Arguments Against ETH

humanoidlord said:

who knows, maybe, but the UFO phenomena is definitely not what it looks like (various interestellar civilizations visiting earth using FTL drives) maybe its still extraterrestrial but something way more alien than an star trek style alien council

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Lordy - who said that alien visitors are going to be anything like the fictional Star Trek council? That's not what I think - I think that they're millions if not billions of years ahead of us, so they'll be less comprehensible to us, than we would be to a neanderthal.

CasualBystander said:

I'm still dubious about warp drive.

The effect would have to propagate at the speed of light.

This would limit you to the speed of light.

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That's true of the simplistic Alcubierre model where the warp shell lies beyond the craft.

But I think that these craft use the hull itself to generate the warp field internal to the material, in which case the warp field gets accelerated as the craft accelerates. That would appear to eliminate the light-speed propagation problem. But I haven't seen a paper about this concept yet so I'm just speculating at this point, but it's a logical argument.

There's also no getting around the perfect fit between theory and observations. These craft behave exactly as gravitaitonal field propulsion theory predicts. So whatever the technical issues may be, others have clearly overcome them...and we can too, eventually.

humanoidlord said:

That is a lot of energy just to get to light speed.

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No, you're mixing up Newtonian physics with relativistic physics here.

Once the field is established, gravitational field propulsion requires no expenditure of energy to keep accelerating the craft (except for whatever inherent energy losses trickle out of the system via inefficiencies), because technically the craft isn't acquiring any momentum or kinetic energy - the distortion in spacetime is the source of the acceleration. This is also why there's no time dilation with gravitational field propulsion: the region of spacetime within the craft remains flat - there's no Lorentz boost within the bubble, so that region remains identical to that of the observer's rest frame.

The physics of applied general relativity (GR) are in many ways just as exotic and counterintuitive as quantum field theory. We just don't hear as much about those effects because we haven't learned how to engineer with GR yet.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

Lordy - who said that alien visitors are going to be anything like the fictional Star Trek council? That's not what I think - I think that they're millions if not billions of years ahead of us, so they'll be less comprehensible to us, than we would be to a neanderthal.


That's true of the simplistic Alcubierre model where the warp shell lies beyond the craft.

But I think that these craft use the hull itself to generate the warp field internal to the material, in which case the warp field gets accelerated as the craft accelerates. That would appear to eliminate the light-speed propagation problem. But I haven't seen a paper about this concept yet so I'm just speculating at this point, but it's a logical argument.

There's also no getting around the perfect fit between theory and observations. These craft behave exactly as gravitaitonal field propulsion theory predicts. So whatever the technical issues may be, others have clearly overcome them...and we can too, eventually.


No, you're mixing up Newtonian physics with relativistic physics here.

Once the field is established, gravitational field propulsion requires no expenditure of energy to keep accelerating the craft (except for whatever inherent energy losses trickle out of the system via inefficiencies), because technically the craft isn't acquiring any momentum or kinetic energy - the distortion in spacetime is the source of the acceleration. This is also why there's no time dilation with gravitational field propulsion: the region of spacetime within the craft remains flat - there's no Lorentz boost within the bubble, so that region remains identical to that of the observer's rest frame.

The physics of applied general relativity (GR) are in many ways just as exotic and counterintuitive as quantum field theory. We just don't hear as much about those effects because we haven't learned how to engineer with GR yet.

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Umm.

The problem is that actual field propagation speed is limited to the speed of light.

In your scenario the hull would get ahead of the field.

Further you are assuming space compression is elastic. That may be true but compression of the matter in space probably isn't.

Which raises a question of how bad the drag in space is from high speed travel. Speed is empty and the resistance negligible at the slow speeds we use. But if there is enough gas for a Bussard ramjet that means there is a lot of high speed drag.

CasualBystander said:

Umm.

The problem is that actual field propagation speed is limited to the speed of light.

In your scenario the hull would get ahead of the field.

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No, you're not listening to what I'm saying: I'm saying that the material of the hull itself is generating the field internally. So the field isn't propagating and the material and the field are intrinsically and inescapably coupled - one can't get ahead of the other, just like the electric field within a capacitor can't get ahead of or behind a capacitor.

In relativity you can always choose the frame of any observer or object and call that the rest frame, and any fields within that rest frame will behave the same way as if they're at rest. From an observer in relative motion the fields appear to be compressed along the direction of motion, but that's an artifact of the relative perspective (described by the Lorentz boost as a rotation) between reference frames moving through spacetime.

