Yeah. I get in to it sometimes with people about aliens bc I'm open to the idea that aliens may have visited the solar system, but people get upset when I maintain the line that even if a probe did arrive here it probably wouldn't have much amazing magical super-science going for it. Just really, really sturdy computers and solar cells. Which would be cool, but it's hardly the magical anti-gravity and what-not people want to believe in, physics be damned.

That said, I'm still pretty confident that interstellar travel doesn't happen much bc there's just no reason to do it and the logistical challenge is enormous. You have to throw something at another star system very precisely, it has to survive decades or centuries or longer in the deep black with no power what-so-ever. It has to successfully wake up on arrival to the new star system after all those years in deep space getting bombarded with gamma radiation. And then it needs to generate enough energy to send some kind of signal back home, which would take years or longer to arrive, and someone would have to still be listening after all that time.

Isn't there some vacuum evaporation thing in vacuum where even metals and other solids evaporate very slowly? idk. There are so many massive logistical and materials science and engineering challenges that would need to be overcome just so you could get a little telemetry about a star that would be incredibly expensive if not impossible to send real infrastructure too, most of which you could get with deep space satellites. Sometimes people god-of-the-gaps at me about "oh maybe there's a magical power source we haven't discovered" or whatever, but there's no point arguing about that bc at that point it's just fantasy.