Moontanman

It depends on if you think the same people who launched will get there. We could, with only controlled fusion plus our current technology, colonise the entire galaxy is something like 250,000 to 250,000,000 years. As far as where to go... where ever you want to go as long as you are taking your own environment with you the destination becomes only means to refuel, repair, and reproduce. Planets and gravity wells are to be avoided if possible.. Sorry repeat..

IMHO the motivations and appearance of aliens is difficult, to say the least, to try and speculate about these things is, if not a waste of time, really meaningless. We seem to be stuck on the Star Trek\Star Wars mind set where all aliens are more or less humanoid and all planets are more or less mirror images of Earth. Assuming that the laws of physics are as we see them it seems unlikely that star ship will make direct voyages to a star and colonise planets.Of course if we find a way to prolong our life span and or change our perception of time such voyages might be possible. But it would seem that slow boats or generational ship would be much more likely. After living their lives on a generational ships the people on board might think that planets with uncontrolled weather and, wild dangerous animals, and various gravity and gases unlike the controlled environment of the spacecraft might be less than optimal. Using local materials to build new spaceships would look like the logical choice. In fact I would think that all the material in our own solar system would be used to make habitats instead of starships. Of course such habitats could be converted to starships if the need arose.

This is an interesting short video about colonizing the galaxy via star motion. I still think that planets are unnecessary to the point that planets will be ignored and actively avoided. This gives a interesting slant.

Dynomite! Is a cultural reference mean to be humorous, check the spelling. But yes, we would have to develop ways of mining in zero gee. Possibly robots could do much of it with just a few humans to supervise the mining and construction of the first habitats. Then more humans could settle in those places and more robots could be used. It's the beginning of my Winnebago theory of galactic colonization...

I look forward to something other than baseless assertions. You must provide something other than your own assertions. I can assert anything in that manner and disproof? You are mistaken, you must provide some support for your assertions other than your assertions. Teapot in orbit around Uranus anyone? I am responding to what is little more than a gish gallop of baseless assertions, he does not really provide anything that can be called evidence and his logic is at best cartoonish, Sherlock Holmes? Really?

Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Citation please. Sherlock Holmes was wrong, this is nothing but a argument from ignorance, if you don't know then you don't know no matter how many things you think you've eliminated deciding something is the truth with no supporting evidence is not valid. Would you say there are no white swans because you've never seen one? Until Australia was discovered there were no white swans as far as anyone knew but there they were. The only thing absurd is using an argument from ignorance, I see no reason to think the "plan" in not contained in the genome just because you can't see it..

You are correct, I misread your statement but it comes back to your 10 assertions, can you provide a citation for any of them? They do indeed sound like the ravings of a creationist your claim you are not one is meaningless. We see creationists all the time who try to sneak in their agenda by claiming not to be creationists. You made the assertions, it's not our job to disprove them, it's your job to show they are valid...

Actually you are so far off on all of them your not even close enough for why your wrong to be explained. You make completely off thew wall, and i suspect a dishonest creationist source, assumptions at the beginning of each point that are not close enough to even be wrong. The Earth and it's biosphere is not a closed system..

So if Elon Musk hasn't suggested it then it has to be impossible? The whole point of this is that one planet doesn't have to support such an enterprise. In fact that would be close to impossible but there are plenty of resources already in space, asteroids, Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, and those good old oort cloud objects not to mention such objects in interstellar space.

Talk about a non sequitur...

Why does the computer programmer have to a god? Why couldn't just be our descendants modeling the past to see how things were back in the good old days. As I said god is not an answer to anything... Prove you are real...

Before you embarrass your self again please show some evidence of a god before invoking a god. God is not an answer to anything and is infact a claim that needs evidence...

