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Trainguyrom@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The biggest challenge with believing in extra terrestrial beings visiting earth is just the sheer size of space. The closest solar system to Earth is Alpha Centauri which is over 4 light years away. By our current understanding of physics it is impossible to travel faster than light, so any visitors from Alpha Centauri would have had to travel for centuries if not millennia to get here (going really fast requires a ton of energy amongst other engineering challenges) simply put interstellar travel is so prohibitively slow and expensive that it will likely be reserved purely for colonization/exploration or only for the most dire of needs.

But on top of the sheer challenge of interstellar travel is the challenge of timing. The earth is 4 billion years old and the universe is around 13 billion years old. How would a visitor traveling for centuries know that the time is right to visit? How would they know we won’t have experienced an extinction event by the time they get here? Would they even know we exist by the time they leave to visit? Or even more existentially, Humans have only been around for about 200k years or 0.0066% of the Earth’s lifetime so far. Imagine a duplicate of earth with the same history and occupants but forming just 0.1 billion years earlier. If the human equivalents are still around on that clone-earth their civilization would be literally older than the dinosaurs are here. Except there are planets both billions of years older and newer than earth, so how many of those have previously hosted intelligent life that’s since experienced an extinction event, and how many of those will one day have intelligent life form on them?

Basically extra terrestrial life is inevitable in this universe, but the chances of humans ever meeting an intelligent life form from another planet is basically 0 due to the sheer scale of time and space separating us from anywhere and anywhen such intelligent life might exist

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