Do you believe in Aliens?

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

Also, life and intelligent life are two different things.
Doesn't mean they don't either. :)
I think it's likely they do. There has been so many sightings through the years and so many stories that I believe no smoke without fire, so to speak.
It's also what we would do. We (humans) would have similar strategy if we had similar technology to visit other planets.

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 like the space travel explained in three body problem. Soldering about folding up dimensions.
GET THIS MAN HIS VOTES
I mean, we could potentially see them if they're in any of the neighboring galaxies, and if they're in ours they should have arrived and turned Earth into a colony long ago. Space is big, but time is long. Loud aliens would have to be truly rare indeed for this.
- I don't know, if this is worth arguing over. Depending on how far advanced you expect such a life form to be, obviously they might be capable of things that we currently consider impossible. But well, to illustrate what I mean:
  The next galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy. It is 2.5 million light years away. There could be life over there right now, but we wouldn't know, until about 2.5 million years from now.
  Compare that to the emergence of modern humans, which was 300,000 years ago. We didn't start sending out radio waves until some generations ago.
  None of this means that it's not possible for life to have existed on some planet 2.5 million years ago, so we'd be seeing their radio waves right now, but even then, we might interpret them as background noise.
  The next star is Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years away. So, we could see things from there in 4.24 years, which is pretty good, although still absolute hell of a delay for exchanging messages.
  But for them to actually visit us, even if they go at 1% the speed of light, that would mean they'd need 424 years of travel time. With little sunlight or other energy sources on the way.
  And 1% of the speed of light is an insane 10,800,000 km/h. Compare that to the fastest man-made object, the Parker Solar Probe, which is expected to go 720,000 km/h, when it closely passes by the Sun.
  Basically, we can be extremely generous with these examples and still see practically insurmountable time frames.
  Worm holes could theoretically exist. Maybe a sufficiently advanced race could defy physics as we know it. But if they can't, that's a pretty good explanation why they're hiding.

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.

would not be dumb and incompetent enough to fall under the control of people
Never underestimate the stupidity of smart people/potential other sentient beings.
- Also good to never underestimate human negativity bias, where the brain remembers bad things far more than it remembers positive things.
  Look at air travel. We invented it over a century ago, and have made it safe enough that a single failure out of thousands of successful flights becomes newsworthy.
  The statistical likelihood of stupid-yet-capable aliens happening to fuck up that badly is very small.

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 think that we may simply be among the first civilisations to reach such a technologically advanced point. By the time a species gets tech that can destroy their civilisation, i reckon they would most likely have also made a broadcast of some sort, either through radio or light or whatever else.
Granted, there's no real way to know any of this, us being the first is just what I reason is the most likely answer.
- You have to account for the fact that, even if a civilization were to broadcast some sort of signal, it would take many millennia or eons for any signals to reach us. And even then, we would have to be advanced enough to be able to receive and interpret those signals at the same time they reach Earth.
  There could very well be countless advanced civilizations whose signals just haven’t reached us yet, just as there may have been countless ones whose signals couldn’t be received or understood when they reached us, and they’ve died out or otherwise stopped transmitting before we could.
  Keep in mind that the first radio broadcast on Earth was only 127 years ago. That means the farthest anyone could possibly detect any radio signal from earth is a mere 127 light years away.
- Idk, this seems anthropocentric. Why would we be the first? I understand that there is some degree of truth to the universe being young, but that seems as likely as us being the only advanced life, which assumes that we are some special exception.
  It seems more likely that other technologically advanced life may have gone intentionally dark (minimizing signals that may leave the solar system) for safety. It's possible humans will do this some day, maybe after we detect alien life and determine it is dangerous. Or, they prioritized harmony and stewardship of their planet and stopped broadcasting (or never did) because that is incompatible with their life style.

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.

