Also, I have become extremely annoyed at the whole "aliens are super human and they have been around for billions of years longer than human beings because they are semi-divine and somehow beyond all human comprehension and there is no limit to their great powers" attitude.
These are three separate and distinct issues; first, ET's probable age. Second, how many centuries we are behind ET technologically. Third, whether ET has hit a technology 'ceiling' and has stagnated, or whether the universe plays host to unending technical development. Dealing with them in order:
1) ET cannot be more than about 6 billion years old, tops. The galaxy was not capable of supporting life at all for quite some time, then we have to account for the fact that this planet (formed late in the galactic cycle, BTW) was around for billions of years before the first income tax return was filed. Nothing about the situation as we understand it today rules out an ET over 1 billion years old.
Assuming a nice, leisurely search of the Galaxy, ET cannot be much less than 10 million years old. For if he's here, we know the odds are
overwelming that he found us without reference to any radio transmissions we've made. The odds of him being close enough to have detected us by radio transmission are worse than about 1 in 1,000. (Assuming 50 years radio of travel, plus 50 years of ET travel vs 50,000 light year radius in which ET's home planet might reside).
So that's roughly an age profile of 10 million to 6 billion years. We have forms of life on Earth that have existed for hundreds of millions of years more or less unchanged, do we not?
2) Anyone's guess as to how far we are behind ET's technology. It's probably an inverse square thing to catch up anyway. That is, if we are 20,000 years behind him now, we might close 80% of the gap in the next 5,000 years.
3) I personally believe that there is no foundation behind the reasoning that a technological base must expand forever. I think there's only so many tricks inherent to the physics of the universe and that after a certain period they are all known to a species. Hence my reasoning that ET, for all his book-smarts, will have technically flatlined - a barrier as real as the speed of light, at some time in the distant past.
The assumption that all alien civilizations are more "advanced" than human civilization is also ludicrous
No, the assumption is that any alien civilization that has come here must be more technically advanced than we are.
In fact, the very idea of advancement of civilizations is angering because it removes the development of societies from adaptation and places them into some kind arbitrary progression of history which doesn't exist
Yes, you are absolutely 100% correct. All suggestions that there is a 'progression' to civilization is meaningless, arbitrary, and ultimately useless, since any measure of 'advancement' means nothing and measures nothing but the comparer's inherent biases. I heartily recommend you fire off a letter to the President of the Confederate States of America and advise him that there is no quantifiable form of heirarchy amongst nations or civilizations.
ANd if aliens are here, then that changes quite a lot of things. They are very likely to have some advanced technology which we could benefit from.
Um, well yes they would. But no one has exactly bowled me over with a cascade of reasoning as to why ET would share
diddly squat with us. I'd expect it more likely by orders of magnitude that the US would share nuclear technology with Tehran...
If you do not believe aliens have come here before, then why is the U.S. government so secretive about UFO/ET encounters?
For those that don't believe there's an alien problem in these parts, they think the US government is unresponsive because there is nothing to the phenominon; how can they hide information about something that doesn't exist?