CasualBystander said:

Further you are assuming space compression is elastic.

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"Malleable" is probably more accurate than "elastic," but we're talking about well-trodden GR here - no new physics involved.

CasualBystander said:

That may be true but compression of the matter in space probably isn't.

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I don't know what you're referring to here, or why it matters. All matter subjected to binding energy gets compressed to some extent; it's not significant here as far as I can tell. It hasn't been raised as an objection in the academic literature anyway.

CasualBystander said:

Which raises a question of how bad the drag in space is from high speed travel. Speed is empty and the resistance negligible at the slow speeds we use. But if there is enough gas for a Bussard ramjet that means there is a lot of high speed drag.

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There's no drag to spacetime itself; I think you're invoking the interstellar medium.

Personally I tend to assume that the positive and negative poles of the gravitational field embedded within the hull (the interaction of which accelerates the craft) are rotating, accelerating any material medium around the craft using the Lense-Thirring effect, because we don't detect any hot trails of plasma associated with AAVs even at extremely high velocities through the atmosphere, which is obviously far more dense than the interstellar medium. But however they're doing it, they're doing it: even in reports where these devices move at meteoric speeds through the lower atmosphere, there's no associated trails of plasma. It's as if the field is distorting the spacetime around the craft and carrying all of the matter embedded in that spacetime right along with it, preventing both atmospheric plasma trails and superheating of the hull.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I think that they're millions if not billions of years ahead of us, so they'll be less comprehensible to us, than we would be to a neanderthal.

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An analogy might be some of the tribes recently found in South America that have had no contact with anyone. Theoretically anyway - not sure how exact that claim is based pictures like this. When they see a drone or small plane overhead the reaction hasn't been that different from what we do when we see something we can't compute


Note that our buddy down there has an arrow knocked. Know why?
Because he doesn't have an F/A-18 Super Hornet.

If we're speculating about motives maybe they're leaving us generally alone for our own good. Look at the grief for fellow humans with only a relatively short time period between levels of civilization.

Uncontacted Indians of Brazil - Survival International

CasualBystander said:

I'm still dubious about warp drive.

The effect would have to propagate at the speed of light.

This would limit you to the speed of light.

That is a lot of energy just to get to light speed. Not sure it would be less than simply accelerating to 0.9 C for a long voyage and could be orders of magnitude more, which makes it impractical.

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yeah, unless i see it at work, it just another pipe dream like superstrings

Thomas R. Morrison said:

Lordy - who said that alien visitors are going to be anything like the fictional Star Trek council? That's not what I think - I think that they're millions if not billions of years ahead of us, so they'll be less comprehensible to us, than we would be to a neanderthal.

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while you never said it, you implied it in your past posts
if the phenomena is really extraterrestrial in nature then i would bet on really exotic concepts like plasma based life, god-like AIs or even mind parasites and maybe even something even more exotic
the fact here is that we are definitely not dealing with humanoid exploratory species like us

Thomas R. Morrison said:

There's also no getting around the perfect fit between theory and observations. These craft behave exactly as gravitaitonal field propulsion theory predicts.

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they also fit perfectly an holographical or pure energy based model on UFOs

Thomas R. Morrison said:

No, you're mixing up Newtonian physics with relativistic physics here.

Once the field is established, gravitational field propulsion requires no expenditure of energy to keep accelerating the craft (except for whatever inherent energy losses trickle out of the system via inefficiencies), because technically the craft isn't acquiring any momentum or kinetic energy - the distortion in spacetime is the source of the acceleration. This is also why there's no time dilation with gravitational field propulsion: the region of spacetime within the craft remains flat - there's no Lorentz boost within the bubble, so that region remains identical to that of the observer's rest frame.

The physics of applied general relativity (GR) are in many ways just as exotic and counterintuitive as quantum field theory. We just don't hear as much about those effects because we haven't learned how to engineer with GR yet.

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it would need an exotic reactor either way

Thomas R. Morrison said:

because we don't detect any hot trails of plasma associated with AAVs even at extremely high velocities through the atmosphere

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We can't say that because there is a lot of evidence that plasma surrounds UFOs during stages that require lots of energy, like fast manoeuvres or descent from outer space.

From disruption of petrol engines we have one of the best established facts about UFOs, that they are surrounded by high electric potential.

Many witnesses who touched hull sad that it was very hot, which could had been caused by presence of plasma during previous flight stages.

