I bring this up because it seems to once again be gaining traction in the zeitgeist: I cannot comprehend why UFO hunters put so much time and effort into trying to force governments to "reveal the truth about extraterrestrial contact", but I also cannot fathom how they think aliens even have a chance of successfully contacting us in-person in the first place.
a) Why does anyone believe extraterrestrials would be able to track us down at all? Space is BIG.
b) If aliens knew we existed in the first place, please explain the math of how they'd get here. Even taking Star Trek logic into account and considering warp drive as a possibility, when considering relativity, Newton's third law and the mathematics of achieving the right conditions of either for deep space travel, warp drive still seems implausible.
c) In the mathematically improbable situation where intelligent life did manage to get here, why would they be tiptoeing around in the background for seemingly 80 or so years when they are clearly technologically superior to us and nothing humanity has available to itself could remotely stop them? It seems silly to imagine these incredible lifeforms getting here and then having an "oops we crash landed" event.
d) Lastly, governments successfully covering up such an event(s) for decades is a fairy tale. Governments playing around with flight and stealth technology for the last 100 years? Yeah that seems likely.
Do I think intelligent life exists? Absolutely. Is there a chance those beings have contacted or reached us? 99.9999999% no. Is it fun to speculate about the possibilities and portray those possibilities in stories? Of course. Should people be spending time and money forming organizations to "force the government to tell the truth", thereby wasting everyone else's time and resources and ultimately being drains on society? Absolutely not. I don't get it.
orion's arm project
has a basic, but easily understood explanation. basically, if both relativity and causality hold, true FTL travel is impossible, no matter how it is you acheive it. (in the OA universe, wormholes are accepted because the ship itself is not actually going FTL, and therefore not breaking causality)
my understanding of why an alcuibierre drive wouldn't work is that space time itself has some energy(and therefore some mass,) all you're really doing in that system is replacing the reaction mass from being matter to being... uh... space. But my understanding is that of a highly unscientific mind trying to understand...uh... sciencey shit.
In any case, some things to point out? the fastest man-made object is currently the Parker Solar Probe which is planned to reach a top speed of about 190 km/s at it's fastest. (it's basically falling into the sun, using Venus to loop around and gain speed.) That's about .0006 c. At that speed, it would take about seven thousand years to reach proxima centauri (the nearest star at 4.2 light years.)
the energy necessary to accelerate even a few kilograms to a speed that could arrive at earth from another star (any other star), in a reasonable time frame is... appropriately described as astronomical. Any species technologically advanced to do so would be advanced enough to recognize that the only thing that's really unique about our system is... well, us, and all the other life that evolved to be here. So there goes economic incentive. Cultural curiosity? sure maybe. but they'd be technologically advanced enough to understand that we nuked the shit out of our selves, and that we're fucking psychotic. Which removes that.
Religious mandate? Oh. Great. Space-Mormons. (of course there's space-mormons,) This is dubious as then, said proselytizers would definitely defy the world government to preach. (kind of like that idiot that got dead trying to proselytize the Sentinelese people.) Religious mandate to wipe us out of existence? we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Curiosity? is tempered by the whole 'oh, they nuked themselves,' thing. Any technology used to get here could be reverse engineered and used to get there- and we're psychotic enough to nuke ourselves... there's absolutely no telling how we'd actually respond to aliens. probably not how Star Trek portrays our First Contact... (well. except in the mirror universe. That might be more accurate.)
alien abduction stories replaced vampiric...er... visitation?... stories. it's just pop culture intruding onto people's imaginations.
But yeah. Any society capable of getting here has no need to tiptoe around- they can do what they want. The shinnanigans are... more likely us either misunderstanding things (ie military prototypes, whatever.) or straight up fraud (because, you know, that's happened.)
The only likely scenario I envision is unmanned probes arriving centuries or more later with the messages. No one might be around to receive them then though.