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This is a fully general argument against anything. Nobody gets annihilated for lying on a huge scale!
Have we swept 200 billion galaxies for life? We barely even have a probe outside our solar system. We do not know what we are looking at, we cannot even categorize 95% of the content. 'For all we know' is totally and completely worthless. Blind children do not get to pontificate on the world of art, they've never even experienced it.
Common sense says that if life works on Earth, it can work elsewhere too. Hanson has a more advanced theory on the basis that we emerged quite early as a civilization, compared to all the times when earth-based life might emerge - this implies that advanced civilizations will make it hard for civilizations to emerge later. Besides, you haven't checked 200 billion galaxies, you have no idea what's there.
The burden of proof weighs overwhelmingly more heavily on your claim than mine! I say that there may be alien life somewhere that has come here (based upon various observations) but that we don't know enough to be sure of anything. You say there is no life at all in the entire universe except here without a shred of evidence.
We've checked... how many planets? We can't even be sure there's no other life in our own solar system. Europa's oceans for instance, there could be life there. We don't know if there is life there, we don't know what advanced stellar civilizations look like. We don't know.
We know nothing about civilizations in general, especially not advanced civilizations. With a sample size of one, we can't differentiate between civilizations in general and human civilization. All we know is that something is part of a civilization, they have some kind of energy-processing, manufacturing, knowledge base. Defining a civilization is different to understanding them.
The phenomena we're talking about here has never been stealthy in that we're not capable of seeing it. These things are perfectly visible, we just can't interact with them since they shoot around at immense speeds.
Edit: for the recording you can have the Nimitz clips and the testimony of Commander Fravor
What I'm reading @DaseindustriesLtd as saying is that, if you do the math, life should be extraordinarily rare. That is, abiogenesis should happen statistically never, and the only reason that we happen to be in a place where life exists, out of all the places in the cosmos, is because we are ourselves the product of that nigh impossibly rare thing.
This cannot have been on the basis of an analysis of the narrow segment of the cosmos that we have been able to see, such an evaluation would have to have been based on an analysis of what life is like and of the preconditions for that to exist.
Well, we don't really know how life came into existence either. It happened over 3 billion years ago! We can't know what the conditions were back then that resulted in life, so how can we rule it to be statistically impossible? The math is just made-up numbers.
But testimonies of American military are evidence about reality?
I think we've found our fundamental disagreement. I take this to be no more evidence than claims of some peculiar Indian sect about the conspiracy of Naga People – complete with grainy photos. It has pretty much zero weight in comparison to priors from natural sciences. And our uncertainty about American sanity or honesty absolutely dwarfs our uncertainty about relevant scientific conjectures.
The US military is routinely insane and dishonest but they're not sufficiently skilled at keeping secrets to get away with this.
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