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I agree this is unlikely to be true, but I keep in mind what we know now and what we knew 1 million years ago. The energy to run a PC would seem obscene to people even thousands of years ago (let alone what a PC is and what it can do). Pull someone from earlier in this timeline and see what they think of airplanes.

2.6 million years ago: Stone tools

1.7 million years ago: Controlled fire

5,000 - 3,000 BC: Writing

3,000 BC: The wheel

1543: Nicolaus Copernicus publishes his heliocentric model of the solar system

1687: Newton publishes "Principia Mathematica"

1915: Albert Einstein publishes the general theory of relativity.

1969: Apollo 11 mission successfully lands the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon.

This is exactly my thought as well. There are a bunch of very interesting things in development: fusion energy is getting closer and closer, approaches for warp bubbles are being discovered without humongous energy requirements, possibly a room-temperature normal-pressure superconductor, etc.

It's hard to predict how much research all of these will take to fully harness, but given our previous rate of progress I'm still very hopeful that the world in 100 years will have technology we can't even dream of.

A laptop consumes energy at the same order of magnitude as a human body—not an “obscene” amount. The physics of accelerating an organism to the relativistic speeds required to make space travel feasible are in a completely different realm.

Based on what we know it's highly unlikely/impossible but what if you don't have to accelerate?..

What if god is real (or gods, or whatever)?

That's what this all boils down to. It's the exact same line of logic.

Sure there could be an omnipotent all powerful being that just chooses to stay hidden from us for no provable, observable, or obvious reason. It's just impossible to prove or disprove.

What if they don't need to accelerate? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy. What if they can teleport? Neat, it's STILL a shitton of energy. What if they can hop dimensions or bend the universe? Neat, it's STILL a shit ton of energy.

What if it's not a shit ton of energy? Fuck it why not, how did they find us? They have tech for that? Fuck it why not, why aren't they showing themselves beyond these extremely rare sightings? They have a reason for that. Fuck it why not, why would every government hide these? Tech or war or something. Fuck it why not, why hasn't SETI or one of the thousand other independent science observatories or detectors not picked up any of this or reported on it?.....

and on and on and on.

So i can't prove that tomorrow the Sun God Ra won't descend from the heavens and sit atop the pyramids as if it was his throne and rule from on high, but I damn sure don't have any evidence that's why the sun is moving across the sky.

I totally agree with your way of thinking, that's the only way to stay sane.

But this green men circus makes me really uncomfortable at this point. I kinda want to believe.

It'd be an obscene amount a few hundred years ago.

You provided an timeline of human evolution, but has fundamental physics changed at the core?

Unfortunately, we haven't found any drop-in replacement to Newton's first & second laws for e.g.; Conversely, more & more of physics is condensing towards established standard models proving that our model of universe is more definite. In the quantum space our research is mostly finding new interactions, not fundamental particles everyday. Energy & it transformations are the biggest truths eventually. To propel crafts capable of interstellar voyage, immense energy burst is needed for propulsion. We have seen no evidence of the kind of physics which will break relativistic models - and no material which can sustain the thermals in the process.

At the core of it, our chances to find another habitable world & intelligent species wherever they might be is rapidly reducing. Universe is expanding faster than previous estimated and probably double as old if you consider recent research. Our window of opportunity to establish contact passed probably before we came into existence.

It is like predicting we'll be able to detect God by advances one day. That supernatural being could exist - but most scientific evidence points to a hard no, given we already know it is a mental / emotional construction.

Yes. This. 100%

If I was the government exchequer and comfortably spending on the refrigeration of alien entrails & annually greasing their flying saucers, I wouldn't _additionally_ spend billions of dollars setting up space observatories like JWST, new radio wave telescopes & deep space probes to find evidence of life. At the least, experts from scientific community will be invited to investigate any material finds & that information will trickle out in tiny amounts. Scientific community deeply believes in replication at its core. It is impossible for everything to remain compartmental.

And acknowledging existence of alien technology only makes the position of a country more formidable, not less. Our global relationship is today less of muscle (like the past) & more posturing. By acknowledging otherworldly technology's existence but denying the details, US would be incredibly in advantageous position militarily. Why wouldn't they if they already possessed these technology?

We as human race may be spiteful to our brethren, but not stupid given the obscene expenditure of wealth and resources we dedicate annually in lieu of feeding & keeping everyone happy

You comment sound like a “know-it-all”. We don’t know what these crafts are, where they are from and how they came here. A little humble attitude is more aligned with reality: there’s so much we don’t know.

My comment is based on the current understanding of physics and the odds of some creature capable of defying that being able to even be hidden.

I would love for us to find evidence of life in the universe which is why I despise this charade which takes attention away from the scientists who are actually trying to do so. But apparently SETI is in on it too or some other nonsense.

I would suggest you consider the possibility that the current understanding of physics a thousand years from now will look very different from how it looks today.

Even more so a million years from now.

The reality is that we're not a particularly intelligent species - as shown by the fact that we're currently terraforming our own planet to make it less hospitable.

Our culture may well be extinct within a century. So I think it's optimistic to believe that we as a species have much of a clue about anything at all.

Now put that in the context of an extremely old universe, and it's not hard to understand that we're unlikely to be the smartest people in the room.

FWIW I'm agnostic about UFOs. The problem is that they conflate two issues - aerial phenomena, and alien visitation.

There's no reason those should be connected. Or that the latter would inevitably be responsible for the former.

The scientific thing to do is to collect evidence of the former before assuming the latter.

So these incredibly advanced beings also keep accidentally crash landing their spaceships once they get to earth?

Who also somehow are aware of the location of earth, it having life, haven't made themselves known, and have only been seen in a way the governments can hush up (all of them).

This is just how it is. How it’s always been.

People need to believe in something. Multiple things. Anything. It’s why thousands of religions exist.

Most people have mundane lives and are wage slaves. This gives people hope. People want to believe there is more to life. Americans in particular want to believe their government is all powerful.

It should not be so shocking how easy it is to get people to believe this, or the fake moon landing, or anything else. People desperately want to believe, and the government is happy to enable it because it provides stability.