Comment by __MatrixMan__
2 days ago
I'm not saying that it's a conclusion that we should jump to. Just that it's silly to expect people not to consider it first. It's more related to why we're looking up in the first place than any of its alternatives.
It's so ridiculous that the only reason to expend a single keystroke on it is to demolish it.
Consider what the implication would be if these are ET spacecraft. The galaxy would be absolute soaked in ETI. The Fermi argument would then bite maximally: why did we even evolve, if the galaxy has been so saturated? Why wasn't every single planet and asteroid used for colonies and resources ages ago?
It's important to realize that science fictional tropes of galaxies with everyone zooming around in spaceships having adventures are not consistent with what we observe.
What does the low probability have to do with it?
If you had asked Galileo's contemporaries about the probability that he'd find moons orbiting Jupiter, they'd have put it at zero, and they turned out to be wrong.
Einstein's work was also in flagrant disregard of the established scientific sensibilities of the time.
I can't speak for everybody, but the excitement that I get when I look through a telescope, or a microscope, or commune with any machine that can see something that I can't... it comes from the possibility that I'll see something impossible, something that invalidates the theories which previously governed what I'm likely to see. It's why we keep building better telescopes and bigger particle colliders--because we want to prove ourselves wrong.
It's fine to be a rationalist with an appreciation for existing theory, but it's not irrationality when others attempt to invalidate what you're protecting--thats where progress comes from. We wouldn't know as much as we do without the people who look for things that shouldn't be there on the basis of viewpoints outside of accepted theory.