There’s one thing people obsess over with some regularity: aliens. By “aliens” I don’t mean existence of extraterrestrial life in general, but, specifically, flying saucers or UFOs being alien spacecraft secretly monitoring us, and, as a step further, American government having access to alien technology, either by having recovered wrecked alien craft, or by secretly cooperating with aliens in secret facilities. As “evidence” for that, American stealth aircraft are usually presented – originally, the fighter jets looked nothing like that, and then “something” happened and the Americans suddenly started developing “invisible” aeroplanes. It is strongly hinted that this happened because they gained access to alien technology, and incorporated it into their new weapons designs.
Well, “something” happened alright; a Soviet scientist by the name of Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev developed the theory behind it and published it in a Soviet scientific journal, but the Soviet military saw no utility in it, unlike the Americans, who promptly translated his work and developed upon it further. To quote Wikipedia:
“Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev (sometimes also Petr; Russian: Пётр Яковлевич Уфимцев) (born 1931 in Ust-Charyshskaya Pristan, West Siberian Krai, now Altai Krai) is a Soviet/Russian physicist and mathematician, considered the seminal force behind modern stealth aircraft technology. In the 1960s he began developing equations for predicting the reflection of electromagnetic waves from simple two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects.
Much of Ufimtsev’s work was translated into English, and in the 1970s American Lockheed engineers began to expand upon some of his theories to create the concept of aircraft with reduced radar signatures.”
Basically, attributing obscure technology to aliens seems to be a popular thing among the fake sources, but it’s also something that makes it quite easy to debunk said fakes once you learn the truth. It’s similar to claiming to have learned some secret shit in Tibet or India from a secret guru or in a secret monastery. It worked best while those places were unknown by most and thought to be the end of the Earth, but less so today.
This brings us to the reason why I don’t care about the aliens: they don’t matter. If the aliens did in fact influence technological development in some country on Earth, and this changed the geopolitical situation here to their advantage, that would be a serious matter and I would change my opinion, but from what I can see, nothing of the sort exists. Furthermore, if the aliens indeed are behind the flying saucer phenomenon, and they monitor us for the better part of a century, and they never revealed themselves to us, this is not very different from the situation we would have if the aliens didn’t exist at all – they have zero effect on us. If something doesn’t have any effect on anything, I honestly couldn’t care about it. It’s like bacteria found in core samples from some extremely deep bore hole; yes, they exist, but they don’t influence absolutely anything I care about, and as a result I don’t care about them. They exist, they don’t do anything important, and I don’t care. Likewise, the aliens might not exist, or they exist and they don’t influence anything I care about. In both cases, I don’t care. If they revealed themselves and started influencing things I care about, my position might change, but until then, I don’t really give even a slightest bit of fuck.
Now someone will start about the Drake equation and the immensely low probability that we’re alone in the Universe, and I’ll just roll my eyes and ask what that has to do with anything. Furthermore, when I was younger I firmly believed in the existence of alien visits to Earth, based mostly on what seemed to be ancient cargo cults influenced by the aliens. My position changed with time, mostly due to my better understanding of the evolution of life. I used to think that the main problem with life was the development of DNA and cellular replication, and that this took billions of years, and after that point, everything was easy. It turned out that life on Earth started merrily replicating while the core wasn’t even properly solidified. It took basically no time to develop, which means it came here on comets or other interstellar debris, and complex molecules that form the basis of life were indeed found there, so it’s more of a case of “mix this with water and wait five minutes”, rather than waiting for electric discharge, chemistry in the primordial oceans and what not causing random combinations of molecules. The problem is, the life that was originally created was much simpler that what we have today; basically, you had single-cell replication, but it took enormously huge amounts of time, and a very few singular cases of what appears to be incredible luck, in order for life to get past the phase of self-replicating molecules, and into the phase where a eukaryote cell has a separate core, mitochondria, ribosomes and chloroplasts. Basically, the earliest fossils are 4 billion years old, right at the upper edge of Hadean epoch, when the Earth’s crust was still smoking orange. It took two billion years of vibrant evolution of life to create the first multicellular life, and only after that the things start conforming to my expectations of what evolution looked like – basically, it took another billion and a half years for life to develop to the point of the Cambrian explosion, and that’s the part of the history of life everybody seems to be familiar with.
