If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
Nahh, any species able to come close to interstellar travel would be able to observe us from afar. We can already take good data on other planets’ atmospheres. It’s not going to be too much longer (probably still past our lifetimes, but) before we can take spy satellite quality photos of the surface.
Sure, some alien species might prefer to be more hands-on, but I’d hope they’d also recognize the destructive power humans have and stay away; It’s a lot easier to break something than to invent it, and few things remain even recognizable after being hit by bigger military weapons. A lot of older movies/media relied on that fact to make the other thing seem so fantastically strong. Like the alien ship shrugging off a nuke in Independence Day.
That may be true, but there’s only so much you can collect by remote observation. I really like the “interstellar scientists” take, because it’s something I can see us doing. If we obtained warp drive, we would want to understand how other intelligent species develop, and how similar their conditions and course of development is to our own.
The aliens are interested in bovine bowels, which are difficult to probe from afar.