Quote:
Originally Posted by Battlebasset
It's actually worse than that. Your 4.2 light years would be the closest star to Earth, Alpha Centauri, which has no confirmed habitable planets. So it's likely that any travelers would be coming from much farther away. Add to that the need to travel much faster than the speed of light, which is currently believed to be impossible, and the issues with space/time at those speeds, and visitation becomes even less likely.
If you do a little google searching, you'll see that after WW2, many believed that some Nazis escaped to the moon. This was because after the war we discovered their work on rockets, and people knew very little about the complexity of space travel, or about the habitability of the moon. Once the public knowledge of both grew, those beliefs quickly dissipated.
I put UFO's in the same category. If people really understood the complexity of FTL travel, and the vast distances of space, most would understand that it is highly unlikely, even an impossibility that we have ever been visited.
That does not mean their isn't life on other planets. I just believe that it is rare, and far enough away that we will never know on this side of eternity if it exists.
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It was less than 200 years ago that a voyage from America to Australia took around four months, and a trip overland from our east coast to west coast was a journey of more than half a year. If you made it at all.
Today, flight time New York to Sydney is about 22 hours and NY to LA a hair over 6.
We didn't know how to build machines that could fly at near (or in the case of Concorde, over) the speed of sound.
Until we did.