Aliens (the Fermi Paradox)

First off, let me say that I do believe in Extraterrestrial Life.  However,

I do not believe such life has visited Earth.  Ever?  Not sure about that, but certainly not in the past century.  Contrary to UFO enthusiast's claims, I just don't believe there's any evidence to support it.

I really do believe that if an extraterrestrial intelligence visited Earth, the evidence would be pretty widespread and undeniable.  Contrary to many conspiracy theorists, the media in the Western world is simply too widespread, too diverse, to enter into collusion with a "hush" conspiracy.  In other words, even if the government of the United States was able to muzzle their own media, they wouldn't be able to quiet the reports from, say, Germany, or France, or Japan.

Governments can't even agree on many mundane things, such as tariffs, much less something huge that affects all people.  At any rate, I digress.

Along with media, most industrialized countries possess some form of very sensitive radio equipment - large multimetre dishes that collect radio energy in the nanowatt range.  It would be very difficult for an alien spacecraft to just sneak up on us.  Their communications with home base would be picked up by our telescopes, as they would be pretty much on a direct line of sight with us.  In their various scanning of the sky, some country would pick up the broadcast and the news would spread like wildfire through the world before we'd even decoded the message.

I don't believe in this nonsense about "subspace" or some form of superluminal waveform that we are unaware of.  The laws of Physics don't point to any form of "missing" energy that we are unable to read.  Granted, we're not very good at picking up neutrinos (the vast majority pass right through the Earth completely unaffected by the teratons of rock), but they aren't superluminal, either.  Other than the fact one wouldn't have to worry about such messages being blocked by intervening dust and gas or planets in space, they don't make a very good communications medium.

The point I was originally trying to get to, is that space is vast.  Incredibly so.  Therefore, travel to another star system is no trivial feat, not even by theoretically highly advanced aliens.  Setting up such a mission would take great planning and great expenditure of resources and intelligence.  They wouldn't waste all that sneaking around in trailer parks or cornfields.

We'd hear about the arrival probably months in advance, from the Kuiper Belt or outer solar system, and the whole world would be pretty well prepared on some level for it.

Our radio waves have been traveling outward for over a century now.  Granted, for the first few decades, the transmissions were so weak that they'd be easily lost in the background noise of the galaxy.  But chances are, if somebody has already picked up our radio waves, they would have to be at least as advanced as us, and therefore, we'd likely have picked up theirs by now.  But, if they haven't, the number of stars our transmissions reach increases to the cube of the time in transit.  In twice the time, eight times as many stars will "hear" us.  If they are listening.  Tens of thousands of stars now reside inside our "radio sphere."  Given another few decades, the number will reach into the millions.

I've gone on far longer than intended about communications.  Maybe, tomorrow I'll discuss the likelihood of intelligent life even arising.

Phil