Famously, hovering UFOs cause crackling noises on police and FM radios, which in present physics can only be caused by plasma.

As well, it is well known that UFOs appear and disappear from radar screens. That easily can be explained by plasma because plasma absorbs microwaves. So much so that Soviets planned to envelope their planes in a plasma as a form of stealth. Reason why UFOs appear and dissappear from radars is that their flight patterns are dynamic and hulls produce different amounts and different kinds of plasma. Different states of plasma would absorb microwaves in a different ways. Plasma exists in four distinct stages of which one is completely invisible.

I described this elsewhere but I'll just mention it here. When UFOs are observed descending from space through atmosphere they go through all the colours of plasma that Earth's atmosphere is capable of producing. They start with white light, then they switch to bluish white, then green, yellow, red and orange and finally they emerge out of plasma as dark gun-metal color solid object. All these colours like blue Green red orange are actually spectral lines of oxygen hydrogen and nitrogen available in Earth's atmosphere. Here is to Wikipedia article:

So all these different observations from witnesses can inside modern physics be Explained with plasma. Plasma definitely prevails is down to earth explanation.

But saying that recently I heard an observation from very reliable source, Ray Stanford himself, who did a colour slide of an UFO with difraction filter on the lens. That enabled him to break up a spectrum of light that was coming from UFO and he found it it was just a single line of monochromatic red colour. Don't ask me how but other observers as well reported that a light coming from UFOs is monochromatic. This monochromatic nature of light from UFOs might or might not disrupt above stated theory that plasma shrouds uFOs. This monochromatic nature of UFO lights might be the ultimate clue into UFO propulsion because if they are using metamaterials for their hulls then UFOs should be forced to use monochromatic light because cavities inside metamaterials are all the fixed size. That would mean that we are not seeing plasma, but overflow of the monochromatic light from inside the hull's material. Just by measuring wavelength of this monochromatic light we can find out size of the cavities in the metamaterial and help ourselves to reverse engineer UFO propulsion.

But monochromatic light can not explain crackling of the radios and temporary radar invisibility.

As always, we just need more of better data.

Dejan Corovic said:

. . . But saying that recently I heard an observation from very reliable source, Ray Stanford himself . . .

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Regarding "very reliable source . . .", please see this thread.

Dejan Corovic said:

. . . who did a colour slide of an UFO with dichroic filter on the lens. That enabled him to break up a spectrum of light that was coming from UFO and he found it it was just a single line of monochromatic red colour.

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Well, for starters, before embarking on all of those extrapolations, why didn't you post the Stanford image to better illuminate our understanding? Oh, what's that you say? -- you don't have the image? Well, you could have at least inserted a link to where the image has been posted on the Internet, along with all of Stanford's associated claims regarding the circumstances in which it was ostensibly obtained. Oh, the image hasn't been made available for critical scrutiny at all?

Ah, well. This latest in the never-ending cornucopia of Stanford UFO-evidence claims should be given weight only if every element of the claim is validated by competent technical experts, independent of Stanford, with due attention also to "chain-of-evidence" concerns.

Dejan Corovic said:

As always, we just need more of better data.

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Yes.

Justice Fodor said:

Regarding "very reliable source . . .", please see this thread.

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That is your opinion, not mine. I have zero interest in what you have to say.

Yes, I can see that you have your hands full, building a sand castle of extrapolation about UFO propulsion, from something that Ray Stanford told you in an email or on the phone.

In your original post you wrote that Stanford used a "dichroic filter on the lens," and that the monochromatic result (Stanford seeing red) was therefore very significant. That struck me as nonsense. Now I see that you have edited your post to say "difraction filter [sic] on the lens," which at least is not nonsensical on its face. But I think we better wait for that independent, expert-analyst report, before jumping to conclusions, heh?

Dejan Corovic said:

We can't say that because there is a lot of evidence that plasma surrounds UFOs during stages that require lots of energy, like fast manoeuvres or descent from outer space.

From disruption of petrol engines we have one of the best established facts about UFOs, that they are surrounded by high electric potential.

Many witnesses who touched hull sad that it was very hot, which could had been caused by presence of plasma during previous flight stages.

Famously, hovering UFOs cause crackling noises on police and FM radios, which in present physics can only be caused by plasma.

As well, it is well known that UFOs appear and disappear from radar screens. That easily can be explained by plasma because plasma absorbs microwaves. So much so that Soviets planned to envelope their planes in a plasma as a form of stealth. Reason why UFOs appear and dissappear from radars is that their flight patterns are dynamic and hulls produce different amounts and different kinds of plasma. Different states of plasma would absorb microwaves in a different ways. Plasma exists in four distinct stages of which one is completely invisible.

