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When you say you obviously don’t believe in aliens do you mean you don’t believe aliens exist, that they visited earth, or that Mexico has their remains?
Three overlapping claims count as Ayys. Here are my thoughts on all three, add yours.
Life somewhere else in the universe: Very likely, it's quite possible primitive life even exists elsewhere in the solar system.
Intelligent life somewhere else in the universe: Moderately likely, FERMI paradox can be resolved in a number of satisfactory ways.
Intelligent life that has deliberately visited earth, in person, regularly since the middle of the 20th century: Very unlikely.
I still see 3 as barely plausible simply because of the scale of the universe. Unless something physics-breaking is discovered and shown to allow for FTL travel without the need for eye watering amounts of matter and energy, or any undetected particles, there’s simply no way to have biological creatures cross interstellar space within less than twenty or so generations. I’m not even convinced that signals could cross fast enough for anything approaching a conversation. To thus suggest that aliens are here, especially given that reports almost universally say biological aliens, is to pretty much say that our understanding of physics is massively wrong.
I mean this seems reasonably likely. Who says there's not a cheat out there somewhere? There's still so much we don't understand.
I think you lack imagination. Who says the aliens don't upload themselves, then print new bodies once they arrive in new locations? Not to mention it hardly seems a stretch to surmise these hyperadvanced aliens have developed immortality.
Much of it has been verified experimentally. It’s not so much that it’s impossible that we’re wrong, but that I think that absent a reason to believe very fundamental ideas ideas about physics are wrong, it’s better to assume they’re right. To do otherwise is simply positing magic-by-another-name, where there’s something we really want to be true. If I can simply ignore physics on the grounds that it might be wrong (with no evidence given that it actually is wrong) then what I’d have is magic or the force or something. After all that hasn’t been completely ruled out and there could be a cheat out there that makes a force choke possible.
I think especially with things I really want to believe, it’s much more rational to go with what we actually know to be true.
I think it's reasonably likely that we are massively wrong about the laws of physics in general. Separately, I think it's virtually guaranteed that "magic" exists. Just think about how much progress humanity has made in the last 100 years, then multiply that by a billion years. We would have to have nearly reached a totally unprecedented, super extreme technological asymptote for magic to not exist.
The specific form that magic takes is up in the air, but I expect within a few thousand years force chokes will be fairly easy to pull off under certain circumstances. Perhaps Disneyworld will truly be Disneyworld, a planet laced with nanobots just to enable that specifically.
And we do have plenty of evidence that our current model of physics is wrong, or at least incomplete. There is still no unified model. We know for a fact there is more we have yet to discover.
Our models aren’t perfect, sure, but we have done experiments and have mathematical models and so on that have been verified. And absent a very good reason to doubt them, I don’t see it as very rational to simply say “we don’t know literally everything, and it’s possible that what we know is wrong, therefore the stuff I want to be real must be possible once we figure it out.” That’s not science, that’s fantasy and speculation based on only imagination. If we don’t know that it’s physically possible there’s no reason to include such things in our speculations about either advanced aliens or our far future. We are bound by the laws of physics and if it’s not possible within physics, time cannot make it possible. A trillion years from now, F=ma will still be true as will E=mc^2. We may find work around, we may engineer safer craft that can withstand bigger forces, we may make cheap replacement parts for our bodies. But it will all be within physical reality bound by physical laws.
The very good reason to doubt them is that we've been consistently wrong, again and again, about what is impossible. And to be clear, I'm not saying any particular thing must be possible. I don't know how interstellar travel is possible, but given that our understanding of physics isn't perfect, it is probable that something will arise which makes interstellar travel much easier than it currently appears.
Similarly, if our understanding of the laws of physics is incomplete, there's no reason to assume that it is complete when speculating about advanced aliens or our far future. Our ancestors would have had better predictions regarding humanity's current capabilities if they had posited the discovery of magic than if they had assumed technological progress was mostly complete.
EDIT: That's not to say it will ever be the case that f != ma, but from our current perspective whatever future technological advances are discovered will look to us like the laws of physics are being broken.
I don’t see it as a very good reason simply because it basically throws out verified mathematics and experimentally verified physics without even the fig leaf of a justification. If you have a reason to suspect that a given law of physics is wrong, then present evidence or even an argument for that law of physics being wrong. That’s perfectly reasonable to me. I’m almost certain we’re wrong about things. But to suppose, without evidence that of course this thing should be possible given infinite time isn’t scientific thinking. It’s just a fancy pseudo intellectual way of saying “if we go far enough into the future, then magic.”
And at this point, again, it’s not that we know nothing. We don’t know everything obviously, but we do know quite a bit about how the universe works down to the quantum mechanics level and up to the level of the largest objects in the universe. We can use the things we do know to be true to speculate on possible future technologies and those things we know will work. There are plenty of amazing things out there and I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination. The issue is that until we know exactly what’s wrong with our physics, it’s unreasonable to just throw it out based on speculation.
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