Do you believe in aliens?

@BlueVeins

who's to say that an extra planetary civilization hasn't arisen somewhere in the universe ?

When we leave the earths atmosphere and enter space we are aliens to any other species who would encounter us

Its arrogant to think that ours is the highest form of intelligence in such a vast universe

Life exploits whatever building blocks are available

@SW-User very well said

@SW-User The fact that there exists a region of the Earth that is as sterile and barren as the Atacama Desert in Chile proves that there are "building blocks," so to speak, that life is either entirely incapable of exploiting or unlikely to exploit. If you study the physical properties of the chemicals on Earth, specifically water and carbon, it becomes very clear very fast that these chemicals are the most likely to form the basis of complex life. Homeostasis is on some level prerequisite to survival, and water's high heat capacity makes that 100x more doable. It's also polar, which makes it form weak bonds to most materials, which helps keep organisms physically contiguous. Carbon is cool because it can form bonds with 1-4 other atoms without issue. The list goes on.

The vast majority of the universe is occupied by intergalactic space, and the vast majority of what remains is interstellar space. The vast majority of stars are too close to their respective galactic centers for sufficient stability to be maintained, and the vast majority of stars are far too dim to provide abundant energy like our very own Sun. There's a huge laundry list of stuff that has to go right for civilization to take hold, and we hit the lottery. That doesn't mean any other planet did the same by any stretch of the imagination.

@AskingTheUniverse There's also another issue. The faster you go, the slower time passes, so, if you're traveling at about the speed of light (not possible to reach the speed of light), so 99.99999999% speed of light, if you're on that ship, every second that elapses for you, is equivalent to 19.6 hours, for someone who remains on earth.

So, if a traveler, left their planet, which is 50 light years away from earth, traveling at 99.99% speed of light, by the time they reach earth, 50 years later for them, it would be about 3.5 Million years later for earth.

I would not impossible, just not with the Physics we know.

@Northwest Wow, that's crazy. It's hard to wrap my head around that!! 🤯

@AskingTheUniverse The math is pretty straightforward. The concept though, is a bit strange, but the concept is experimentally verifiable, with subatomic particles.