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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Not sure I agree with this, but here is one argument that worrying about aliens might not be "bad guy bias", but rather a very reasonable worry (not something we should spend every day in fear of, more like the worry that we might be wiped out by an asteroid or comet hitting the earth without alien intervention)

http://sites.inka.de/mips/r...

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

While the huge number of star systems out there with planets makes it highly likely that there is life elswhere, and some form of intelligent life somewhere out there, the lack of any pickup of anything looking like an intelligent transmission by the long-running SETI project is not very encouraging about there being much of the latter anywhere nearby in our galaxy, or even pretty far away in our galaxy. Somebody might be listening to us, but they do not seem to be sending anything out on their own. Given how difficult it is to get life going and then to get multi-cellular life going, intelligent life out there may in fact be very scarce.

Also, as long as Einstein remains correct and the speed of light is an essential limit to velocity, interstellar travel remains very unllikely or difficult.

Of course, if one wishes to accept that perhaps there are much higher civilizations than us, able to overcome the speed of light limit, and even some kind of galactic or even inter-galactic civilization that maintains some kind of higher order as in so many sci-fi series, then it would not be illogical to have had an outbreak of visitations after 1945, coinciding with the big outbreak of UFO sightings, not all of which have been explained, given that in 1945 we humans set off explosive nuclear weapons, something that a higher order interplanetary civilization would presumably keep track of in "developing" plantary civilizations, indeed, the theme of the original "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

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