Is "life out there" here?

UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) are all the rage these days and, having made the mistake of watching some newly released U.S. government videos on youtube, I'm now inundated by UFO videos. I have no idea what motivates the frauds or how stupid you have to be to believe that aliens playing tourist in our atmosphere would turn on running lights - or that sasquatches are those same tourists in atmosphere suits - but there do indeed seem to be some reports or sightings that defy easy explanation.

These tend to share a number of characteristics among which the two most important are first that there is no obvious explanation and, second, that the person or people reporting or recording it seem sane and uninterested in using the experience to elevate themselves in their own, or other people's, eyes.

Notice, however, that this doesn't mean a couple of crazies suffering through a methventure in someone else's backyard couldn't have a legitimate alien (in this context meaning "non-human technological intelligence" rather than "Mexican") encounter - it just means their stories need to be reviewed with more of focus on the observer than would normally be applied to incidents reported by either military or civilian pilots risking careers to record unusual sightings.

On a personal level I have neither the time nor the information needed to review even a few of the more interesting cases in any detail - but a number of highly credible teams have done so, and even dismissing those cases where they might reasonably be expected to pretend to a lack of understanding for national security reasons, we're still left with a residue of unexplained sightings and/or events.

With that in mind, lets consider a different way of asking the question: if at least some UAPs are the products of extra-terrestrial intelligence, then where did they come from and how did they get here?

If we assume they're neither time travelers from a past or future earth nor from planet nine (or some other solar system body) then we have to imagine two things: first, that intelligent technological life evolved somewhere else as well as here; and, second, that they have some means of crossing inter-steller distances.

My supposition is that life evolves everywhere and anywhere life can be supported - basically, where chemistry works, life begins - but evolution from chemical life to DNA, cellular structure, motility, and ultimately intelligence requires that conditions change over time - with each new set of changes creating new challenges for the emerging life form to overcome. As a result I expect we'll find life in some form on nearly every planet or major moon, but the frequency with which we find it at each level of complexity should fall off exponentially as that complexity rises - reaching near zero for technology using intelligences like our own.

Of course our galaxy is a pretty big place - so one in a billion probably still means over a hundred versions of us out there - and make no mistake: the competitive nature of evolution means that Klingons, Romulans, and Borg are far more likely than Vulcans.

But then, how did they get here? The galaxy is a pretty big place: we do not know how to travel faster than light - and many think it impossible. What we do know is that an alien mothership of significant mass traveling at any serious (sub-light) speed at all would leave a horrendous streak of fire (or other, more esoteric, phenomena like magnetic or gravitational field distortions) across our sky decelerating into our solar system.

Nuts pointing to the star of Bethlehem aside, we have no record of such an event - so either our aliens have a super luminal drive that doesn't leave a large energy signature on deceleration (as Alcubierre's warp drive certainly would), or they're not here. Of course we don't know what the laws of super luminal physics are, so who knows? but, given what we do know, the claim that extra-terrestrials tourists are visiting without bothering to pay our hotel room taxes is just not a very good bet.

AI directed machines are a better bet - after all we've sent early versions of these to most of the planets in our own system and there is an actual plan to send a camera and sensor pack to Alpha Centuri on a light sail.

In fact if current progress continues we should be able, within a very few years, to build a few hundred copies of each of dozen or more specialized, but networked, probes, and send them off at very low levels of continuous acceleration toward a planet 39 light years away knowing enough of them will get there in about 800 years to hang around for about another hundred years, and then group up to form a transmitter to tell us about their findings.

We're not likely to do it, of course, because we simply don't have the civilizational stability needed for it to make sense - and I don't think any other intelligence would either because the impatience is a consequence of the way the evolution of intelligence through overcoming change works.

Bottom line: either somebody has a low energy super luminal drive, or all this UAP stuff is delusion, confusion, or illusion - and, so far, there's no theoretical basis for a low energy super luminal drive.