If aliens had the tech to travel a million light years to visit us, they'd have taken over the planet in an hour.
Lol Too long, 10 minutes?
TBF, it took 2 minutes for aliens to be worshiped as "eye in the sky" in 3bp
- And that's assuming they're even interested in Earth. They'll probably start by strip-mining Jupiter and/or building a Dyson swarm around the sun.
Anyone who thinks the government can hide anything is vastly overestimating their capabilities. They're basically keystone cops with the demeanor of storm troopers. Play benny hill or imperial march over literally any declassified CIA document and at least one of them will fit.

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.

Statistically it is very unlikely that alien life doesn't exist. It's also extremely unlikely that we would ever find any unless we are entirely wrong about the nature of reality and physics.

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.

. I could sooner believe UFOs were interdimensional anomalies than aliens who traveled from another planet in the universe via space.
the gulf of space makes me think along these lines as well.

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.

This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I'm going to devil's advocate all over it.
The chances of life to occur are small enough,
Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1
The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,
They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?
The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,
This one's not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible
The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.
Agreed that the earth's position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the "near impossible" part.
The universe is huge, there's almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.
Can't really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the 'conspiracy nut' bin. But it doesn't mean life on other planets doesn't exist. There are many theories why we wouldn't have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
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.
Hubble expansion isn't a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it's difficult to even measure.
- There's actually a fairly decent argument that life may have developed literally everywhere in space in the first few hundred million years of the universe, since yes it started insanely hot and compressed, but as it expanded there had to be a time period of up to a hundred million years or so, that everything outside of stars was at the proper temperature for water to be liquid. The end result being that you'll find single cellular life existing literally anywhere it possibly can.
- I'm pretty much on board, though how much anyone can agree is a matter of relativity.
  We know about the closest stars and the planets within them, and based off spectrometry, we're confident the planets "close" to us haven't had life, though they might be capable.
  The chances of there being no mass extinction events in the millions of years following abiogenesis is arguably smaller than surviving the five or so we've had. Given everything we know about astrophysics, we owe the asteroids a few clean hits, we have been astronomically lucky, and that's not even taking into consideration every other cause of mass extinction.
  15 billion years is still considered early in the grand scheme of things, it's likely that we are the early ones. A billion years head start is plausible, sure, but it's certainly less plausible than our existence.
  All of this is to say that life is rare enough without them being a stones throw away.
  And this is all disregarding any possible intent behind a visit. Any being capable of space travel does not need our resources.
  Unless they're sex tourists, which would explain all the anal probing.
  On second thought, I choose to believe.
- I'm incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That's an extremely interesting question, and I'm sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn't already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity's curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.
- I have coined a theory I call "Galactic spring." It's that the emergence of intelligent life is a manifestation of and synchronized by some underlying phenomena - perhaps just the natural growth in informational complexity in a galaxy-wide entanglement network. Perhaps just a matter of sufficient amounts of the needed elements being available. The specific underlying mechanism isn't that important, unless we have an understanding about the initial emergence of life to compare it to. But the theory is that there is a larger synchronizing factor.
  Like spring, there are some species that may emerge early. But also like spring, the emergence of one heralds the emergence of others. Every other "the earth is the unique snowflake of the universe" theory has failed. We are simply emerging. The conditions are occurring that generate intelligent life, and there's no strong reason to believe that our circumstance in that regard is unique.
Wouldnt have to do it faster, just first
- Wait, what?
  That's like saying you don't have to drive faster to win the race, you just have to cross the line first.

I do I just wish they believed in me.

sigh

Can imagine the disillusionment aliens would feel having seen us from 10 light years away and constantly watching us as they approach until they get close enough for the data to be virtually current. I wouldnt wanna visit either. Probably be attacked on sight.

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?

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.

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 very enthusiastic refusal to look at evidence
That just makes me think the air force knows exactly what the UFO was because they were flying it.
With your last statemate that is not true there are records of the american government looking into this back into the sixties. Also researchers like Jacques Vallee have spent decades doing real investigation into the subject.
- Governmental research. There was Project Blue Book, as I mentioned, which was inconclusive and then ended.

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.

