People desperately want to believe aliens aren't real, and some real mental gymnastics to get there. Like believing "debunking" videos from crackpots and videogame programmers (which real pilots say are nonsensical), or "this one time in the 60s the CIA".
Anti-vaxxers show us there is no such thing.
Exactly. I firmly believe that extraterrestrial life exists. My belief comes from the abundance of CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen) in the universe, combined with extremely long time scales and basic chemistry.
Simple/single-celled (or some analog) extraterrestrial life seems almost inevitable based on our understanding of how the universe works.
That said, such a belief doesn't include intelligent extraterrestrial life with technological civilizations that might create interstellar spacecraft which regularly visit our little corner of the galaxy. For me to believe that, I'd need a "Klaatu barads nicto"[0] moment.
I could be wrong, but there's no compelling evidence that I am. To channel Carl Sagan: "Claims require evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still
But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions of years across billions of trillions of star systems, that only one developed intelligent life. Even on earth, life was nearly destroyed 5 times, but still survived and evolved.
Of course, it's very likely that such life will be forever undetectable by us, and we'll be undetectable by them.
We can be pretty confident that life as we know it has evolved elsewhere, given the chemistry involved, but intelligent, (and more importantly) life that develops technological civilizations is much less certain.
Detecting intelligent non-technological life is likely impossible unless we actually visit such a planet. Consider a world where creatures like dolphins or whales are the dominant species. No fire (okay, sodium reactions, but how do you create and store pure sodium ions?), so no metallurgy.
As I said, I'd need to see some pretty convincing evidence (even with the vast expanses of both space and time in the universe pushing in that direction) to claim that intelligent, technological life exists elsewhere. That doesn't mean such civilizations don't exist, but given we don't really understand how intelligence (as a prerequisite for a technologically advanced civilization) comes about, except in broad evolutionary terms, making such a claim is premature IMHO.
But still, it's just unfathomable that in billions
of years across billions of trillions of star systems,
that only one developed intelligent life
It's also important IMO to understand that advanced intelligence is not an inevitable goal of evolution. Evolution only "cares" about survival. That can result in intelligent life, but it can just as often result in horseshoe crabs -- creatures of low intelligence that fill a niche perfectly and resiliently.
Intelligence is a really tough way to survive. You need a metabolically expensiv and fragile brain (or brains)
I'm a believer of the notion of "great filter(s)."
I think most civilizations on a path to interstellar travel have to pass through a nuclear fission phase (how do you build advanced stuff without discovering this?) and I think a great % of civilizations will end/cripple themselves during this phase via nuclear war. This will filter out a lot of civilizations.
The next challenging filter would be making serious efforts at exploring/colonizing/exploiting other planets and solar systems before exhausting their own home planet's resources or making it unlivable. The human race is definitely on pace to lose this race.
However, I'm not going to believe that little green men from Mars visit the US government in flying saucers because of evidence so bad that "crackpots and videogame programmers" can debunk it.
> "Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights" over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. "This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project."
This is exactly what happened with the people and incidents that were exposed in the Mirage Men[1] documentary that covers how the government uses UFO and alien conspiracy theories to coverup information that they don't want the public to know.
Well-meaning people stumbled upon classified projects, did the right thing by reporting them to the government, and then the government went out of its way to construct situations and fake evidence to convince them that what they saw were really aliens.
In one incident, the government constructed a fake "alien crash landing" site in the mountains, and flew one of their victims to it and let them investigate it themselves in order to convince them that what they really saw were aliens.
In the process of deceiving these people, the government even significantly contributed to a veteran's mental breakdown and paranoia via agents' lies and extensive surveillance of the victim's life.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srtrRbt77AE