Exactly..and this is what baffles me of people who defend the Fermi Paradox and swear aliens don't or can't exist because we've never seen them. IT's such a mind boggingly large, vast universe, I'd be more stunned and flabberghasted that we did see evidence so quicly.

I don't think you are truly appreciateing the extreme depth and scale of the universe.

There are hundreds of billions to trillions of galaxies in the observable universe to distances of billions of lightyears.

Consider this, civilizations on the other side of the milkyway wouldn't be able to see us yet. Out of potentially trillions of galaxies, just as you said they could see our galaxy but would have to wait millions to billions of years before they could see our civilization.

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Yes. Exactly.

Could there be? Sure. Can we prove it? No. Or at least, not yet.

I have a telescope , but it isn't too strong. I can see stars and see the moon close up, but that is the extent of it.

We could barely see evidence of our own existence with current tech from more than a few dozen light years away - and the most obvious evidence for sapient life here that's distantly visible is the radical change in atmospheric composition over the past hundred years or so, which is only visible (with our tech) from locations that lie exactly on our equatorial plane such that Earth passes between those locations and our sun every year.

In terms of radio transmissions, we're struggling to communicate with the Voyager craft and they've only just passed the heliopause…

We'd never detect alien tv/radio transmissions even from the nearest stars, and that's assuming that we're even listening at the right time to catch the narrow high-power transmission window - terrestrial communications have invested hard into more efficient methods as well as widespread encryption, meaning that 1) there's dramatically less RF blasted into space compared to 50 years ago, and 2) what is broadcast is essentially meaningless noise.

Yes… and “seeing” may come in different forms, from spectral analysis to microwave to radio wave transmissions. Bare in mind that those radio waves may have red shifted into the microwave frequencies (SETI may have been looking in the wrong place).

On the remote chance we do detect an alien signature, the source of it will probably be so far in the past that that civilization will probably also be extinct. And certainly too far away for us to communicate with it.

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It’s possible they dont exist anymore, isn’t it?

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Well, he's dead, so I doubt that, but if he were alive, he would have reluctantly done so, yes. Idk, this still feels so wrong though with the health issues buzz is dealing with

Exactly. So if there’s someone out there looking at us, wouldn’t they also be seeing our distant past?

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We can see their past. But never their present.

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Actually, if it meant that we are going back to the moon, Neil would be out in public with Buzz.

I love that we collectively chose Spaghettification as the term used to describe what it looks like to be sucked into a black hole.

It's my taxes being flushed down the toilet from the governments last spending spree...

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Nothing crazy actually, however it is much easier to capture if using a tracking mount which follows the movement of the night sky, allowing for longer exposures.