Asklemmy

Life probably exists somewhere else.

That doesn't mean they visit us in secret and there's a conspiracy to hide it.

It's two very different things

I assume other life exists somewhere, because the universe is practically infinite in size, but I also assume that we will not meet them, because the universe is practically infinite in size.

I am sure there are extraterrestrial life forms. It's scientific consensus.

I do not think "the government" has proof and hides that from us.

The universe is big enough that life probably exists in other places. Anything advanced enough to reach us (an extraordinarily difficult feat) would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people, and people just want to believe in something fun to compensate for how boring modern life can be.

Extraterrestrial life = yes. It's a big universe and the chances of us being the only life in the entire universe is slim.

Aliens visiting us = no. For the same reason as above. It's a big ass universe.

Governments being able to hide aliens from us = lol no. If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they'd have taken over the planet in an hour.

existence of extraterrestrial life

Absolutely certain

and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.

Completely absurd.

The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if you apply a ludicrously unjustified value to the last figure in the Drake equation.

Technological civilizations are very likely self-extinguishing simply because technological power grows faster than any evolved species capacity to apply that technology to the benefit of the species.

Only way out of that would be that bio life is just a bootstrap for machine life and machine life just isn't that interested in interacting with biological life so we'll never see or hear from it.

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it's likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that's the extent of it.

I've seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don't "believe" that they do.

Really, I don't "believe" in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don't even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It's not a conscious choice or anything - it's just appears that there's a set of requirements that must be met before the position of "belief" is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of "believing" just isn't triggered, and it's not as if I can somehow force it, so that's that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it's near certain that somebody would've blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they're that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don't see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else's interests. That's our delusion - not theirs.

I do I just wish they believed in me.

sigh

The chances of extra terrestrial life to have visited earth is very, very small.

The chances of life to occur are small enough,

The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,

The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,

The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.

The universe is huge, there's almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.

Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.

I believe there is extraterrestrial life, unless God exists. Then who knows?

I think UFOs have natural explainations, are mistakes or hoaxes, or are human technology.

I seriously doubt aliens have traveled here only to play peek-a-boo in the skies. I could sooner believe UFOs were interdimensional anomalies than aliens who traveled from another planet in the universe via space.

The potential existence of sentient life out there? Sure. Space is big.

Anything that's ever interacted with us or is likely in a position to ever be able to do so? No. Space is big.

While I 100% believe that the universe is probably crawling with extraterrestrial life, I don't think any of it has visited us here.
Any alien race who had the technology to travel across the galaxy would look at humanity the same way we look at an ant hill while we're driving down the highway, we don't even notice it.
Sure, there may be some alien scientists that want to study our planet the same way that our scientist want to study ants, but what are the chances they even know about us? And is there anything interesting enough about us to distinguish us from all the other ant hills?

Is there other intelligent alien life in our Galaxy? Probably. Given how fast life formed on Earth, there must be millions of other life-bearing planets, and intelligence can't be that rare, but it might be short-lived.

Are there UFO sightings? Yes, people do see unidentified flying objects. Some of them can be explained, some cannot.

Are the UFOs aliens? I don't know, I'm a "curious agnostic" on the subject.

There's a LOT of UFO sightings, and evidence from good observers, including US Navy aviators. The US Air Force continues not to cooperate, and officially denies any sightings exist. The very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence, aside from Project Blue Book, is suspicious.

It's technically plausible that someone within 50-ish light years of Earth could have heard our radio, sent a ship here, and use drones or manned ships to observe us without interacting. There could also be many other explanations.

We don't know, and until the last couple years there was no effort to investigate.

The probability that there are no aliens is very small, considering just how large the universe is. For the same reason we will probably not get to meet them though.

Yep. The universe is so vast that alien life most certainly exists, but simply due to the distance between them and us we’ll likely never detect it. The farther things are from us, the longer it takes for light to get to us. Something 100 light years away is just that, it takes a hundred years to get to us.

