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Any astronomy expert, correct me if I'm wrong, but the nearest star group is Alpha Centauri, about 4.24 light years away. A light year represents about 5.87 trillion miles, so - apart from our own sun - our nearest star "neighbors" are at least 23 trillion miles away.

Quite so. Most people who think we're being visited by aliens either don't understand the distances involved or, if they do, simply handwave away speed of light problem. "They must have invented warp drive".

Suuuuuure they have.

"Quite so. Most people who think we're being visited by aliens either don't understand the distances involved or, if they do, simply handwave away speed of light problem."

That is why UFO expert Jacques Vallee, who believed that there is persuasive evidence of "alien" encounters, concluded that these are not from "spaceships" from other planets, but from some kind of interdimensional or occult phenomena, perhaps what some would call "daemonic" entities.

Space is almost empty but not quite. Any ship traveling near light speed would be ripped to pieces when impacting the bits of matter floating in space. The trick to space travel in not going real fast but rather making the distances much shorter by bending space to suit your needs. But bending space, if possible, will require a lot of energy. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot, as in the entire energy out put of the Sun for the time necessary to go from A to B.

Alien life is, I think a given. The numbers (odds) are just to overwhelming to argue against it. But intelligence complex life is an entirely different matter. The odds certainly favor it, but if one looks at the history of the Earth it is certainly remarkable that everything happened at just exactly the right time for intelligent complex life to exist here and even then it took 4 billion years for complex intelligent life to evolve. Then another 400 million years before civilization happens.

Perhaps looking at just one single unlikely event needed will illustrate just how lucky we are to be here. Our Moon. Without the Moon there would likely not be complex intelligent life on Earth. The Earth-Moon system is really a binary planet system which locks in a stable orbit for both planets. Our Planet Earth does not wobble about, it stay on an stable axis witch gives us our seasons. If the axis were changing wildly (which they would without the Moon) seasons would chance wildly too. Every 1,000 years or so climates would go from topical to arctic and then back again. In such a world evolution of higher life forms would not be possible. And that is just one example of many needed for us to be here.

We are so very lucky to have our Moon. The Moon is the mother life on Earth. We have our Moon as a result two planets colliding. The young Earth and Thea. Thea (a Mars size planet) hit the Earth at exactly the right angle to form a Moon. How lucky is that? The collision also blew into space our early highly toxic atmosphere (see Venus). How lucky was that? Also little known is that Thea's planetary core merged with ours giving us a large long lasting inner hot core with out which we would be solar toast (see Mars). How lucky was that? The Moon formed quite close to the Earth (20,000 - 50,000 miles). So 4 billion years ago the tides were much much larger then today. And by that I mean hundreds to thousands of feet larger. These earlier tides scoured the land and delivered all of the ingredients needed for life to the early oceans. Then gradually the Moon receded and the tides grew smaller making life on coastal plains possible. How lucky was that?

Well I think you get my point, alien life, yes no doubt. Civilization, probably but not a certainty.