The fundamental issue is that people really have no intuition as to how unfathomably gigantic space is.
Traveling Mars to Earth would require some decent tech. Traveling from the next star over requires some mind-bending tech. An entity traveling from the next galaxy over would necessarily be in possession of just some truly incomprehensible technology and would probably exist on spatial and temporal scales that just cannot be loaded into our ape brains via our sensory organs.
Just playing devils advocate though: okay, but couldn't they also just have really high-tech ships in a primitive shape (like a sphere, for aesthetic reasons) with really fast engines and really strong hulls, too? Maybe we're simply too limited in our naive essence to understand the technology behind such a simple premise.
I mean, sure, the odds are not zero. But they seem very, very, very, very close to zero (to me).
And then the odds go down further that they have tech that can move them 10,000+ light years in a palatable amount of time/energy for them to visit Earth.
Then the odds go down further by the fact that, if they exist with that broad a view of the universe, Earth is almost certainly not worth visiting.
Then the odds go down further by the fact that we have allegedly detected and recovered them?
Not zero but it really is astronomically low, even if you have high conviction the universe is actually teeming with life.
Its not crazy to me to think that there is something here.
But that it doesn't care if we see it or not. There is not much of it so we just don't see it often.
Who know what we recovered? Perhaps just some discarded waste, perhaps the result of internal conflict. Neither seems crazy.
I like to think the Earth _is_ very special given "life", and that we are just about to start our own exploration of the galaxy (on galactic timescales)
It's really only a few hundred years before we mount an artificial general inelegance in the front of some rocket and shoot it at the nearest sun.
Can you imagine recovering alien technology, and the best we have to show for it is an iphone, with East Asia starting to lap us in things like semiconductor manufacturing?
You'd sure thing ALIUM technology would be useful for Intel to leapfrog Asia's foundaries.
Traveling Mars to Earth would require some decent tech. Traveling from the next star over requires some mind-bending tech. An entity traveling from the next galaxy over would necessarily be in possession of just some truly incomprehensible technology and would probably exist on spatial and temporal scales that just cannot be loaded into our ape brains via our sensory organs.