So, the issue isn’t whether there’s life somewhere. I expect there to be some kind of life on at least five solar system bodies; basically, if life could develop on the early Earth, which was by all accounts the most terrible hellhole one can imagine, it can develop almost anywhere. However, I expect it to be of the kind we had during the first two billion of years of development of life on Earth, because it still would have been there if not for several very lucky events one wouldn’t have the time for if, for instance, his planet lost its magnetic field and its oceans evaporated into space. Life on such a planet would have quite an opportunity to continue developing underground, like it does deep in the Earth’s crust, and evolve into very resistant extremophiles, but you would never have anything like the Cambrian explosion, or even the eukaryotes. But let’s imagine you indeed get multi-cellular life somewhere, but there’s no ozone layer, or the land is for some reason perfectly hostile to life; for instance, life develops around the hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, on some cold moon of Saturn. Let’s imagine life developing to the point of some octopus, which is quite intelligent, but remains an evolutionary dead end forever. This is not at all a far-fetched conclusion; in fact, this is how most successful Earth animals exist; they become very successful in their evolutionary niche, and change very little for millions or even hundreds of millions of years. In fact, some single-celled organisms probably didn’t change for billions of years, and I don’t really see why they would, if they are extremely successful in their environment. Furthermore, the more stable the environment, the less reason and opportunity one would have to evolve, for the evolutionary niches are inhabited by super-successful organisms that make it impossible for anything new to evolve, because evolution implies half-assed attempts stumbling along for long enough to eventually mutate into something that can resist even the slightest bit of pressure, which precludes functional competition, and this explains why new forms of life on Earth flourished only when some disaster wiped out the masters of the previously established evolutionary niches. We had human evolution in the Pleistocene, where the climate is so chaotic that it routinely wiped out anything static, and started disproportionally favouring adaptability and intelligence. Basically, the birds had to evolve seasonal migration, the mammals needed to evolve hibernation, and the humans needed to evolve enough of a brain to start using tools, making fire, wearing clothes and building shelters in order to survive the seasonal extremes. However, when we add the incredible length of time necessary for life to evolve from replicating RNA to eukaryotes, and I mean incredible as in “enough time for a star to grow old”, and that’s with Universe giving you a head start by providing the almost-living chemicals on comets, probably created in the aftermath of a supernova, it is not unreasonable to assume that in most places where life managed to take hold, it either found the conditions too unfavourable to continue, it evolved at a slower pace because of the conditions (for instance, being limited to a narrow space around a hydrothermal vent on Europa, and then having the hydrothermal vent move and everything freeze every now and then, or oceans on Mars evaporating, or soil containing reactive chemicals that inhibit life past the extremophile phase, or radiation inhibiting complexity past the tardigrade phase), or it just died out, or reached one of a billion possible dead ends. When you combine the likelihood of bad luck, such as having an asteroid wipe everything out every now and then, or having a very active star that produces a CMA of great power every now and then and sterilizes the planets around it, with necessity of having several instances of extremely good luck that were necessary to create the Earth as we know it, for instance the Theia impact that created the Moon, which is responsible for Earth’s incredibly strong magnetic shield, and also for stability of its axis of rotation and probably several other important things, or hundreds of other things that could’ve gone the slightest bit of a margin differently and we wouldn’t be here, the fact that our star has been incredibly well behaved for immense percentage of its life, and so on; earlier, I thought that the Universe was just too big for us to be the only intelligent species, but with everything I now know, it might be that the Universe is too small for this to be repeated anywhere else. I don’t know if that is indeed the case, but for all we know, Jupiter, Venus and Mars might be the rule for how the planets turn out. Basically, they either don’t develop a magnetic field, or they lose it, and then it’s all over; or they have a significant magnetic field, but they are gas giants, and maybe the conditions on their moons are more favourable for the development of life than on the inner planets, because of the tidal forces influencing the moons’ cores and creating geothermal activity that favours life – maybe, but we have no evidence yet, and we especially have no evidence that this life isn’t permanently stunted by its environment. In any case, the Universe outside Earth looks like a barren wasteland, incredibly hostile to life. The conditions on Earth look like something that required too much luck for it to be a normal or expected thing, and perhaps too much luck not to have been created backwards, by setting the desired outcome and then creating the conditions that allow that to work, which is basically what I think happened.
