I agree with all that. But given the massive size of the universe and the tiny time window during which Earth has hosted intelligent life, it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever get to meet ‘em. Which is just as well, I’d rather not be on the receiving end of another 1492, being “discovered” by a civilization with advanced technology tends to go very poorly for the natives.

Don't kid yourself bro, there's always anal probing. Always.

Interesting thought! Advanced AI could get you around some of the obvious longevity-problems of carbon-based life. But to make it plausible that we'd actually encounter alien AI, you'd still have to address the distance problem (huge universe, hard to get very far at sub light speed).

If you're saying no one knows for certain what the outer limits on space travel speed are in light of the laws of physics, I'll have to heartily agree with you. From my non-expert understanding, most physicists today think that based on everything we know about the universe, FTL travel is highly unlikely to work out. If we're shifting over from hard science fiction to fantasy, then wormholes, etc. could possibly provide a work-around. But I'm not so sure it's "naive" to worry about light speed travel -- if it's not possible that means we're back to a universe that in all probability is teeming with life, but is also so damned big and has such restrictive laws that unless we happen to have evolved virtually on top of each other, we can't pop over for a visit, and neither can they.

OK, but has Joe Rogan ever covered this issue?

Well if this happened, you know the deal was struck on the golf course.

UFOs ... the new opiate of the masses.

According to Karl Marx, religion. But the 1840s was a long time ago, there must have been a few other opiates of the masses in between.

If you're looking for the original opiate of the masses, though, you'd have to go with opium.

They have the technology to travel across unfathomable space and time, but still haven't developed a functional cloaking device. Inconceivable!

I don't know that our failure to detect extraterrestrial life supports a creationist read on the universe, but it certainly doesn't piss me off. If we're bumping into alien life there's a decent chance of it going south for us, either through open hostility or benign incompatibility.

Of course we're still in the infancy of creating devices to observe the universe outside our atmosphere, and we've visited only a handful of other planets, so it's probably premature to conclude that Earth is a one-off. But just because of the sheer size of the universe, I still think it's unlikely humans will ever get to communicate directly with other intelligent life, even if we're one day able to detect signs of its existence.