Not in our Lifetime
When I was a child, I loved science fiction. I read everything I could find, both novels and short stories. For a long time, I basically didn’t read anything that wasn’t science fiction. I never missed an episode of Star Trek, and a film only needed to be mildly science fictiony to draw my attention
I still enjoy it, and dream of a future which involves lots of robots and adventures in space. But, reality does have a way of crushing fiction and I have come to the sad realization that, although we may colonize the rest of our solar system, interstellar travel is light years away. Literally, light years away.
That’s because the nearest solar system to our own is over 4 light years away, which means that even if we had spacecraft on which people could live for an indefinite period of time, which we don’t, it would still be prohibitively far away. Even if these spacecraft could grow their own food and somehow obtain water (or learn to recycle every drop of sweat and urine produced) and energy from deep space, which we have no idea of how to do, and even if we had spacecraft which could travel at the speed of light, which we aren’t even close to, it would still take over 4 years to get there.
So, it’s not going to happen any time soon and, despite a strong desire to believe, the more I hear about UFOs, the Roswell incident and area 51, the more unconvinced I am that aliens have ever visited here. The non-interference doctrine was invented by the writers of Star Trek and there’s no reason to believe an alien civilization would go by it. If they’d taken all the trouble of getting here, I’d think they’d make their presence obvious.
Also, as Stephen Hawking has said, if an alien civilization has a technology advanced enough to travel across interstellar space, they would view us as we would view a savage, pre-technological tribe living in some primitive and remote jungle. At best. At worst, they would see us as animals, curiousities for some alien zoo or subjects for scientific experiments.
So, I no longer think that contact is just around the corner. But I no longer think that is a bad thing.
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