In any case, my current opinion about the existence of aliens, in the sense of an intelligent space-faring extraterrestrial species that visited Earth in the past and does so in the present, without revealing themselves to our public, is that something that doesn’t reveal itself and doesn’t influence anything for all intents and purposes doesn’t matter, and might as well not exist for the degree of importance it has to all the things that matter to me in any way or form. Will aliens help me in any way? No. Will they hinder my plans in any way? No. In any case, I already spent an inordinate amount of time and effort thinking about the implications and probabilities, and there’s obviously a limit as to what resources I will dedicate to completely impractical matters.
Sure, you can define aliens in ways that include non-physical beings, such as God, angels and demons, and re-define “other worlds” to mean non-physical realms, but that’s not what most people mean by aliens – beings that occupy and have originated in this physical Universe, only on places other than Earth. If you need to enter the sphere of theology and redefine aliens in order to make them relevant, you basically accept my reasoning as to why aliens don’t matter, you just phrase it as “physical aliens don’t matter”.
Most compelling UFO so far (at least that I found) is “TicToc” UFO sighting by four F18 pilots.
Object was first detected by carrier radar and then two F-18s were sent to investigate (Alex Dietrich, and her then commanding officer, David Fravor).
It was visible on radar, FLIR and visually, so it must have been something physical and not a sensor glitch or some electronic noise.
Also, former navy pilot Ryan Graves reports every day sightings of unidentified objects, mostly on radar system, but confirmed by FLIR and pilot’s visual on multiple occasions.
So, these are not some attention-craving loonies and one would take kind of seriously when they report stuff like that – however, Pentagon completely ignored those reports FOR YEARS until Christopher Millen (deputy assistant secretary of defense) requested declassification of mentioned incidents as private citizen which led to Pentagaon reinstating ATIP now called UAP).
Why would they ignore this? They knew exactly what it is and knew it poses no threat?
Because pilots are not even sent to investigate because it is too expensive to deviate from training plan, even though objects are constantly detected in transient – restricted US coastal air space.
Also, all this sightings started with radar upgrade on F-18, so one would assume it’s the radar issue, but that does not explain FLIR and visual detection in same spot as radar detection.
As far as I know, the root of the problem is that nobody dares say “I don’t know what this is”, because they fear being seen as ignorant and replaced by someone who falsely claims to know what it is. This is the reason why humans always had an answer to all possible questions. The answers were of course bullshit, but they always existed. What’s the milky way, oh, someone spilled milk when crossing the sky, that’s how it got the name. What are the stars, the fires in the hearths of the deceased elders, of course. Why are crystals transparent? Oh, its just water that froze permanently because it was very cold in the high mountains.
Basically, people don’t know what something is, and then they pull an answer from their arse, and if nobody can immediately disprove it, it tends to stick, and this is how we got the aliens, and in the dark ages those were the witches flying in the sky on their brooms, and before that it was the strong wind moving the stars in the sky, or elders from the next world who lost their way, or the wild hunt.
