If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
If someone were to record a flawless, 4K video of an actual alien walking around or a spaceship flying overhead, people would just think it’s a deep fake.
That may be true, but there’s only so much you can collect by remote observation. I really like the “interstellar scientists” take, because it’s something I can see us doing. If we obtained warp drive, we would want to understand how other intelligent species develop, and how similar their conditions and course of development is to our own.
I guess my point is: By the time we’d be able to travel that far, we’d have the ability to make all such observations without showing up on the planet.
Though on the other side of the coin, if interstellar travel were so ubiquitous, who’s to say all aliens would behave in such hands-off ways? Maybe any aliens that would visit Earth would be the equivalent to rednecks driving out in to the woods to shoot squirrels. Or in a more innocuous analogy, bird watching without binoculars.