No, this is a misunderstanding often alluded to but it doesn't hold up without assuming that any travels would be direct from star to star by the same individuals. Slow ships traveling from one oort cloud to another and making use of interstellar objects and dust to top up volatiles and to build even more habitats makes much more sense and is doable if they have controlled fusion as an energy source. No needs for planets at all and any visitors to earth would be the equivalent specialized researchers. The entire galaxy could be smattered by these habitats, rotated for gravity, see O'Neil cylinders and Mckendrick cylinders and Stanford Torus. I don't know of a reason why aluminum from an alien spacecraft would necessarily show up differently. But you have a point about what we are looking for. If what we are looking for is something else then we might not even detect it at all. This has been suggested in the search for a shadow biosphere. We look for DNA from the biosphere we know and wouldn't "see" anything different..

As much as I like Neil he is not the last word on this and has no evidence to back that up... https://futurism.com/sorry-elon-physicists-say-we-definitely-arent-living-in-a-computer-simulation

It's an interesting concept. I know I've never heard of it being used to detect aliens.

You do realise that distance is not necessarily a limiting factor.. right? I am asking what would that evidence be?

"off world ejecta"? Are you talking about DNA? I'm not sure how that would work but I am sure it's not being done and will not be done until some other suspicions direct us in that direction. Until someone takes the possibility of aliens visiting us serious no one will even try to do that... this video, if you start it at around 03:40 to get past all the silly intro they put in it is interesting, it's kind of long, but if you get the chance it does give some insight into the whole 2004 Nov. 10th sighting that wasn't told by TV the FLIR stuff starts at around 26:00 and we've seen that on the national news. If you get the chance it is interesting if nothing else due to the possibility it was human tech. Dropping from 28.000 fett to 50 feet at 24,000 mph of course if it's all bs then it's meaningless and that is the key. How do you figure out what is BS and what is real... 500 knots underwater is wild...

Depends on how serious you take the report of the two aircraft that encountered the "tic tacs" before the ones who took the FLIR images. The initial report was of objects capable of hypersonic flight extreme altitudes and hovering over the ocean, radar tapes and sonar detections. The FLIR images are not indicative at all and could easily be disinformation but you do make a good point. I would be very surprised if Russia or China were testing super drones just off the coast of the US but it's not out of the bounds of possibility. I think I said this in another thread but these sighting have human tech written all over them but if it is human then a phase change in aerial warfare equal to or exceeding stealth is taking place...

While that is a bit of a fly in the ointment some things are impossible for even those supersonic highly maneuverable drones. Dropping down from extreme altitude and or climbing back up with no exhaust or heat buildup is more than a bit odd. But I am not arguing the quality of specific evidence, just asking what would it take. I have a feeling that this is a very difficult question to answer. Almost anything short of the landing on the white house lawn can be nit picked apart...

You don't think that an aircraft flying in ways impossible for our tech is suspicious in anyway of something anomalous at least? Wouldn't ruling out any mundane reason be true for all possible evidence? Not at all, I would be amazed if they shared technology to any large degree, in fact I would hope they do not but things like history, biology, and literature would be very interesting to me..

I doubt it would change my life very much if at all. I would love to read their literature, history, or natural history of their planet. The first thing I would want to know is "are there anymore of us out there"

So we are unlikely to have real evidence unless the aliens want us to?

In a recent thread there seemed to be some confusion as to what would constitute Evidence in regards to UFOs and aliens. I am a bit unsure myself, so I ask exactly what evidence would make you have to consider aliens as the cause of a UFO incident? Would there have to be a landing on the white house lawn? Or would a good film be enough to make considering aliens reasonable. Now days, with things like cgi, photoshop, drones, and military tech I would think it would come close to requiring a landing in times square during the new years eve celebration. But is it reasonable to require that much evidence before aliens are a reasonable consideration? Past sightings are in the past and while I know of many past sightings that make me wonder passing down info from the past is subject to the "chinese whispers" problem. Taken at face value I would say some reports from the past scream something of high strangeness at least but we cannot be sure of how accurately the sighting was reported then or how accurately it was passed down. So lets limit ourselves to modern standards of evidence taking all the possible mundan possibilities into account and try to keep from rehashing sightings that occured in the past we cannot really be sure of.

One of my favs which hasn't been mentioned is Isaac Arthur.