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I mean im not disputing that at all. My point is that absent any evidence of extraterrestrial life, there’s no good reason to insert them into our understanding of the universe. Theres no reason to posit a class of things that we have no evidence exists. They might be out there, they might not. But until we find something unequivocally pointing to extraterrestrial life existing, it’s impossible to say they exist. It’s unknown and unknowable and thus not not useful to assume.
I suspect your actual question is more about convincing me as a skeptic. To me, the proof would have to be public— a landing in a public place and filmed by legitimate news media, NASA showing images of a city on another planet. A signal of clearly intelligent origin announced by NASA or SETI. A deep space object that is clearly of technological origin and not built by humans. In short a public demonstration of evidence for life in deep space affirmed either by the event itself being public or vetted by subject matter experts and given to the public as news.
My opinion is simple, im defaulting to “not extraterrestrial life” until Theres good evidence to think they not only exist, but are capable of coming here. There are lots of potential explanations for what the reported are showing: radar malfunctions, secret craft of human origin, intelligence gathering lies to find out what kinds of technology our rivals have, poorly trained observers, a cover story for classified craft being filmed or to hide a weakness of radar. All of these would be plausible with the information we have available and what is known about intelligence agencies and individual actors in that technology and military sphere. If I can explain the data dump without positing aliens, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my default explanation be “it could be aliens” any more than it would be a good idea to have my default interpretation be “it could be demons.”
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