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Even if we had visitation I still think that they did it without FTL travel. It's much more likely to me that they calculated that we had a high probability of intelligent life or whatever condition they're after hundreds or thousands of years ago and made the voyage.

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Perhaps they are expanding exponentially across the galaxy like bacteria in a Petri dish. We just happened to be within their expanding sphere of influence.

It only takes a head start of a few hundred million years to cross the galaxy side to side at large but comprehensible speeds.

Also, our scientific models work well for 90% of stuff - that doesn't mean they reflect the whole at all. Newton thought gravity was a force, Einstein a warping of spacetime. Newton was right - to a point. Was Einstein right - to a point? I'm not a physicist, but I am a scientist. If we accept there are 'aliens' - a lot can be learned in 100 000 years of civilisation. They could be a billion years ahead of us.

I completely agree. The mathematical models we use to understand the world are maps and we should not conflate them with the territory.

We should stop using the term "law" to describe what has always been "the most widely-accepted approximation to what we've seen so far". It is just a model and we will never be certain of whether a better one is just around the corner.

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