but what if an extra-terrestrial species has evolved in specific high stress conditions to live for hundreds or thousands of years?
a 200 year journey would not be so steep if you could live for five thousand years.
it should put down an expectation for us - if we find extra-terrestrial life, it will essentially necessarily have to have extremely long lifespans. we should expect that.
it may consequently be the case that a theoretical alien race has observed hundreds or thousands of years of human progress. that would be a potentially invaluable source to draw on about our own history and evolution.
and what it further implies is that what we've learned about the physics of space travel makes it more likely, in my opinion, that at least some of the historical descriptions of human interaction with god or gods are confused interactions with alien species. they would necessarily be god-like to us, in order to exist at all.
a naturalistic explanation of god as a concept may involve the biologification of the deity. and it's a reason to return to polytheism as more reasonable than monotheism.
this does continue to strike me as far-fetched, but i must also argue that it's the most likely of a collection of crazy propositions. there must be some empirical basis for so much nonsense. it can't have come from thin air. if i had to pick one proposal out of the pile, the idea that our concept of god comes from interaction with ten thousand year old aliens strikes me as the best of the bunch. it's at least falsifiable, right?