Aliens are our circus in bread & circus. Don’t think about the stolen 2020 election, uniparty control of the media, corporate capture of our regulatory agencies and politicians, impending inflation, southern border disaster, persistant BLM riots etc. etc. Instead, think of aliens.
Some reality from Quillette:
The laws of Physics: Travel from another star in any reasonable time requires near-light speed travel. A ship propelled by onboard conventional rocket fuel would require more fuel than there is mass in the visible universe to accelerate to near light speed and slow down at the end of the voyage, so clearly some more advanced fuel would be required. But even using nuclear fusion one would use more than 2,000 times the mass of the ship in fuel for each acceleration and deceleration to and from near-light speed. Basic physics constraints imply that any on-board propulsion technology that could power a conventional ship-sized spacecraft to travel from one solar system to another at near light speed and decelerate it within our solar system would require using energy that is comparable to the entire amount of power used by all of humanity at the current time. Hard to imagine any civilization devoting such extensive resources to visit us only to hang around secretly spying on aircraft carriers, or abducting humans to perform kinky experiments.
It only hurts when you stop: Some reports claim UAPs travel extremely fast and stop or turn instantly. No matter what the propulsion system, g-forces experienced in such a maneuver would be enough to crush steel, not to mention the unfortunate aliens inside. That is, unless one had “inertial dampers” like they have in Star Trek, which, alas, are science fiction technobabble.
The Lunar Module was ugly for a reason: Moving in space and traveling in our atmosphere are two different things. There is no reason to have fancy aerodynamics in space because there isn’t any atmosphere to have dynamics in. Whatever craft you travel in through the galaxy will not be the same type of craft you would want to design to perform aerial acrobatics in on Earth.
Why here?: Most Stars in the galaxy are older than our sun so it is reasonable to suspect that an advanced civilization, if such civilizations survive periods like the one we are now living in, would have been able to observe the Earth since its formation. But over the past 4.5 billion years, we have only been sending out signals of technological intelligence for a century or so, meaning that observing Earth at any random time since it formed, one would only have a one in 50 million chance of detecting life here. Moreover, since our radio and TV signals have only been traveling at light speed for 100 years, any civilization that detected such signals would have to be: (a) close by, and (b) ready to immediately launch a massive, complex, and expensive light speed mission to Earth in order to have made it here by now. And that is if they were lucky enough to detect our signals in the first place. There are an infinite number of frequencies to search, and as anyone who has cable TV knows, where there are only perhaps 400 channels to scan, one generally has a hard time finding what one is looking for before the program one is seeking is over.
Why travel in the first place: In this pandemic era, many of us have learned that it is a lot easier to have a ZOOM meeting than to try to embark on air travel across international lines. This is particularly true for space travel. It is far, far easier to both search for extraterrestrial intelligences by listening for signals, or to attempt to communicate with other galactic species by cleverly sending signals, than it is to try and bridge the gap with spacecraft. If we are ever to learn about intelligent aliens, it won’t be by meeting them in the air, but by listening or watching the heavens. Even that is a longshot, but at least is possible. That truth goes for aliens as well as for us.