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Notes -
Logically speaking, there's several billion years of history when we could have been visited by any number of interstellar space probes, without anybody in a real position to notice or file a complaint about violated speed limits.
I will note that acceleration is fine. You can probably make the beam tight enough despite unavoidable dispersion to get away with it, especially if you choose an oblique final angle of approach. Deceleration without getting caught is the hard part, especially if you aren't going to dramatically lengthen the journey in the process. I don't think that even the ~hardest torchship engines can avoid ridiculously large thermal emissions.
At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter all that much for the sake of my general argument. There is very little justification for aliens that advanced to go to all the bother and do... whatever they're presently accused of doing. Which doesn't seem to be much. It wouldn't explain why they don't seem to be doing anything at all back home, wherever that is.
No it's not, you can e.g. decelerate from nearly .5C over the course of about 20 years with a magnetic sail.
This is an odd objection to me given that the "aliens" in the conventional narrative supposedly act exactly as humans do towards, say, apes (trying to observe them discreetly but slipping up in embarrassing ways, occasionally knocking them out with mysterious weapons and taking biopsy samples or tagging them, doing hybridization experiments, etc.) and if anything that seems suspiciously anthropomorphic. It seems to me we should expect aliens to behave weirdly, if they were truly from a distant world in some way.
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