Humans have been around for an estimated 300,000 years, or 1.09575e+8 days. Here are a few things that would not have been believed possible by 99.9% of the population, including the most rational and logical thinkers, only 150 years ago (54,787 days).
Microchips
Nuclear weapons, and usable, controllable nuclear fusion/fission in general
The Internet
Electric cars
Jet propulsion
Smartphones
Most fields of modern chemistry
Most fields of physics
etc.
Technological advancements happen at breakneck speed. One mans "you can't break the speed of light" is another mans "you can't fly, humans don't have wings!"
But scientific advancements happen that change our perspective. It's likely we'll never break the light barrier, if it's as solid as our understanding makes it seem. It's less likely we'll never find a way to sidestep that barrier by manipulating other forces. Let's say we find a way to create a gravity well that encompasses a craft. The person in the craft doesn't actually feel like they're falling at infinite-G, they just happen to get from one place to another incredibly fast, passing through various states of matter unperturbed on their way. To us, it looks like they broke the speed of light. In reality, they weren't actually "moving" in the way we think of movement, thereby not needing to break the speed of light.
These advancements happen all the time. If you brought a group of the top scientists from the 1850s to be here with us today, they would have have absolutely no idea what was going on and they would believe they'd gone insane. So many paradigm shifts have happened over the last 150 years that it would be impossible to make sense of it in their (remaining) lifetimes.
I don't know if we're being visited. If we are then it's not likely they're being of another race that came here in a ship. More likely they would be mechanical or biomechanical in nature, some sort of von Neumann probes self-creating and self-spreading reconnaissance craft for an ancient (dead?) race. Or maybe they tapped into another force we don't even have a name or vague idea about yet, maybe a driving force behind consciousness.
But regardless, UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) is a legitimate field of study and I look forward to seeing it grow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But there are credible models for sailing light beamed from stars, and even gravity surfing rotating black holes.
Can you elaborate on these? I would like to know more.
- I can't, but this astrophysicist is the one who proposed the idea. Both techniques use compatible tech. https://youtu.be/rFqL9CkNxXw?si=WkbEiTM6usQnSgyy

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.

I like those last three sentences. You managed to capture the infinite size of the universe and what it means. Bravo.

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.

Hollow Earth theory intensifies

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

Depends on what do you mean by existence of aliens:

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.
Life exists, but only in the simplest form, like single-cell organisms (e.g. bacteria).
Life exists, but only in the form of simple multi-cell organisms.
More advanced species exist, like fish or frogs on Earth, but nothing like Humans.
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.
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 intrigued by 0. Nobody ever talks about that one. Multicellular life and complex life have independently shown up more than once on Earth, so 2 and 3 are hard to defend.

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

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.

You will never die. You will watch everyone else die out over the next million or so years, and then you will be alone until you figure out how to create new people.
- ..story of my life.

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

Ah, the ol’ Drake Equation, providing useful input since 1961
I propose a more elegant equation called the Fifty Cent Equation:
p(A) = x
If x equals 0, then there’s no aliens. If x equals 1, there are definitely aliens. If x is between 0 and 1, non-inclusive, then maybe there’s aliens.
It’s math yo. I’m helping with math.
- So you're saying it's 50/50. Half the time it works every time.

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.

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 kept waiting for the part where he's super religious, but was ultimately let down. I may have to read his book.

There's one more thing to consider: when we think of aliens, we constantly think of those blue human-like creatures based on carbon life forms.

Most likely, alien life will be formed entirely differently: maybe it will be silicon-based, maybe something else, or a planetary mind, or something we can't even imagine.

And no, we didn't contact them yet and are unlikely to in many, many lifetimes.

The only truly reasonable position to have on this question is pure agnosticism: you do not and cannot know if life exists elsewhere in the universe, especially intelligent life. We could, in theory, be the only intelligent species to ever evolve in this universe. Period.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, and I think, potentially, that it could be so advanced that we don't have the ability to recognize some or all of them.

Of course Aliens is real, I didn't imagine the movie.

Extraterrestrial life on Earth, and government coverups? Zero evidence.

Game over man, game over.

Nope.

As other people have said we cannot for of they do our do not exist.

