Does it matter if there are aliens?

An answer to Paul Pallaghy’s article, “Where are the Aliens?”

Paul Pallaghy, PhD has written a rather wonderful article looking at why we have yet to meet an alien, and if they exist at all. His take (sorry, spoiler) is that the reason might be that there are possibly no other species in our galaxy advanced enough.

Oddly, however, despite a nice long read, I think he might have lightly tripped over the better answer in his opening paragraph: lack of interest. Or, perhaps, lack of funds.

There is a good argument that we won’t ever need to populate our solar system, let alone go any farther.

We won’t need to suffer civilisation crash or anything else dramatic to prevent us from wandering cosmically. We just require better management of where we are.

The human population is calculated to increase for the next several years. But then, the best guess is that it will level out, and probably drop again. It might reach a height of eleven billion. That is a lot of people, but it isn’t Bladerunner levels.

Even if in the future we are short of minerals, sending AI driven robots around the asteroids will keep us going for… well, it is almost impossible to calculate for how long, but a long time!

In the meanwhile, assuming we never invent a warp drive (and my betting is that we don’t because neither humans nor anything else would survive one), then interstellar travel will be a) impractical, b) ludicrously expensive, c) completely pointless. Indeed, if we did invent a warp drive, the chances are that it will be even more expensive, and so will never get off the page. To quote the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, space is big. And travel isn’t cheap.

I think the more advanced civilisation becomes, the more those simple facts will be accepted, and scientists et al will happily focus on the local until we reach our use-by date.

I must admit, although I love the idea of space travel, I am not even sure why we are bothering with the outrageous expense of sending humans to the Moon again, or onwards to Mars. It strikes me that those are both perfect environments for AI-driven, non-humanoid robots who don’t need oxygen and whose “bones” don’t give a damn about gravity, or the lack of it, or solar radiation.

I suspect that if there are any other advanced civilisations out there, we might never know, and even if we did, we won’t ever communicate, let alone visit each other.

Why would we? What would be the point? And why would they come looking for us? Especially if they are a billion years more advanced than Earthlings. If they have managed to hang on that long, I suspect they must be very happy where they are, thank you very much, else they would be whizzing everywhere.

So no, I doubt it is as simple as there not being others out there, and neither do I think there is anything paradoxical about us not coming across any. I think it is simply too far to make any sense whatsoever. And if that has been the case for the last couple of billion years, then, as the trillions of galaxies drift father apart, then it will definitely be so for the next couple of billion years.

Disappointing, I know, but what did we expect?