[Porch Dweller]

UFOs as in spaceships piloted by aliens? Nope. Oh, I believe they may be out there, but the chances of them having come to earth are incredibly small. Why, you ask? Thanks for asking, I reply.

I know people want to make themselves feel more important than they are, but we're just living on a tiny, insignificant planet that orbits an average, nondescript star. There's nothing really special about our solar system, nothing that would scream out to the rest of the galaxy "Hey, come visit here! They've got awesome french fries!!!"

The only thing that would really flag our system as a point of interest is our radio wave transmissions. We've been making them for about 115 years. Because radio waves travel at the speed of light there is a hypothetical sphere around our planet 115 light years in diameter in which our broadcasts can theoretically be detected. It's extremely doubtful that any transmissions are still strong enough to be detected at that range, even with powerful antennas, but for the sake of argument we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Human civilization has only been around for the last 10000 years or so, an incredibly tiny and relatively insignificant fraction of the Milky Way's age of 13.2 billion years old. Many, many, many intelligent civilizations may have risen and fallen during those billions of years...or not. I choose to believe that they have. But what are the odds of one existing concurrently with ours and to also be close enough to hear us?

For aliens to have detected our transmissions and visited us, we would need to have a space-faring intelligent race that just happens to be existing relatively close-by at the same time as us, just happens to have faster-than-light ship technology (if this is even physically possible), and just happens to be able to pick up our broadcasts and instead of replying to them decides to send a ship to our planet to stick probes in hick's asses.

Alternatively, the alien race would need to just happen to be flying through our 115ly sphere of hypothetical radio transmissions and just happen to be able to pick up transmissions while travelling FTL, and when they do they divert from whatever their mission is in order to come here and stick probes in hick's asses.

Space is incredibly vast. On the timeline of our galaxy, the odds that any of the above have happened in the relatively minute amount of time human civilization has been around are minuscule. I'd like to believe that someday we'll make contact with another race. I just don't believe it's already happened, and the odds are if it does happen it won't happen for a long, long time.