And by aliens I mean, outer space creatures and UFO. For whatever reason all UFO sighting footage looks either fake or like recorded with a Casio keyboard. And I find hard to believe we don’t have any decent footage of them with all the surveillance and technology we have now.
Edit: 🍿
Wasn’t part of the Fermi Paradox that a bunch of scientists got together and found that you needed super duper extraordinary evidence that aliens hadn’t visited earth; because a civilization capable of building any form of self-replicating exploratory drone would have been able to map our entire galaxy in less than 1,000,000yrs, assuming a speed of 0.1c?
Iirc the fact that we haven’t found a probe, interstellar message, colony ships or artificial extraterrestrial satellites yet is the super duper extraordinary evidence that supposedly disproves their existence. Our galaxy alone is so huge that the fact that there aren’t aliens is the weird part.
Also, part of the reason why exploring the galaxy would be so slow is because humans are too scared of nuclear engines. We’re literally shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to space travel because we’re too paranoid of nuclear to find a safe way of getting a nuclear engine into orbit. Nuclear engines would dramatically reduce the travel time not just within our system but also other systems to something reasonable.
I touched on this a bit here. But basically I think the fermi paradox essentially just tells us that life, multicellular life and intelligent life are much rarer than we think they are.
I don’t know if nuclear engines would change too much when it comes to space travel between the stars. I mean let’s say you could reach even 1% of the speed of light (which is already bonkers honestly). That’s still quite slow all things considered. Just to cover, say 1% of the Milky Way’s diameter (100.000 light years) would be a distance of 1000 light years. With 1% light speed, that would take you 100.000 years. That’s simply not viable.
Iirc a nuclear rocket would cut travel time down to centuries between stellar systems. While cruising the galaxy in one go might not be feasible, travelling to a nearby system would be.
Honestly even centuries is like… a crazy timescale for space travel. There’s so many things that can go wrong and there’s nothing saving you in space. Generation ships is a cool idea but it is that - just an idea, at this point.