I've never run across people that are evangelists for the idea of space aliens either. I suspect these people are agnostics or even atheists yearning to believe in a higher power, but they won't say that it's God. Safer to profess faith in a nameless alien entity.
I personally like "The Seven" (see below).
Yes, that pesky speed limit (the speed of light) does get in the way of interstellar travel. ?
For those of you who watched
Game of Thrones, "The Seven" was their "higher power". But the reason I like it, is because the math of string theory needs 11 dimensions to work. So we have three spacial dimensions plus time, so four.
Four plus the missing seven gets us to string theory. Having lots of extra dimensions around also means the speed limit is gone. And we also have quantum entanglement that can transmit information over however far apart entangled "stuff" is, instantaneously. When you look at the very small, things get really weird, so if you want to be newtonian about things, sure, then what you see is what you get. I'm pretty certain that there's a heckofalot more than our puny animal brains have the capacity to know.
As a scientist, I try to keep an open mind. However, trying to come up with any plausible explanation about why any space alien civilization would WANT to come to Earth is where I sort of shrug.
Me too. Sitting in the middle of things, we see ourselves as pretty important. But notice that each time in history that we learn more about our situation, we learned that we were less important than we earlier thought.
There's a bit of a TED talk that I keep coming back to about our impression of our importance (intelligence). There's this illustration of where one of the smartest people who ever lived, you and me, and a chicken, all on an intelligence scale.
But I think that intelligence doesn't stop where the human brain stops being able to comprehend things. We can know where in the field to run to catch a fly ball without doing the math. What if, when someone was born, they could just know calculus and quantum mechanics without the math?
This explains why we've not seen the aliens: we are simply not very interesting.
www.history.com
en.m.wikipedia.org