I described this elsewhere but I'll just mention it here. When UFOs are observed descending from space through atmosphere they go through all the colours of plasma that Earth's atmosphere is capable of producing. They start with white light, then they switch to bluish white, then green, yellow, red and orange and finally they emerge out of plasma as dark gun-metal color solid object. All these colours like blue Green red orange are actually spectral lines of oxygen hydrogen and nitrogen available in Earth's atmosphere. Here is to Wikipedia article:

So all these different observations from witnesses can inside modern physics be Explained with plasma. Plasma definitely prevails is down to earth explanation.

But saying that recently I heard an observation from very reliable source, Ray Stanford himself, who did a colour slide of an UFO with difraction filter on the lens. That enabled him to break up a spectrum of light that was coming from UFO and he found it it was just a single line of monochromatic red colour. Don't ask me how but other observers as well reported that a light coming from UFOs is monochromatic. This monochromatic nature of light from UFOs might or might not disrupt above stated theory that plasma shrouds uFOs. This monochromatic nature of UFO lights might be the ultimate clue into UFO propulsion because if they are using metamaterials for their hulls then UFOs should be forced to use monochromatic light because cavities inside metamaterials are all the fixed size. That would mean that we are not seeing plasma, but overflow of the monochromatic light from inside the hull's material. Just by measuring wavelength of this monochromatic light we can find out size of the cavities in the metamaterial and help ourselves to reverse engineer UFO propulsion.

But monochromatic light can not explain crackling of the radios and temporary radar invisibility.

As always, we just need more of better data.

Click to expand...

There's a lot to parse and contemplate here, and perhaps we should do that sometime. But my point was much simpler than all of this - I'm not talking about any plasma that may or may not be enveloping AAVs in relation to their propulsion mechanism, I'm just pointing out that AAVs don't leave a long trail of hot plasma in their wake, even when they move at meteoric speeds. If AAVs employed brute force to push through the atmosphere at meteoric speeds, there would be a glowing trail of plasma left behind them as they streaked across the sky. But that's never reported in such cases.

They also don't produce sonic booms even when they jump to Mach 31 like we've heard about in the Nimitz incidents (Kevin Day and/or Trevor described the anomalous radar targets dropping from 28K ft altitude down to 50 ft altitude in .78 second, and back up again at the same rate, when approached by interceptors, which gives and an average transit speed of about Mach 31). Cmdr. Fravor also noted the absence of a sonic boom when the Tic-Tac AAV went supersonic at the end of their encounter. In fact, radical accelerations to supersonic speed are never accompanied by a sonic boom in any AAV reports.

So the absence of a trail of ionized atmosphere, and the absence of sonic booms at high speed, both indicate that the AAV propulsion system overcomes drag in a way that we humans can't mimic yet. It appears that AAVs displace the matter around the craft in a controlled way, preventing the formation of a compression wave and the intense atmospheric friction that accompanies all other known hypersonic motion through the atmosphere.

In my mind, that presents a very significant clue regarding the nature of their propulsion mechanism.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

I think that they're millions if not billions of years ahead of us

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Whilst I agree with this I think it just a percentage of the whole, meaning there's most likely alien (to us) species millions and billions of years ahead of us, but there's most likely species out there thousands of years ahead of us, hundreds of years ahead, decades ahead, and we are most likely decades ahead of some species out there, hundreds, thousands and so on...

I think there are intelligent species throughout the universe of varying ages reflecting the various ages of galaxies, stars and planets...I agree it is most likely that the alien species visiting our planet are thousands, millions, or billions of years ahead of us but what if there are species out there around our level of technology and like us, encountered alien visitors to their planet...What if they shot down one or a few of those 'ufos' and figured out the technology, maybe it took them fifty years and they commence to using that tech and randomly travel to our planet?...Well then we have a ufo visitor only fifty years ahead of us, they just got lucky and downed enough ufos visiting their planet and figured out the tech...

These visitors of possibly millions and billions of years ahead of us do have some implications I think we should consider...Not only has the questions of why would they visit our planet and why would they have interest in our primitive species been raised, but before asking those questions I think we have to first consider their possible mindset towards other intelligent species, no matter the level of intelligence, we should consider how they view life on other planets...Did they evolved over the eons with a highly positive mindset of generally respecting other life, although they may snatch a couple test subjects here and there, do they in general respect life?...Being billions of years ahead of us maybe they regard abducting a few people isn't going to cause that species to be extinct or harm things as a whole, they see the bigger picture through time perhaps...