That said thinking about how big the universe is, my personal opinion is they have to exist.

As for governments covering them up.... highly unlikely. They can't even cover up their dirty laundry, let alone aliens

I'm open to the idea of life outside of Earth, but I'm sceptical that governments can keep them secret when they can't keep sex scandals, drug use or financial crimes by leaders secret.

I do! Perhaps alien life could even be hiding in plain sight on Earth, and someday we will discover a virus or a bacteria that looks nothing like anything else on Earth and could've hitched a ride on a meteorite!

Google water bears.
- Tardigrades are animals, as confirmed by genetic analysis, and morphologically resemble what we think of as everyday animals even more closely than, say, Cnidaria (jellyfish, corals, hydras, etc.)

Capital A Aliens, all the conspiracy theory stuff? No, absolutely not. I think the people of the future will see that exactly the way we see demons, angels, djinn, all the stuff people used to believe in. It's a religious belief not science, no matter the pseudoscientific jargon it's wrapped in.

Aliens somewhere out in the universe? Yes I believe there are more planets with life, out there.

And I also believe there is Something - whatever the force is, that people used to call demons and now call Aliens, I do think it's something, I just think that people convinced it's aliens are as wrong as the people who were convinced it was whatever else in the past.

I would believe in alternate realities overlapping ours before I would believe in living organic beings traversing the vastness of space to get here, then hiding and yet talking to governments or individuals somehow at the same time.

Yes. The older I get, the more I believe it is actually a Men in Black kind of situation.

I'm dubious of faster than life travel being for reasons beyond our understanding of physics. If there were a reasonable way to do so 1 race anywhere in the galaxy could have colonized the entire galaxy or at least a substantial portion thereof in only a few million years. If it is possible it seems to suggest that life is so rare that there are very few forms of higher intelligent life in the galaxy at any given time and probably relatively few ever.
- If faster than light travel existed, then a species would possibly be able to colonize anything in less than an instant because they'd be traveling backwards in time.
  However, it might be possible to change locations faster than light by cutting through spacetime using a wormhole.
  Yet, in support of your argument, I think I also remember that perhaps there are ways to warp spacetime around a ship so that locally, the ship is not traveling faster than light, but the warping of spacetime is. I don't understand this concept well enough to have a confident opinion on it tho. For example, is it possible to warp spacetime faster than light without violating general relativity?

Has intelligent life that we could communicate with ever existed in time? Yes. Does it exist in this exact moment? Unlikely. Is it or is it ever been in a proximity that we could communicate? No.

That’s not to say there isn’t intelligent life that we cannot understand or communicate with. If we exist inside the brain of some universally large creature, and our existence is just luck, we won’t ever be able to communicate.

I have something new to say about this. Hold on.

It's possible they're out there but it doesn't change my life at all one bit. My take-away is that hopefully I live long enough to get to see them for myself if they're out there, out of sheer curiosity for how intelligence could evolve from unknown circumstances.

I am certain that intelligent life in the universe is realively common, but that there is no real way to break or even bend the laws of physics to allow for FTL meaning that the chance of one ever enountering another is basically zero unless there are more than one species of intelligent life in a single star system.

I'm agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.

edit: See comment below on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis.

I don't follow how possible aliens = simulation. And what's the basis for what we experience being defined as simulation or not? Are we in a computer, or everything is a hallucination?
- Sorry, I suppose people haven't heard of the "Simulation hypothesis" in philosophy.
  Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe "around" it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.

I just read that as "Do you believe in Asians?" and at first I wondered whether that was racist, then I went like "Nooo, Asians, go!! I believe in you!! You can do it!!"

Is this you?
https://youtu.be/3Lyex2tSUyA?si=g1RFxQfBvCS5R2Y0
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/3Lyex2tSUyA?si=g1RFxQfBvCS5R2Y0
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
oh. like that secret asian man fellow.

Growing up in a devout Muslim society, I was made to believe that aliens don't exist.

But I simply thought that this couldn't really be possible since there's at least a few other planets that have signs of life, surely there's a civilization in there, even if it's as smart as the animals on earth.