The problem is, we don’t really know how this world works, and there have been even weirder anomalies, such as people getting displaced in time or space, and who knows what else. That’s why I’m very disinclined to jump to explanations, and prefer having a “I don’t know” as the default answer. That’s because there might not even be anything there in the first place. Maybe it’s faked by the government or the military to hide something they were doing; for instance, they can provide faked radar data and eye-witness testimony to hide the fact that they did something else there that might have been visible on their adversaries’ radar or satellite imagery, and they want to create a false story. You see, aliens are much preferable to a nuclear treaty breach.
As a comic relief that’s alien related I offer the following meme. ☝🏻🤓👌🏻😗😗😗 https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/58d1ba746a361e661fe401b9352f9486e77ec38590258f92c5e8d87d59e8ff0d.jpg
There is also another thing people generally have a very hard time to grasp – technological difference between hypothetical intergalactic civilization and us, they mostly imagine it like today compared to hundred years ago, or something like that.
This idea is also propagated through numerous sci-fi movies where intergalactic life is exactly the same as Earth life, just with few cool gadgets like warp and wormhole ships, but no one actually tries to imagine energy level of wormhole ship which basically needs to devour a planet for each jump – and that’s in theory 🙂
But going a step back, I like Alastair Reynolds books because he is mathematician and he based his sci-fi on math, however, that means that there is no FTL flight in his books which means there is no intergalactic flight (except a naturaly occurring wormhole that connected our galaxy with a distant one) and fancy warp jumps, just huge, massive ships (kilometers in size) with huge, massive engines that pushed those ships close to speed of light with some cool physics behind it where each engine had to contain one specially gifted Conjoiner, which is basically more humane version of Borg, which used it’s capabilities to control immensely complex anti-matter reactions inside engine so that engine actually worked instead of wiping out solar system.
Engines are so huge they can scorch entire planet if they are turned on too close.
So, only by energy consumption, difference between hypothetic intergalactic civilization and us is exponentially higher than between us and first eucaryotes.
It is unimaginable how those beings would look like and for all purposes there would not be much difference between them and gods and flying saucers that monitor us are just ridiculous fantasies.
As far as intragalactic – I am quite certain by now that single galaxy can hardly create two sufficiently advanced civilizations to actually colonize other solar systems.
Just look at us, we like to think we are technologically advanced and Mars is still not reachable to us and by now we sent exactly TWO objects outside solar systems? At least intentionally 🙂
And is Mars even in our plans? Nope, instead on the menu is nuclear war and total destruction of advanced civilization.
And even if we could scale out and reach Alastair Reynolds level of space travel – those energy levels would certainly be detectable even with current technology, especially when testing of a Conjoiner drive goes ka-bum and creates a small sun for a short time 🙂
So yeah, only “aliens” I believe are those from other planes of existence when they manifest on physical plane this way or another.
There was a recent discovery made by the Voyager probes, which detected enormous amounts of corpuscular radiation at the very boundary of the solar system, analogous to the Van Allen belts around the Earth, only much stronger. The theory is similar – that’s where an enormous amount of electrically charged particles gather at the point of equilibrium between the solar wind and the galactic radiation, and if you fly a spacecraft through it, it’s strong enough to fry its electronics, let alone the crew. So, radiation is definitely one of the limiting factors in exploring deep space, and it’s not all of the kind that is easy to shield against; most of it can be blocked by several layers of alu-foil and cardboard, but there’s that percentage that’s usually blocked by the atmosphere, the part that makes commercial air crews exposed to quite a bit of radiation since they fly above it. Even on the ground level, I’m measuring a consistent difference between 0.10 μSv/h during the day, and 0.09 μSv/h during the night, the difference of course being due to what the Sun manages to push through the roof. When I was measuring in the basement, radiation was consistently at 0.09 μSv/h. This is all negligible, but without the Earth’s atmosphere and the magnetic field, I guess you get what the Apollo astronauts had – flashes and streaks of light, as high-energy photons ripped through their retinas and brains. So, a long trip through space would be quite deadly due to the fact that you can’t really shield the crew from all the radiation without making the ship so massive, it’s not practical to accelerate to really high speeds. Also, accelerating the ship to relativistic speeds increases the radiation problem, since it magnifies the impact energy of every particle you hit, and the Doppler effect increases the wavelength of the photons you hit, making them penetrate deeper and have a more harmful effect on the body. This, essentially, makes the conventional non-warp, non-hyperspace flight impractical for biological beings, but the computers could probably pull it off.
