Well the heads of security don't have to be scientist. They may rely on them for information and opinion though so I call that part irrelevent.
I believe their are alien life forms out there and so much of that science is unknown that space travel beyond our understanding of science and propulsion is likely.
Heck we have found several new elements in the last decade.
Martian base... well that is a stretch for my brain, but there is a lot of evidence provided by reputable sources that .. yeah. ET has visited here in my mind.
Maybe not ET proper.. after all we will likely use robots in the future space exploration to overcome the huge issues that come from sending Billy Bob into space.
Some of the death bed confessions are interesting and since the US Government has agencies specific to ET's I bet they know more than what is shared.
When you consider how much we have learned in the last 100 years I can imagine beings that are way smarter than us being light years ahead of our understanding.
It has more to do with the limited duration of the survival of a species combined with the wildly absurd vastness of spacetime.
We know there was a big bang and afterwards matter collected eventually into planets which eventually in certain random gathering of elements cooled off with sufficient elemental resources to support the development of life. Of that life, a very small amount has the right circumstances on planet to survive and struggle long enough to develop into self aware, self determining species (intelligent life).
Now add in the factor that Darwin applies everywhere, that is how life works. A species is born, continues to exist until the environment changes sufficiently that it is replaced by another species. This means it is reasonable to expect that all intelligent life has a limited lifespan. Advanced life is still a question, but by observing Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the like, we can suppose that a species typically does not last more than a few hundred thousand years. While natural competition dies out, factors like disease, environmental changes, war, etc present themselves as more serous threats to survival. It makes complete sense that there will Nomo Sapiens Sapiens alive in the year 102,000CE.
Accepting the limited durability of a species, now add in the factor that all planets are not cooling at the same rate. Assume we are generous and give Humans 500,000 years as a life span for the species. Life has been on earth for 3.5 BILLION years. Intelligent life is just a small annoying blip on the radar.
It may very well be that intelligent life has evolved, made planes, and guns, and memes, and ships, and naturally come extinct before we ever slithered out of the oceans. It is more than likely that sun conditions in another system somewhere are pushing evolution to create a new intelligent species that will emerge not long after we are dead. This means over the vastness of time and space and the goldilocks conditions required, the odds of two Intelligent Species being alive during the SAME time period is actually pretty small.
So already, we look at very small odds of coexistence without interaction. Once you have figured out how small those odds are, you then have to tangle with the superb vastness of space.
We have a lot of good theories about how one could attempt travel across Solar Systems. Obviously our systems now are absurdly simple and a rocket would never work, but there are numerous theories about some kind of Gravity Drive system that could actually allow you to travel faster than light by bending spacetime.
The realty is these are just theories with some good math, but we simply do not have the energy technology to try applied physics applications, but say we make a breakthrough in Zero Point Energy or Dark Energy creates a fundamental change in energy resources and suddenly we can build something like a gravity well ship. Even if a species got to that advanced practice, even if it lets you travel across galaxies in a lifespan that a species can survive, finding anyone else in the staggering vastness of space is just a mind boggling concept.
Say we have a Gravity drive that lets us safely navigate our transport or observation satellite or whatever at the fun Star Trek speed Warp 9 which was kind of a maximum for that story. This equates to roughly 830 times the Speed of Light. The observable universe, i.e. the edge of the universe that we can identify in any meaningful way is 46.5 BILLION light years in every direction from Earth. So what, at that speed, it would take 100 million human years to reach the edge and back in a single direction?
So like I say, the odds of beating the odds of space, time, and energy all combined are just WILDLY against that ever happening.
I mean, I am not a physicist, I didn't study this stuff in college, I do read some books on quantum theory for fun just so I can have a better understanding of WTF is going on in Life, The Universe, and Everything, and based on the aforementioned theories of energy and spacetime, we are actually much more likely to be visited by time travelers from our own planet than to ever see another intelligent species.
:dunno