What planet has signs of life?
- This YouTube short lists one.
  I should welcome your downvotes if you're somehow not convinced enough, or if you simply hate YouTube Shorts like I do.

Sure. Immigrants have that can-do attitude that makes them much more likely to become entrepreneurs and small-business owners. I've worked for several.

I believe in the boundless depths of the self. Beyond that I'm not sure.

Understanding why and how we're even conscious entities, assuming I believe you guys even exist, is the question that still needs to be answered regardless of aliens becoming known to us.

I’m sure there is intelligent life out there but if we ever cross paths is very uncertain.

I lean towards no, which is a minority scientific position. The Fermi paradox is strong evidence against technological aliens, and of all the evolutionary history we have immediate abiogenesis is the most weakly supported. It happened early, but there's still a 10% chance of a thing randomly happening in the first 10% of geological history (to oversimplify the math).

If it's not that, it's eukariogenesis, but that seems a bit more inevitable given how cooperative bacteria can already be. The development of technology seems inevitable once a thing by chance becomes smart and dexterous enough, and every other step along the way has happened more than once. Earth-like planets are still thought to be abundant.

Edit: Oh, and no to any conspiracy. It would be really hard to hide obvious alien life, and there's no real motive for all world governments to unanimously do so. And conspiracies don't exist, because we're too disorganised to keep a huge secret for long.

As a metaphysical solipsist, I haven’t decided yet.

All the whistleblowers have testified under oath and were demonstrably employed by the aforementioned organizations. Further disregard would be arrogance. However, it's less about "aliens" and more about additional forms of non-human intelligence. Essentially, we are facing a new paradigm in physics. This is a positive development.

Basically every time a major government fucks up in a way that looks really bad, they just run "Hey look, Aliens!!" to distract everyone and it works. Every. Single. Time. Like, how many times do they have to "reveal" "evidence" of aliens before people start to catch on...?
The government stuff is more about not wanting anyone to feel like they'll be ridiculed and their career will be over if they talk about seeing things they can't explain in case that thing turns out to be some new technology developed by other people. And that there might be ways the laws of physics behave to make weird stuff show up that we don't understand, so studying it could result in improvements to our understanding of physics. There's no credible evidence of aliens that has been uncovered by any of that.
You can see it in the renaming of UFO to UAP. UFO stands for unidentified flying object and never implied aliens were the ones flying the object. It was changed to unidentified aerial phenomenon because UFO did imply that whatever was seen was flying and an object when it could just be refracted light in some cases, which is neither flying nor an object.
I want to believe but there isn't a good reason to do so at this point.
And there is non-human intelligence on earth, but outside of humans it's only used for problem solving, communication, and basic tool use. I'm not even aware of any animal that uses tools to make other tools other than humans and maybe some of the other extinct hominids, which would be a requirement if you're saying non-human intelligence on earth is capable of creating UAPs. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean.
The whistleblowers are around in an amount and level of story consistency that makes me think they are grifters.
- Roughly estimating, there are about 500 employees from CIA subprograms making such claims. They do so under oath and without significant financial gain. If their employer were to contradict or refute their claims, they could be prosecuted criminally in the US. This is a different quality than before, where witnesses had no connection to government agencies.

I definitely believe that aliens exist, but I very much doubt that they have any interest in contacting us. I find that lot of the discussions around aliens fail to take into account the sheer vastness of the Universe.

Universe has been around for close to 14 billion years
Milky Way in its current form has been around for about 8~9 billion years
Life on Earth appears around 4280 million years ago
Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago.
Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago
Writing is invented around 5500 years ago

Inventions of language and writing are the landmark moment here. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.

So, after millions of years of life on Earth nothing interesting happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in a blink of an eye on cosmological scale we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It's worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge using language and writing.

Now let's take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they're designed to look like noise.

Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don't go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.

So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small! The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. The chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.

I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We're likely to develop human style AIs within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space because we're adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that's most likely to be prolific in space.

Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be what we consider to be geological scales.

