As (potentially) cool as it would be to have hard evidence of extraterrestrial life visiting earth, I'm inclined to believe the same.
The only situation I could envision this being true would be some nearby civilization (on a galactic scale) sending out millions of small probes, but even then, any civilization with the technology and means to do that probably wouldn't need the probe to actually land on the planet to gather whatever data they wanted. I think if faster-than-light travel were possible, we would have been large-scale visited already.
One way that we could potentially detect another advanced civilization without direct communication would be if they built a Dyson sphere, but due to the speed of light we would be watching it happen hundreds or thousands of years in the past.
you'd also have to observe the process over centuries or millenia as it would be built. So were we are at right now basically for the next 100 years if we're staring consistently
As (potentially) cool as it would be to have hard evidence of extraterrestrial life visiting earth, I'm inclined to believe the same.
The only situation I could envision this being true would be some nearby civilization (on a galactic scale) sending out millions of small probes, but even then, any civilization with the technology and means to do that probably wouldn't need the probe to actually land on the planet to gather whatever data they wanted. I think if faster-than-light travel were possible, we would have been large-scale visited already.
One way that we could potentially detect another advanced civilization without direct communication would be if they built a Dyson sphere, but due to the speed of light we would be watching it happen hundreds or thousands of years in the past.
you'd also have to observe the process over centuries or millenia as it would be built. So were we are at right now basically for the next 100 years if we're staring consistently