advance of our own, to the point of harnessing physics we don't even understand.

It would also be very easy to see them coming, because there is no stealth in space and they would need to be burning fuel and giving off heat, and doing so for tens of thousands of years or more.

Why don't they just stay totally outside detection range, instead?

The same reason why petting zoos exist. The thrill and experience of getting so close to something exotic.

For some earthly evidence, the smarter the animal, the more it will exhibit “play” behavior. I suspect it’s an unavoidable quirk of evolved intelligence.

To see as much detail as possible without confirming they are here. Sensors aren't unlimited, aliens would be constrained by the same physics as we are.

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