Aliens haven't contacted us. Scientists found a compelling reason why.

Yep, relativity is a bitch. Even if we could do the speed of light, our time here would pass so quickly that by the time we reached some place that had life, ours might have stopped existing.

And yes, I know a light year is not a measure of time, but distance, but it still takes time.

Nah, they just have a bunch of myths about the evil homo sapiens abducting their alien babies.

It is homo phobia.

Oh no! Makes all that probing worse.

"They're made out of meat."

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

Knowledge.

Why are there scientists here on Earth studying the most boring subjects imaginable to anyone but them? Why does every tiny organism have a small, but dedicated group of scientists studying it at some point?

We must know - we will know! is a quote which represents humanity well. A factually wrong quote since we will not know everything but, an objective nonetheless. Why should other species believe different?

My point exactly.

I'd seen this before, but was happy to reread it for gems like this:

"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

Such a beautiful description of the human voice.

And the smell….

I sure did, which is a pretty typical assumption when people think about beings from a different planet.

Yes, appended in square brackets, to indicate that it is not part of the original text.

This is a service I would appreciate. Or at least put it in the description.

Yes, modern article titles are designed to get you to click it so they make money off advertising to you

The thing is, out of a population of trillions (or even quadrillions as you say), you only need a few thousand to travel to the stars to colonize another planet. With how large the population is, that is bound to happen. Just like there were bound to be pioneers travelling to the new world to settle it, despite how dangerous the journey was. And how there will be pioneers to settle the moon or mars or further out.

And a civilization like that would absolutely send stuff to other star systems, if only for science, so most of the research for the journey would already be done. And this is assuming that a civilization wouldn't want ever greater quantities of resources for ever greater projects, or access to other star systems for reasons we cannot fathom today (maybe neutron stars or black holes have some incredibly tempting uses? Or maybe there's some useful resources out in the galaxy that we have yet to discover?)

Basically, a successful civilization like that is bound to spread out, it's difficult to see scenarios where a successful civilization would be so homogenous in thought as for that to not happen. Amd then it's before we even get to sending AI probes to "colonize" space and gather data.

Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you’ll need to travel interstellar space) you’ve essentially learned how to make cities in space.

I don't think it is a valid point. Yeah, if we can build a ship that take us to Alpha Centauri it would lool like a small city, but that does not mean that it can last forever and the traveller would never need to settle on a planet. And looking what the humans did in the past, it seems logic that while a part would want to continue to explore, another part would want to settle on a planet.

Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by “lot” I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.

So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?

Because it is habitable and can be used as a transit point, advanced outpost, refuelling base or any other use you can do of an habitable planet where to do things you have not to fight even with the environment (tourism for example).

Or there are plenty of societies at least as advanced as we are, but we can't find each other because space is big and our stars tend to drown out our own puny EM emissions.

Suhweeet! We can be the Old Ones, Chutulu flatghn la!

As you said, after the formation of Earth, it took only a few hundred milion years for life to develop. That is incredibly short, almost instanteneously as soon as conditions for life were met, life formed. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, formed almost as soon as galaxies could form. So here we have a situation where a inteligent civilization could have formed anywhere in our galaxy 13 bil years ago or at any point in time after that. Chance is, if they had, by now they would have conquered the whole galaxy. Absence of any sign of inteligent life can be wxplained by the Great Filter. It could be any of the following: 1) interstellar travel is never feasible for any civ, no matter how advanced, 2) Earth-like planets are so rare, that we are probably the only inteligent civ in our galaxy, 3) Earth-like planets are not that rare, but inteligent civs tend to destroy themselves before they manage to spread out to other planets... We don't know what the Great Filter is, but it must be pretty destructive for a civ. I just want to point out the fact that the Great Filter is probably still ahead of us and that we shouldn't take our existence for granted. We need to meticulously examine and neutralize any possible threats to human civilization. This is not fearmongering. It's just common sense, after you take all the facts into account that I laid out.

I'm sure that's the case. You can travel to other stars without ftl, it's just a lot slower and probably one way. It's really pretty limiting for society, for instance, without ftl an interstellar "civilization" is basically out of the question, you can't govern another star system without at the very least faster communication.

Every conservative on earth would demand we attack the flying illegal aliens. Our planet's dumbest of dipshit right-wingers would be outside shooting at clouds all night long.

What even makes you think the industrial revolution is a given? It happened exactly once at earth. Also: We are not doomed. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but both are possible outcomes

Couldn't the aliens be the same way?

The space is huge and FTL travel is impossible. The only reason someone will visit us is if they built a generational space ship. And the only reason to do that is if you have destroyed your own planet and have to colonise another one. We will only see those, who came for our planet and don't care about us.

I agree, that is why I didn't bring up the possibility of enslavement or colonization. I'd even say the chances are higher of a civ being benign than not when reaching a space faring stage. I base this on mostly nothing.

I do believe an intelligent creature is probably at least mildly curious. Couple that with the likely hood of an advance civ having enough resources to build whatever projects they want, only a small subset of their population would need to be curious enough to make it a reality.