Spaceflight by means of folding or distorting space, however, might be practical if it turns out to be a simple trick, the way nuclear fission turned out to be achievable by a simple trick of using neutrons and a chain reaction that produces more neutrons with every fission; I read Asimov’s SF novels from times before this was discovered, and they thought the solution to nuclear energy would be something incredibly high-tech. Likewise, folding space might prove to be a simple trick, but then again, it might prove to be completely impossible, such as the Alcubierre drive which requires huge amounts of “negative energy” in order to work. If it’s a simple trick, then we might have a situation where an interstellar civilization doesn’t necessarily have to be much more advanced than us; they just happen to have discovered the simple trick that allows you to, basically, change location property of an entity and basically shift it across the parsecs with a simple “command”. For instance, the Romans had technology that was very close to developing steam technology – Vitruvius, for instance, described a rudimentary example. They also had thinking that was very matter-of-fact and compatible with a scientific approach, and developing the scientific method was not a great stretch for them, and was probably just a matter of lucky circumstances, or lack thereof. The Antikitera mechanism demonstrates that they had geared mechanisms, meaning they were very close to the Victorian-era technology, which means that, with the right circumstances, we could have had the present-day technology somewhere in the 7th century or so, which means we’re not *that* advanced. I wouldn’t say that someone in the Victorian era could’ve discovered warp drive by accident, but they were already playing with nuclear physics and relativity at the turn of the century, and huge innovations in electromagnetism at the turn of the century show that there is such a thing as “the right time”, where all sorts of factors converge to make breakthrough possible, and one key technology can open the door to extremely fast progress.
This means that, hypothetically, we could encounter aliens who are basically 9-th century Romans who happened to have the 19-th century breakthroughs in the 6th century, and they have, for instance, technology that is similar to our technology of the 1970s, but instead of semiconductors they, for instance, made some different fundamental discovery that allowed them to teleport ships across the lightyears, instead of making a Facebook.
So, the Universe does it’s best to keep us where we are, interesting, feels almost like 13th floor, just bigger 🙂
Not sure how breakthroughs work, are they pure luck, part of design or are they “pushed” from other planes of existence, combination of those or something else entirely, but advancement through history looks somewhat linear when you flatten spikes of breakthroughs and destruction.
It’s like climbing sine wave with periods of ups and downs. Also, advancement throughout the world was dramatically different up until this latest one which spread globally – and then leading to global totalitarianism which will get us back to stone age 🙂
Also, I am unable to think in alien terms, every idea is basically projection of human traits to aliens, unless human traits are universal in physical plane and all species would have similar constant power grab struggle which both pushes advancement in one phase and then stops it and reverts it in another.
In the end, the point is what you said – aliens does not matter. It’s just mental excercise which could result in a good idea for a sci-fi movie 🙂
I think the greatest breakthrough happen when excess of wealth coincides with several other factors, and in only one case in history did the “stars align” in just the right way as to result in the science-technology feedback of the European industrial revolution. Several times in history they had outbursts of invention, but it never really went anywhere – they discovered many things, including some technology, but it was all insular, not really connected in ways that would have it take off. In comparison, it was like the Vikings colonizing “Vinland” (America). They went there, stayed there for a while, got their asses kicked by the Indians, and the settlement collapsed. In theory, they did it first, but it didn’t amount to anything and people had to do it all over again. Similarly, the ancent Egyptians supposedly crossed the Atlantic in their papyrus ships; also, it didn’t amount to anything. But when the industrial-age Europeans did things, it mattered.
So, basically, in 4.5 billion years it happened exactly once, like 3 seconds ago … not very promising for prospect of universe full of advanced life.