At this point, I'm beginning to think the gulf of space is too much to bridge, and if it were possible, they wouldn't bother hiding / being sneaky / probing whatever.

Depends on what do you mean by existence of aliens:

0. Some chemical/biological processes happen on other planets in the universe, that are necessary for life to exist. Or maybe there are "life" forms like viruses.

1. Life exists, but only in the simplest form, like single-cell organisms (e.g. bacteria).

2. Life exists, but only in the form of simple multi-cell organisms.

3. More advanced species exist, like fish or frogs on Earth, but nothing like Humans.

4. Other advanced species with their own civilizations exist (or existed and destroyed themselves), similar to ours, but again they might not look like humans at all.

5. Super advanced civilization of aliens exists, and they have tech we could only dream of.

Given that we know only one place where life naturally exists (Earth), it's probably hard to tell which one is true. But I think that it's sane to think that there are at least several other civilizations out there similar to ours, but given that our universe is relatively young, we might be the only one in our neighborhood (even on galaxy level) for now.

It's also very important to note that extraterrestrial life might not resemble our life at all, and make us reconsider what even is life.

I'm not convinced they're visiting us. None of the reports I've seen appear credible. But non-interference is often critical to scientific study. They could just be doing a decent job at hiding from us.

If they're out there, I'd be shocked if they wouldn't visit. Our solar system has been showing life signs for 3.5B years, and technological signs for about a century or so. There aren't apparently many planets like ours around. We are a very tempting target for study.

It appears to be quite difficult to develop a spacefarring civilization. But there are credible models for sailing light beamed from stars, and even gravity surfing orbiting black hole pairs. The vast energies required for interstellar travel should be impossible to conceal. We ought to already be able to see them out there, if they're close.

13.5B years is an eyeblink in the potential age of the Universe. We developed early. Perhaps not first, but very early. Intelligence and technology are difficult and expensive to develop. Our hubris may destroy us. We might easily be alone in our local neighborhood. Technological civilizations may still be rare. But once they go interplanetary, there are few ways for such a civilization to go extinct.

I'm fairly confident they're out there somewhere. I'm sceptical that they're close. We may be the first in our galaxy, or even the Local Group. Who can say? I don't know.

While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn't any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

Although, the universe isn't just big -- it's old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it's possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.

Some alien life definitely exists, the universe is a pretty big place after all. There is also zero chance they have come to earth. Such conspiracies need too many people to keep silent and if the US had known about aliens Trump would have tweeted about it.

I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.

When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.

The universe has so many planets that it is unlikely that life only started on earth. However, the universe is simply too big. We are alone in the universe. And the aliens, they are alone too.

As others have stated, the existence of extra-terrestrial life seems a near certainty. We know that intelligent life can evolve in the universe (QED: we exist) and given the vastness of the observable universe it seems highly probable that it's happened more than once. Limiting ourselves to just the Milky Way galaxy, again given the size and number of stars, it seems reasonably likely that there is other intelligent life here.

Have they been to Earth? This one strikes me as less likely. The universe is big, just mind bogglingly big. Even an infinitesimally small part of it, like the Milky Way galaxy is still insanely big. And as best as our current understanding of physics provides, we cannot exceed the speed of light. And even trying to approach that speed is fraught with all kinds of problems. At any significant fraction of the speed of light, bumping into tiny bits of space dust can cause real problems for spaceships (think: nuclear weapon level energies released). Even sub-atomic particles cause problems, as they will be the same as high energy radiation at those speeds. Even if those issues can be handled, there is the problem of reaction mass to get ships up to and decelerate from those speeds. Even electric ion engines need some sort of reaction mass to push against, and that has to be carried. This then runs us face first into the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. For every extra bit of reaction mass you carry, you need even more reaction mass to get everything up to speed. Eventually, you're trying to carry so much mass that the whole thing just gets unfeasible. As a related tanget this XKCD What-If gets into a lot of the same issues.

