Yeah, I've been hearing this story for over fifty years now.

Claiming that intelligent, technological aliens exist and are operating in our solar system is a very very strong claim based on no solid evidence at all.

If I claim your apartment has mice, and you don't know about it, then you should be very willing to entertain the possibility and look for proof. Mice are small.

But if I tell you your apartment has lions, you're not going to believe it, and you're not going to rip up the floor boards looking for lions unless you already have some sort of evidence like a few hairs or some scat.

And you're particularly not going to do this if I've been talking about lions in your apartment for seventy five years, and have yet to produce any evidence at all.

The fact that you label this article "spirituality" gives it away. Your answer to the "kid from the audience" simply assumes that "extraterrestrials" exist.

You want aliens to exist, and it affects your judgement.

We only know of one species of intelligent, technological life, and it is hell-bent on consuming all its resources, destroying its own environment, and therefore destroying its ability to create technology.

The issue is a mismatch between our lifespans and our planning ability, and the temporal scale of our problems. The climate disaster took two hundred years to emerge, a blink in geological terms, but many generations of human lifetime.

If I were forced to guess, I'd agree with Fermi that this Great Filter inexorably prevents intelligent species from leaving their own solar systems.

But that's a guess. The evidence shows nothing. To conclude from that nothing that intelligent technological aliens exist does not follow.