For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don't recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around.

I really can't imagine that advanced civilizations would have much they could learn from us. We might be a curiosity at best to them, but it's more likely that they would give as much consideration to us as we do to an ant when we pass it by.

Im open to all ideas, if there is something to this UAP phenomena I think it's more complicated than just aliens from another galaxy. Maybe its multiple factions, maybe its way more complicated then we can even comprehend or maybe its all black projects and the greatest case of fraud in world history.

Either way I think it's something we should explore more. Having high level officials say some pretty crazy shit and then just writing it off as crazies in the government seems idk also bad? Maybe we should look into why we have these trained professionals in the military saying these things. And if it's prosaic like mental illness well that needs attention obviously and if it's any of the other things well the same answer.

Idk why we just write this shit off conspiracy or not. if we dealt with it and embarrassed the liars or helped the sick wouldn't that be good?

Yes, the sophon is causing all the shenanigans happening on earth rn but it decided to ramp up its game.

Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?

Nobody demands this level of evidence for the asteroid belt. They tell us there’s an asteroid belt, we just believe it. No problem. Big ring of rocks.

But there’s hundreds of high definition videos every day of people’s cell phones recording machines floating in the sky, literal news stories of these things, pilots, government officials, scientists all talking about them, FLIR, radar, visual, etc data and we’re all like “Nah bro it’s a spontaneous conspiracy of strangers to perpetuate a hoax across multiple continents, centuries, and walks of life”

The reason is simple: we’re in denial because it’s absolutely terrifying.

Why do these tens of thousands of people participate in the Alien Hoax Conspiracy? Why, for attention of course.

Please don’t understand me wrong. I am saying the claim that aliens are a “hoax” implies the largest and most well-coordinated conspiracy ever theorized to exist. If there is a conspiracy to perpetuate the alien hoax, it dwarfs every other conspiracy many orders of magnitude over.

Yes there’s fucking aliens. Each and every one of us has seen more evidence for aliens than we’ve seen of the existence of Osama Bin Laden, the Harlem Globetrotters, or spear fishing.

“Oh all those spear fishing videos are all CGI”

Yeah whatever bro. All those vast networks of people just cranking out CGI footage of aliens on a daily basis. You know, for the lulz. Gimme a break.

I can't tell if you're being satirical or serious
- I guess you’d have to come to your own conclusions about the logic instead of reading my intentions.
I actually agree with parts of your underlying idea, but your tone is so awful that you're convincing people to disagree with you.
You could be like : "I believe in cats because of cat videos."
But instead you're like : "What are you? Some kinda ducking idiot? You never seen a cat video? You scared of cats bro?! Small minded population can't accept cats!"
Surely you understand tone? I hope you are only like this on the internet.
- Do you understand tone? Do you comprehend that there’s more to my message than “I think aliens exist”?
Duh. Have you not seen the mountains of high definition video of the alien craft buzzing around our atmosphere?
A single example please. Since that's a drop in the ocean of the amount you've stated exists, only half points will be awarded if there's a chance someone could have altered or faked it, or it's not definitely alien, and could be natural or a secret human technology instead.
I'm not afraid if they are here. They should stop dicking with cows and say hello. Clearly they don't want us dead, so they seem nice enough.
- The Phoenix Lights. This isn't hi-def video, because that didn't really exist commonly, but it was witnessed by literally tens of thousands of people (whoever was out at the time, and it was during a pretty busy period).
  But of course, there will be handwaving and 'disproofs' or things like 'but we can't trust nineties people to see.' Fact is, it is seen by everyone, news channels do pieces on it, and then.. ..meh. Too big to comprehend, and I've got work tomorrow.
Bullshit.
- Says the man named after protomolecule tech

Carl Sagan was the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day. No contributions to science other than self-popularization.

Yet he left this lingering idea that because the universe is immense the unique preconditions required for life would necessarily appear many times. Many people assume this is a "scientific" position and just rattle it off like a pull-string toy.

I can't even begin to describe how abhorent this is. Leave. And let the door hit you on the way out.