I don't think I'm offering resolutions. I'm saying that we have far too limited amounts of information to resolve things in one direction or the other. (On the

I don't think I'm offering resolutions. I'm saying that we have far too limited amounts of information to resolve things in one direction or the other. (On the Mayan aside, I guess I do agree that there will be some basis for getting information from a returned probe, but after millions of years I doubt the home civilization will even remember that they were the ones who sent the probes out to begin with. I guess to be more precise, I expect that the home civ will have been replaced by new civs many times over.) On the probe side, if they return to home there's also no reason to expect them to signal, and seeing one would be unlikely considering we can barely even find asteroids that pose a risk of collision with Earth. So I guess there's also some possibility that there are alien probes slipping through the solar system every so often and we just haven't been able to observe them.