Alternatively;

These creatures that are billions of years ahead of us perhaps has carried with them through the eons a detailed record going back billions of years, they've seen it all, they have done it all from their perspective...Maybe they've evolved as far as they possibly could in whatever form they exist and perhaps they know of others in the universe like them who have survived billions of years...Maybe because they think they have seen it all that they have a total disregard for primitives like us or are completely indifferent...Maybe to them it doesn't matter if we live or die as a species, they will do as they want, from their point of view this universe belongs to them, we and others like us are the wildlife of the universe, like animals exist on our planet...Then we still have to ask the questions, why are they coming here, what interest could they possibly have with us?....

Could a primitive but intelligent lifeform like us even remotely understand the motivations, asperations, and perspectives of another intelligent species but one or more that are millions or billions of years ahead of us?...What if we were to figure out how to fly to the stars the way they do, irregardless if through our own means or that of capturing their technology and figuring it out, would they see us as a threat or as friends or be indifferent considering our history of violence and destruction?...

...

pigfarmer said:

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There is no jumping into conclusions. All the plasma effects that I listed are connected and part of standard electrodynamics thought through universities. Please feel free to consult any electrical engineer with degree to correct me.

It just happens so that witness observations perfectly match modern electrodynamics. Strange but true, possibly (a big) clue.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

If AAVs employed brute force to push through the atmosphere at meteoric speeds, there would be a glowing trail of plasma left behind them as they streaked across the sky.

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Canceling sonic boom is easy, peasy. Project strong positive electric field ahead of the craft to get air ionised. Once ionised heavy positive ions will get repelled by positive electric field. Practically one gets semi vacuum ahead of the craft.

High school physics. You remember Columb force. Not all UFO stuff is high tech

If I remember correctly Soviets thought of it first, 40 years ago, but calculations had shown that a big percentage of jet engine power will be taken, so it didn't make it further than just a scientific paper. They wanted to combine stealth with drag reduction. As well if one envelopes plane in plasma it can be seen with naked eye, no need for radar.

It's all old hat.

If UFOs are moving at high speed they are enveloped either in plasma or that monochromatic light. That's dilema to ponder about.

Thomas R. Morrison said:

There's a lot to parse and contemplate here, and perhaps we should do that sometime. But my point was much simpler than all of this - I'm not talking about any plasma that may or may not be enveloping AAVs in relation to their propulsion mechanism, I'm just pointing out that AAVs don't leave a long trail of hot plasma in their wake, even when they move at meteoric speeds. If AAVs employed brute force to push through the atmosphere at meteoric speeds, there would be a glowing trail of plasma left behind them as they streaked across the sky. But that's never reported in such cases.

They also don't produce sonic booms even when they jump to Mach 31 like we've heard about in the Nimitz incidents (Kevin Day and/or Trevor described the anomalous radar targets dropping from 28K ft altitude down to 50 ft altitude in .78 second, and back up again at the same rate, when approached by interceptors, which gives and an average transit speed of about Mach 31). Cmdr. Fravor also noted the absence of a sonic boom when the Tic-Tac AAV went supersonic at the end of their encounter. In fact, radical accelerations to supersonic speed are never accompanied by a sonic boom in any AAV reports.

So the absence of a trail of ionized atmosphere, and the absence of sonic booms at high speed, both indicate that the AAV propulsion system overcomes drag in a way that we humans can't mimic yet. It appears that AAVs displace the matter around the craft in a controlled way, preventing the formation of a compression wave and the intense atmospheric friction that accompanies all other known hypersonic motion through the atmosphere.

In my mind, that presents a very significant clue regarding the nature of their propulsion mechanism.

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What you have written above reminds me a great deal of some of the chapters in Unconventional Flying Objects, the book by former NACA/NASA scientist Paul R. Hill, published posthumously by his daughter in 1995. Of this book, Dr. Hal Puthoff wrote in 1997, "To the degree that the engineering characteristics of UFOs can be estimated by empirical observation, in my opinion the above-referenced, recently published book by Paul Hill provides the most reliable, concise summary of engineering-type data available."

Are Hill's ideas about how UFOs (or some UFOs) perform the neat tricks you've mentioned, roughly consistent with the observations that you are advancing here?

