Does anyone realize HOW HARD that kind of space travel would be, if it was even possible!?!?!!
Star Trek isn’t the real world!!
So a society would have to progress in a straight line for MANY, MANY thousands of years without having to start over like China constantly did with a new emperor or if a war holocaust set the planet back to square one.
Or a meteor. Or a dead sun.
Or a million other things.
And it would have to be intelligent life
And....
It can be hard to do, but try to wrap your mind around the immensity of just the known universe, then attempt to visualize how many galaxies, stars, and planets are out there.
The sheer weight of the numbers is sobering, and should give even the most hardened skeptic pause. Simple logic dictates that, if life could arise on this one planet, it surely must have arisen on others, considering the nearly infinite number of worlds out there.
Just because we ourselves haven't figured out faster than light travel, doesn't mean that other races haven't done so. They don't even have to be thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are. They just have to have a slightly different roll of the technological advancement dice than us.
In fact, a lot of people who study this subject are convinced that our government solved the FTL problem decades ago, and now have spacecraft that are capable of interstellar travel.
Don't laugh. There are also scores of former military, civilian, and intelligence professionals who say the same thing.
Are they all lying? I really doubt it. Those people saw things in their careers that are too strange to be easily believed by those who haven't. And those are just the ones who are brave enough to speak out. Most aren't.