It is also mathematically silly to assume that of all possible beings over current universe timeline that we are the most technically advanced. We have only existed for a minuscule sliver of that timespan.
That’s not to say that we are statistically likely to have been visited, however. But it is possible.
Why?
Most of our communication relies on radiowaves... even communication to/from space. Now looking at history, we've known and used radiowaves for maybe a 100 years, and considering the current enviromental trends, we might be using it for eg. 500 more, before we die out. Or maybe 10.000. Mathematically it doesn't really matter a lot.
Now look at the waves we've been sending out... a if we assume "the world ends" in 500 years, in a million years, there will be a 600 light-year "thin" shell of a 1mio light years sphere travelling away from earth, attenuated by the square law (twice the distance, 1/4 of the power).
What are the chances, that the thin shell of radiowaves hits some other culture, on some other world, in their "600 years of power", that are able to detect those waves, and actually come visit us (if we're still alive, which we're probably not).
Our world might be everything to us, but in a universal scale, our world compared to the universe is like an atom to our body... utterly insignificant.
Maybe they are prepping the battlefield to exterminate some pests?
And the Fermi Paradox says that if it did, we would see evidence of its effects... but we don't, which imples FTL isn't even remotely possible.
Since generally speaking, humans know or understand a bit more today than they did yesterday, it seems likely that there are things that today we think we know but do not know or know incorrectly. Thus, our rules about what is observable may be flawed. We may be missing evidence of other civilizations and visitors.
Given the vastness of time and space and the fact that we DO know that there is a lot that we do not know (as opposed to not knowing what we do not know), it seems more reasonable to err on the side of we-probably-don't-know.
I don't get the feeling that most educated people believe that "we are the only sentient beings with the ability to move ourselves around a plane or beyond". In fact, I'd wager that a significant portion, if not a majority, of such people believe that there likely is (or was, or will be) other such intelligent / sentient life in the universe.
But... what I think many (maybe most) educated people hold is that it is very unlikely that Earth is being routinely visited by alien intelligences. And I think the basis for that belief structure is rooted in the underlying physical reality of the universe, regarding distances between other worlds, and the speeds that can be attained to travel between worlds.
Simply put, it appears, based on what we know today, that even at light speed, (or a very, very large fraction of light speed), it would take around hundreds of years to travel back and forth to Earth from nearby planets that are suspected of being habitable. So even in the best case, where the aliens can travel at like 0.95 of c, and happen to be located on the very nearest habitable planet, it seems likely that they would have to be both very long-lived, and very tolerant of boredom, to travel back and forth between Earth and their world.
Impossible? No. Likely? Hmm...
OTOH, it seems like we do keep discovering more and more new "possibly habitable worlds" and the "best case" range to such a world keeps shrinking. And there's no particular reason I know of to think that "aliens" might not live dramatically longer lives than us, and maybe they are in fact fine with multiple hundred year jaunts around the universe. Or maybe they've invented the sci-fi trope "suspended animation". So never say never, I guess.
You can take the unexplainable part and do something useful with it - like making observations public and collecting more data.
The rest is a speculative hypothesis about the data.
This has always been one of the biggest problems with the reaction to these phenomena. You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
That's very poor logic and equally poor science.
Agreed.
You can't stop at "Unexplainable things are happening" without being told "They can't be, because interstellar travel is impossible."
Also agreed. We need to be able to divorce analysis of the actual phenomena - whatever they actually are - from one specific speculative hypothesis.
The assertion of a high probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is reasonable.
The presence of testimony is not evidence. People report things for many reasons. Most of the time, it is a silly bid for a moment of fame and/or it just sells news/gathers clicks in an untrustworthy economy on a slow day.
One day, we ourselves may advance our own intelligence sufficiently to achieve civilisation.
We ourselves owe our existence to a chance extinction of the dominant life form on Earth 65 million years ago. Without that, our mammal ancestors would not have been able to reproduce as frequently and plentifully, which would almost certainly have slowed the development of us if it didn't rule it out outright in the timescale the Earth has left.
There's no guarantee most worlds with life even ever develop multi-cellular life. It took Earth billions of years to go from single-cell to multicellular.
Yes, there has been a lot of time and a lot of star systems, but there are so many things that are required, I'm not at all confident that there is intelligent life out there. Earth is a sample size of 1, and we tend to treat it as if its the norm, but that's just a sometimes-useful assumption. The reality is we might have won the universal lottery.