Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to Earth. (By closest, I mean 4.4 light-years away, and by system, I mean there are 3 stars, Proxima Centauri being a whopping 0.1 light-years closer to us than the other two.) If there was ever any life around these stars, shouldn't we have been shaking hands by now? I mean, come on. 4.4 years to get some FM waves up in diz atmosphere? What gives?
Sarah, you're white. Really, really white. Stop.
So at this point in time, it's probably safe to say that there's no intelligent life in any of the nearby star systems, right? We haven't picked up any true signals the entire time we've been searching, so that's grounds of a good decision, right?
No, not really. That's actually really wrong.
Do you remember the first satellites ever launched by man? Sputnik 1? Explorer 1? Despite their gargantuan carrier missiles, do you remember how small they were?
Things haven't really changed. We're still launching little tater tots into our orbit every year. Little pieces of the space station, little satellite devices for ultimate control of your little cellular devices in your pocket, they're all little breakfast crumbs sitting on our Solar system's dining room table, controlling your life and your mind.
What if we haven't been the only civilization to do this?
What if, just like our little trooper 'tot Voyager 2, some other form of "mankind" has ricocheted some sort of mini alien breakfast food past the outskirts of their star system?
What if for some weird reason, that little table scrap made it all the way to our Solar system? What about if for some even weirder reason, it flew by Earth? What if it got sucked into orbit around us?
The International Space Station had to be jetted back up into a higher orbit not too long ago because the lasso that Earth's gravity has on it got yanked one too many times. What happens when things get too low in orbit? Bacon and eggs in a sizzling pan, that's what happens. Whoops, grease fire.
So, about that little foreign nugget, say all of this "Hey, I'm gonna fly by Earth and get stuck in its orbit because I'm awesome" hoo-hah happened at the dawn of the homo sapiens species. This may have been the only evidence of other intelligent life we've ever received from this corner of the galaxy, and may be the last we'll get for another 1.8 billion years. Who and what was stopping it from circling our home long enough to get burnt up, to be cast out of existence without a trace? No one, because we didn't know any better. We were infants in the life of ourselves. There was nothing we could have done.
If no one's around when a tree falls in a forest, does it still make a sound? There's squirrels, birds, mosquitoes, and raccoons to hear it. It damn sure does.
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