What are you referring to by "no breakthoughs"?

If you go back a century and half then most of modern physics has not been discovered yet!

We don't understand dark matter, don't understand black holes due to not understanding physics in that realm (no unified theory), don't know how to interpret quantum theory. We know that entangled quantum particles act in synchrony over arbitrary distance without any signal between them being transmitted at all ... there's a lot we don't know (including not knowing the full extent of what it is that we don't know).

Even if did know it all, what if the thing traveling has a lifetime of millions or years, or in an AI, maybe traveling at near light speed?

Science simply is not in the business of saying what is impossible - it is in the business of predicting what happens in an experiment where we have an adequate theory. When the prediction is wrong you revise the theory.

I meant NOT nonetheless.

Obviously he wouldn't know unless has had personally seen them.

One of the alien rumors is that Nixon wanted to impress his buddy Jacky Gleason and showed him some proof of aliens, and presumably if that did happen then the military would have learnt their lesson (as the public did) about the untrustworthiness of politicians and presidents, and kept them out of the loop in the future. I would not be surprised if the president is kept out of the loop on the most secretive black projects. You'd have to be an idiot to tell Trump something and expect him not to leak it.

The universe is too big for anything that is extremely unlikely to nonetheless have occurred billions/trillions of times, and for all we know there may have been (or still be) multiple forms of life in our own solar system that have independently arisen. We have barely started looking.

As far as advanced life that may be trying to contact us, or at least be detectable by another civilization close-enough by, there are all sorts of reasons why we may not have detected it, such as making a whole bunch of wrong assumptions about what to look for, at what power level, etc.

Government panicked and mishandled it - the public just responded in as logical a fashion as they could given the misinformation that was being fed to them (due to government incompetence).

Who knows the motivations for keeping things secret (which they certainly have been doing, regardless of what the UFOs are) - it may be more about potential military secrets rather than spooking the public about the existence of aliens.

Even if the military suspects this is foreign (not alien) military tech that they don't understand, and can't replicate, that could also be seen as reason not to tell the public.

The whole premise of the movie is that aliens are real, and that the evidence has been covered up ... It could be made into a good movie without being true, but wasn't!

It's inconceivable that life doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe, whether it has visited us or not. Given that humans have gone from gaslight and horsedrawn buggies to electricity, radio and space travel in about 100 years, it's would be expected that another species who started this technological journey sooner than us (even a 1000 years earlier, but could be 100 million years or more) would be a lot more advanced, and may well have tech that appears like sci-fi to us, just as our tech would have looked like black magic to someone like the romans.

Who knows. Some of the UFO reports are certainly intriguing - air force pilots recounting flying objects seemingly disobeying the laws of physics with massive acceleration, changes of direction, etc.

The thing with science is that it only predicts what you've previously observed and understood - it doesn't say what's impossible. Imagine discovering quantum behavior like entanglement at arbitrary distances for the first time - science fiction stuff that turns out to be true. Some of the UFO reports certainly sound like science fiction - we can't understand them - but that doesn't mean they are not true.

It's a long movie - 2.5 hours, and the time went by quickly enough, so somewhat entertaining at least, but I was hoping for something much better.

What spoiled the movie other than a lame single-dimensional plot (it's basically a chase movie - government hunting down a leaker) are (mild spoiler alert) :

1) It's utter reliance on a magical alien device that gives whoever holds it a bunch of superpowers.

2) Some really poor CGI of bug-eyed aliens (their only appearance for maybe 1-2 min out of 2.5 hour movie)

What would have made a better move would have been to cut the magic and make it more believable, much more focus on the cover-up - what the government was actually seeing/collecting/studying etc, maybe more like a documentary than fantasy. MUCH more effort should have been put into the CGI, and the aliens could have been a bit more imaginative, not just bug-eyed air-breathing humanoids.

Yes indeed! It was a totally random handle choice, based on some Monty Python book I owned as I recall !

AI and robotics aren't going to make the world a better place - they are going to destroy jobs and society.

Tesla cars, now that government subsidies have ended, are just rich people's toys. If he priced them like the Chinese so they sold in much larger volume then he could claim to be contributing more to use of clean energy, but as things are kudos for that goes to the Chinese.

Starlink, bringing internet to the boonies, is beneficial, but Space X's nominally core business of launch services, regardless of how cool his reusable rockets are, isn't benefiting anyone other than himself.

I get why people like Musk and his futuristic (also egotistical) humanity-saving gibberish, but if you ignore the futuristic picture he's painting of people living in a low-security prison on Mars, then there really is not much to be impressed with in terms of benefit to society. He has of course been tremendously beneficial to himself, and props for that.

I don't see anything immoral about killing people who are invading your country.

That's a good way of framing it.

Certainly preferable to just fire bombing an entire city.

Why just focus on those, or any specific dates?

Yes, it's certainly shameful that slavery continued in the US until so recently, and a great deal of what is going on in general in the US is shameful.

OTOH, as far as slavery goes:

It was the Romans - Europe's ancestors - that perhaps practiced it more than anyone else.

What amounts to slavery still exists today in the middle east in countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.