Originally Posted by zen_tom

There's one thing for life on a distant planet to evolve and achieve intelligence and even civilisation, possibly to leave its planet and populate the planets in the immediate vicinity, but it is something else entirely to traverse the vast gulfs of space, either using vast amounts of energy and resources to do so at speeds faster than light, or spending hundreds, or even thousands of years entombed in their flying saucers, with little hope of ever returning, for the sole purpose of buzzing Americans and putting probes up their anuses.