What lies north of the North Pole?

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

You cannot understand the glories of the universe without believing there is some Supreme Power behind it.

There is no unique picture of reality.

The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.