Why haven't extraterrestrials made their presence known?

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My grandma is 76 and she uses the Internet all the time. I think people born in the 30's are a lot more modern than people born in the 20's.

I think that we've not contacted extraterrestrials yet because the odds of it happening are really low.

We're probably not alone in the Universe. I would say that life is probably pretty common in the Universe, relatively speaking. Intelligent life would be rarer, though. For one thing, intelligence itself may not happen all that often. It requires a very specific evolutionary path to make an organism physically capable of intelligent behavior. Beyond that, alien intelligence might be, well, alien. It may not look like our intelligence at all, and they may or may not actually care about space travel.

In the case that a species with an intelligence similar enough to our own to care about space travel does evolve, it may not survive for that long, or its technological growth may flatten out at some point. It's unlikely that we would pick up random radio signals travelling across the gulf of space, and species like our own eventually shrink their radio profile, anyway. Assuming that they don't ever develop interstellar travel, they would never contact us physically. Interstellar travel is probably incredibly rare if it happens at all. The speed of light is an absolute maximum speed, and something that you can only reach with massless particles. Maybe there are ways to be sneaky and get around that (like the creation of a stable wormhole), but the odds that a species will attain them are probably very low. Even then, those means of transport probably remain extremely rare. Most interstellar species would probably never build an interstellar empire like you see in science fiction. They probably remain small-scale enough to be susceptible to factors which can cause extinction, too.

Those are the realistic reasons why we haven't encountered anyone else. I will say, though, that I'm really fascinated by another. That's the idea that the first species to get the ability for interstellar travel might purposefully wipe out others. Works really well for science fiction, although I highly doubt that it's the real reason.

If we expect most extraterrestrials to be carbon-based life forms, we might miss them.

IMO, the most visible of all extraterrestrials are the plasmatic orbs.

"You're more advanced than a cockroach. Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one?"

Guys, guys! There may be extra terrestrials, but none of them have been here lately.

ruveyn