Do you think aliens are watching us?NEWS | 23 February 2026Seems to me that anybody observing us from light years away would need a BIG technological jump from where we are. Might be possible! Might not. I assume life is everywhere in the universe. Complex life that is interesting to normal people (sorry micro-biologists!) much less common. Intelligent life that might want to visit here? I can't even guess.
One branch of mammals here got smart enough to wonder about things like this. Might be a fluke. Look at crocodilians or sharks. They have been pretty much the same for many hundreds of millions of years. Not very smart. Because they were already perfect! Evolution responding to circumstances in their environment might make them bigger or smaller, or change the exact shape of their beaks, but they are still fundamentally the same. Not getting smarter.
We got smarter accidentally. Evolution does not select for intelligence, but for survivability. I expect there are, or have been, or will be, other critters with our penchant for exploring just because there are so damned many places they could be! But they would need tech that we have no dreams of yet to find us and visit.
Give us a few thousand more years and we might find a way to do it. But we have called our continued existence into question with just the few thousand years of tech we have now. Will we have the time?
Hope so.Author: Phil Plait. Source
