If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
There is a very reasonable explanation for this: If we are a topic of research for them, they could have simply stopped studying us in the same way
Take our own science for example. We pull out of studies when the funding dries up. Maybe the aliens’ government grant ran out. Or, perhaps they have a policy of avoiding interference with the subjects. They could have changed methodology in response to the threat of high resolution recording equipment
Nahh, any species able to come close to interstellar travel would be able to observe us from afar. We can already take good data on other planets’ atmospheres. It’s not going to be too much longer (probably still past our lifetimes, but) before we can take spy satellite quality photos of the surface.
Sure, some alien species might prefer to be more hands-on, but I’d hope they’d also recognize the destructive power humans have and stay away; It’s a lot easier to break something than to invent it, and few things remain even recognizable after being hit by bigger military weapons. A lot of older movies/media relied on that fact to make the other thing seem so fantastically strong. Like the alien ship shrugging off a nuke in Independence Day.
That may be true, but there’s only so much you can collect by remote observation. I really like the “interstellar scientists” take, because it’s something I can see us doing. If we obtained warp drive, we would want to understand how other intelligent species develop, and how similar their conditions and course of development is to our own.
I guess my point is: By the time we’d be able to travel that far, we’d have the ability to make all such observations without showing up on the planet.
Though on the other side of the coin, if interstellar travel were so ubiquitous, who’s to say all aliens would behave in such hands-off ways? Maybe any aliens that would visit Earth would be the equivalent to rednecks driving out in to the woods to shoot squirrels. Or in a more innocuous analogy, bird watching without binoculars.
The aliens are interested in bovine bowels, which are difficult to probe from afar.