The other night an acquaintance of mine at the America Legion mentioned that he had watched a "documentary" on Amazon entitled " The Age of Discovery". As it turns out Amazon refers to it as a "movie", not a documentary. The cost to watch it is $15 (USD). It is about ninety minutes long and the only reason that I can think of that they list it as a "movie" is for legal reasons. IMO: It is basically a documentary based on the people being interviewed. High level government and military officials that revealed things based on their personal experiences regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena
Also known as UFO's. At the risk of getting into politics: I found the first thing that Senator Chuck Schumer has said that I can agree with.

FWIIW: I for one thought that it was rather thought provoking. I for one had an unusual experience back in 1969 that I can not explain. Three bright lights over NYC that appeared, stayed stationary for about two seconds and then just vanished.

IMHO: I cannot believe that we humans can be vain enough to think that we are alone in the vast expanse of the universe. There is surely something else out there. If there are life forms from another universe that have been visiting us, as silly as it may sound if that life form is so advanced to visit our solar system when we are still trying to land people on our Moon (the Artemis program has been detained) perhaps they have NOT engaged us for the same reason that one would avoid getting into a conversation with some guy named Bubba that obviously has a two digit IQ in a bar some night.

I am curious if anyone else has watched "The Age of Discovery" or has any thoughts about this subject matter, or about my comments?

 

Matt, I have not watched "The Age of Discovery". I have no problem believing in other "worlds" visiting us or even being here.

 

I 100% agree that UFOs, aka UAPs are real.

But, unless some civilization has figured out how to travel at many times the speed of light, there is zero chance any of those UFOs are "manned" spacecraft from other worlds. The distances involved are simply too vast and the time a technological civilization might exist is simply too brief.

But who knows. All I know is I have never seen credible evidence that we have been visited by citizens of other star systems. UFOs are simply (mostly) unexplained.

And many of us had unusual experiences back in 1969.

 

The phrase government issues cover story comes to mind. Wouldn't be first or last.

Are we the sole intelligent life in this vast universe? hell no, we're just the one with a million monkeys at a million typewriters.

But as Mike said, Space is vast, perhaps incomprehensibly so and we are tucked off into a little corner of our galaxy far from anything.

 

I believe the US government has picked up remnants of UFO crashes in past decades. Trump is supposed to open up the "files" for Americans to view.

 

Anything to divert from some other files!

 

While I believe other life exists the one thing I don't comprehend is how a structure/vehicle could ever travel fast enough to visit earth in a reasonable time frame. If the closest source of life is say one million light years away from us, even if they could travel at the speed of light it would take one million years to reach earth ! I don't believe any species of life could live for a million years so they could travel to earth. I don't believe they could have a space vehicle that can travel at the speed of light either. I do believe there is life out there in some place, but I fail to see how they can travel to earth to visit us.

Jerry I am pretty sure you could explain it to us.

 

I am not against the idea that other life could exist. However, I feel that given the likelihood of how far away any truly advanced civilization would be from us, the physics around space travel, etc there is pretty much zero chance any living being could ever reach us. The more you learn and dig on it, the less likely it seems. Personally I think that if we have actually found craft that did not start from this planet, it would be unmanned and launched very, very long ago and was unoccupied. But then you have to start thinking about how much more advanced a civilization would have to be to even accomplish that, how much longer they would have to have existed before us to be that advanced, and still, the distance they likely would be from us and how long it would take for any probe to get here.

And likely as I said, due to expansion any civilizations that are so much older than us to have developed to some extreme point where they could even go a small fraction of the speed of light and also overcome all the other massive hurdles of interstellar travel are likely thousands or more light years from us. And then you start getting into the very odd physics of traveling "against" the direction of the universal expansion. I know some people have an idea that other civilizations could have advanced so much faster than us because "humans do dumb things.... yadda yadda" but there is zero reason to believe any other civilization would have advanced any differently. So hard to believe that any actual life from outer space has ever made it anywhere near us. They would be as equally unlikely to know we ever existed as we are of them. Plus, assuming a civilization actually launched deep space probe, the astronomical odds against them actually pointing it in the very specific region that would come anywhere near us, without knowing exactly where we are already, are so high that it would be hard to even define.

 

I was a geography major and I was fortunate to be taught by the most amazing professor when I was in university. He was convinced that the events that led to earth being formed and man being created, were so unique that it wasn't possible to have life on any other planet in the way that earth and humans evolved.

 

Aside from distance, temporal factors come into play.
A planet forms, stabilizes, collides with other planetary bodies and so forth.
After a few billion years, life, potentially intelligent, has emerged.
In our case, it only took 3.5 billion years.
Our supposed intelligent life has existed for about 5,000 years.
A mere blink of an eye.
How long will we be here before a) a big enough space rock obliviates our existence or we manage to find a way to do it ourselves with a nuclear exchange?

How many times in the past has a visitor arrived, looked around and said, nothing to see here, let's go.