So ya, I doubt that ET has been to Earth, simply because crossing the gulf of intergalactic space would require an investment of resources which is so insanely big that no sane species would bother. And then there is the whole issue of time. Sure, at a sufficient speed and thanks to Lorentz Contraction you can actually cross the Milky Way galaxy in a reasonable amount of time, in your own frame of reference. IIRC, it's something like a single year assuming 1g acceleration half way there and a similar deceleration after the half-way point (can't be arsed to look it up. You, dear reader, have fun with that). However, to the observer sitting on Earth, it takes much, much longer. So long that the folks sending you off will be dead, decayed, fossilized and those fossils long degraded by the time you get there. When you get back, your home planet may well not exist anymore and and thing resembling your home society will have long been lost to the sands of time. Again, no sane species is going to make such an investment of resources for what is effectively no return.

But wait, what if aliens have some magic technology which lets them bypass the limitations on the speed of light? Ok well, if little green Gandalf can cast a teleport spell on Frodo the tentacled alien, then yes he can toss his thing in whatever crack he wants. But, absent any evidence to show that such magic is possible, then it's not really worth consideration.

So, does "the government" have some secret knowledge about aliens? I highly doubt it. Mostly, because I doubt such exists. But, also consider the difficulty of maintaining such a secret for decades with possibly thousands of people knowing. One of the things you learn about, when you get a US FedGov Clearance, is the concept of "Need to Know". One of the things the US Government learned during the Vietnam War was the fact that the more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to leak. If you have a ton of time and insomnia, I highly recommend reading up on Purple Dragon. Secrets leak, all the time. Yet somehow there has been a massive conspiracy around aliens visiting Earth. Oh and that conspiracy would need to extend beyond just the US Government to include other, hostile, governments. But, the only evidence we have is blury videos and crackpots. Ya, bullshit.

So ya, ET is likely "out there", the math makes it pretty likely. At the same time, physics makes it really, really, really hard for him to get here. And no international conspiracy would be able to hide such events over decades.

Yes, though I doubt any have come to visit. For one thing, although we have seen UFO's on Earth, it's awfully strange nobody has seen them through their telescopes. It's almost as if they're not a space thing after all.

I do, but I don't believe we've ever been visited by them or will ever be visited by them.

i think space is too big for aliens to detect, traverse and find us... but thats just going by all known science/reality.

its most likely humans are lying/ignorant with regards to all of the alien-based conspiracies.

There is absolutely other life somewhere. None of it has reached or contacted us, though

Depending on your interpretation of the Drake equation, they are either impossible or inevitable.

I mean, it would be weird if they weren't out there somewhere but I don't think the government knows much more than we do

I'll just leave this here...

The Rare Earth Hypothesis

I kinda don't think there are little gray men

But I think we fundamentally do not understand what it is to be conscious. I don't think we know what is and is not conscious. I think we're limited by our brains and our dimensionality. I think there's a lot more right under our noses.

In general, yes. In the expanse of space there must be life somewhere.

For fun I let myself believe they've visited earth, and that at least some UFOs were alien, but that's more of a fun "what if..." belief than anything and it doesn't impact anything beyond my imagination.

I don’t think governments are concealing anything but I think once we explore and learn where to look, we’ll find microbial life is everywhere. Maybe underground on Mars and near deep sea vents on Europa or the clouds of Venus.

I also think multicellular life and technological societies are rare, temporary, and fleeting. So, we won’t be finding them. Earth is special in that it had 1,000 conditions that allows us to exist for a brief window. But we’re cavalier about climate change when it could cause ocean acidification and end a good chunk of humanity.

The universe is very very big. Unimaginably so. But we have absolutely no idea of how probable the appearance of life is, so we have no idea how probable is it for life to exist elsewhere. So my answer for the first question is: I don't know.

And for the second question, my answer is: haha.