Dejan Corovic said:

Canceling sonic boom is easy, peasy.

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No, it really isn't. I don't know of a single military project that has accomplished this. DARPA has spent billions on developing hypersonic drones that shed the metal layers of their hull as the heat melts them away, because nobody has been able to solve the problem.

So if you know how to do it, then get a patent and sell it to the DoD for a few billion dollars and you'll be set for life.

Dejan Corovic said:

Project strong positive electric field ahead of the craft to get air ionised. Once ionised heavy positive ions will get repelled by positive electric field. Practically one gets semi vacuum ahead of the craft.

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Link?

Dejan Corovic said:

If UFOs are moving at high speed they are enveloped either in plasma or that monochromatic light. That's something to ponder.

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You're not understanding my point: if AAVs were generating plasma as they streaked across the sky, then there would be a glowing trail of hot ionized gas left behind in their wake, just like a meteor.

There isn't. So that's not what's happening.

Justice Fodor said:

What you have written above reminds me a great deal of some of the chapters in Unconventional Flying Objects, the book by former NACA/NASA scientist Paul R. Hill, published posthumously by his daughter in 1995. Of this book, Dr. Hal Puthoff wrote in 1997, "To the degree that the engineering characteristics of UFOs can be estimated by empirical observation, in my opinion the above-referenced, recently published book by Paul Hill provides the most reliable, concise summary of engineering-type data available."

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I love that book; Hill was a brilliant scientist. It's been ages since I read it, but Hill's work was a huge influence on my early thinking on this subject. He even figured out that the propulsion mechanism was a form of gravitational field propulsion before the concept first appeared in the academic literature.

Justice Fodor said:

Are Hill's ideas about how UFOs (or some UFOs) perform the neat tricks you've mentioned, roughly consistent with the observations that you are advancing here?

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I think of Hill's conclusions as the first real ray of light in understanding how these craft propel themselves. But his work predated the breakthroughs in theoretical physics by Robert L. Forward and Miguel Alcubierre that would've solidified and formalized his thinking on the subject, so it's unfortunate that the key papers weren't published until after his death - he missed it by just a few years. I would've loved to see how that work would've helped him mature his ideas on this subject.

But yes, Hill was thinking along these lines, and he also felt that these factors (absence of sonic booms and absence of a superheated trail of plasma behind the craft) were critical signature characteristics of the field propulsion mechanism, which he concluded was either a static or quasi-static gravitational field. The idea that I mentioned above is a quasi-static gravitational field propulsion concept that explains these key signature performance characteristics by employing the Lense-Thirring effect, aka frame-dragging, which is a well-known and empirically proven feature of general relativity. But to my knowledge, nobody has explicitly mentioned this effect as a potential solution for explaining these key traits of AAV performance.

nivek said:

Alternatively; These creatures that are billions of years ahead of us perhaps has carried with them through the eons a detailed record going back billions of years, they've seen it all, they have done it all from their perspective...Maybe because they think they have seen it all that they have a total disregard for primitives like us or are completely indifferent...Maybe to them it doesn't matter if we live or die as a species, they will do as they want, from their point of view this universe belongs to them, we and others like us are the wildlife of the universe, like animals exist on our planet...

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You raise here a sobering possibility. After pondering it further, I may solicit funds for formation of a new organization, "Primitives for Extra-Terrestrial Altruism," or "PETA."

Much about alien life is conjecture at this point.

Their age, depends. This galaxy or another? Did the first intelligent life arrive aeons ago, or are we going through the later stages of the first wave of it appering in the universe? Who came first, are they alive still, what did they do, can we even fathom them at our current state, are there traces around?

How close are they, are we in a middle of a galaxy wide civilization which is obscured or is this area of the space the wild west of the universe, where few travelers stumble upon?

How do they look, is the convergent evolution at work on other planets too or does the universe breed bizarre monstrosities? Or both perhaps? Do advanced civilizations use directed panspermia to create other life around them, including intelligence?

Who knows?

All i know is that humans seem to be pretty much not capable of looking too far at this point, like SETI itself has confessed. Its like if a large landmass was space, and there were persons scattered around at some distances from each other(meaning civilizations), humanity at this point would be a person that is mostly deaf and blind, only able of making quiet whimpers and completely chained to the ground, unable to move, while unbeknownst to him the next person(who can maybe move, see or hear) is perhaps 50 feet away from him. Its understandable how its hard to find anything when youre like that. Our search hasnt even really begun yet.