Aliens on Earth and Their Exopolitics

Introduction to how aliens would engage in relations with a species like ours

By MARTIN REZNY

There has been a lot of interest in the topic of unidentified aerial phenomena and/or totally aliens lately. In response to that, there were also many skeptical arguments flying around explaining why it totally wasn’t aliens:

• The interstellar distances are too vast.
• There’s no practical way to break the speed of light.
• There’s nothing interesting on Earth resource-wise or otherwise.
• Aliens would have initiated contact openly if they wanted to be seen.
• Aliens could hide from detection if they didn’t want to be seen.
• We don’t see any signs of alien activity in space, near or far.
• If the aliens were here, they’d be everywhere else, and we’d see that.

There are more arguments like this, but I think this is a good sample for the purposes of this article. What’s important to understand about them is that these and similar arguments are usually arguments made by physicists, astronomers, or psychologists (the typical cross section of the skeptical movement). It’s not how a political scientist would approach the problem.

By which I don’t mean to say that this kind of difference in approach has to be automatically helpful. Many political scientists would probably start from a conclusion they want to arrive at, one that best fits their political bias, and then they would look for any facts or conjectures that support it.

Even so, the useful part of political analysis is that it wouldn’t really be about whether aliens are here, but about what they likely want if they are here. The political science approach would be based on a realization that we don’t have sufficient theoretical understanding of anything important in regard to the problem, which would lead one to carefully examine the status quo.

But before I get into the specific analysis of what the known facts about our planetary and historical situation may mean for the politics of any aliens that might be squatting around here, let’s address the key flaw in the favorite skeptical arguments from the perspective of political science.

Where There Is a Will

Politics are about motivations like desire, preference, or consensus, the way in which you transform your motivations into goals, and the way in which you wield power to achieve your goals as a political player. Let’s put all possible motivations that may lead to actions under the umbrella of political will.

If there are multiple advanced species operating in space(time), and if at least one species knows that others exist, that will almost certainly motivate the knowing species to do something about it, if it’s at least wired to survive, which all evolved life essentially has to be. That’s Occam’s Razor stuff.

You could try to argue that the distances may be too large for the existence of another technological race to be seen as either a threat or an opportunity. But think about what distance is. Distance in political sense isn’t so much a matter of space, it’s a matter of time as a function of how motivated one is.

A distant race at sublight speeds may not be a threat or an opportunity now, but with enough political will, either yours or theirs, they may be eventually. As the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. We may currently be a relatively shortsighted civilization without anywhere near enough of such will, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for others to have the will.

A space(time)faring civilization that believes it will be around for a long while in some shape or form will likely want to keep an eye on every currently dead rock which may evolve life in the future, which much later may evolve into technological species, which much later may start venturing into space.

From this point of view alone, the argument about distance ever being too great is untenable (perhaps apart from a specific horizon determined by the accelerating expansion of space), and not just that one. We shouldn’t be in any way convinced that faster-than-light travel is impossible until we have seriously tried to develop it. We have barely thought of the possibility.

In the universe, other technological civilizations could have been at it for thousands, millions, or maybe even a billion years longer than us. If FTL is possible, it would only take one civilization developing it for it to then become effectively omnipresent, especially if FTL enables time travel as well.

This may not be a guarantee that FTL is possible or that someone had already developed it and is now spread out all over creation, but it is a pretty solid statistical argument for at least leaving the option open. And I mean seriously open, not just in the halfhearted “I guess aliens could be out there” way.

In political science, especially in geopolitics (a starting point for entertaining exopolitics), you don’t really deal with a lot of certainties, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be treating unknowns as real possibilities. The cost of getting the assessment wrong is high, and it has been paid many times.

Getting it right is a challenge, especially consistently. Political identity and will can be of any kind. It can change abruptly and dramatically, which can result in the development of new ideas, technologies, or tactics that can reshape the whole game practically overnight. It’s not “just” about anything.

There may be some nature or power-related constants, like life needing resources, but you can’t assume that if the other doesn’t need your natural resources, they have no need to visit you, trade with you, or invade you. Maybe they’re after information, about life or culture, or literally anything.

We have a fairly developed scientific understanding of the human species and we have thousands of years of recorded history with each other, and we still cannot predict how our own politics are going to evolve. With an alien mind in the equation, an alien machine mind even, no assumptions are tenable.

As for the “need” as a concept, politics can be easily driven by “want”. It may be reasonable to assume that alien civilizations should be rational to some extent, without which they wouldn’t be able develop as far and survive for as long. Scientists tend to assume this, but that only means that it would likely apply to alien scientists more than to alien people or politicians.

Also, what is rationality? There’s a mighty fine line between true rationality, and rationalization masquerading as rationality. Even within science, scientists don’t necessarily agree which subjects are worthy of study, which methods are most effective, on ethics and organizational principles, etc.

And those are again human scientists, of which we have a fairly good understanding. Overall, we simply cannot make any negative assumptions about alien motivation and rule out any possibilities preemptively on that basis. We have to make positive assumptions and try to rule them out.

The Ultimate Game of Hide and Seek

But how does one make testable or otherwise workable assumptions about alien motivations? Let’s start by assessing the available uncontroversial facts about the world we live in, and on, that are related to potential alien presence. For starters, aliens haven’t publicly, incontrovertibly declared their presence.

This means that at most, they may have done so covertly, in a limited fashion. The primal motivations compatible with this fact are either indifference, non-interference, or deception. Or a mix of these, given that “aliens” may very well not be a political monolith. Competing factions are a distinct possibility.

In any of these eventualities, it seems likely that the aliens in question view themselves as more advanced or otherwise superior. An open, equal exchange, or a classic form of invasion, are more likely between races that see themselves as roughly equal, or at least within the same ballpark.

Obviously, if aliens flew all the way here to our planet from who knows where (or when, or from another dimension), our technology would have to be vastly inferior and our civilization likely much younger, so they might be objectively “superior”. We aren’t being exterminated or enslaved in any traditional way, so the alien sense of superiority likely isn’t xenophobic.

The majority of alleged alien activities and communications seem to indicate pretty much the opposite. They seem to have a concern for us destroying ourselves and life on this planet, whether through nuclear weapons or an environmental catastrophe, which they may be subtly helping us to avert.

Interestingly, it seems that if they are here and have indeed monitored and to some extent interfered with our nuclear weapons and facilities, preventing the nuclear armageddon is much easier for them than preventing us from ruining the natural environment. Evidently, they aren’t omnipotent.

If their policy is general non-interference with our development (except perhaps to prevent our self-destruction), then they’re prohibiting themselves from using the full extent of their technology for the sake of our self-determination. If they have to resort to deception, then they may not truly have the capacity to control us, even if they wanted to do so openly.

If they want to take over our planet in some fashion, it appears that they’re not interested in taking over a dead rock, and they must believe that we, or other aliens, could stop them or severely damage the planet if sufficiently provoked, or they would have tried to take it over openly, which would be a lot faster.

Maybe not even the ability to deactivate a nuke remotely is particularly helpful when you aren’t able to know for sure where all of the nukes are, or if all of them were detonated at the same time. Maybe they could stop all the nukes, but not all of the chemical weapons and nuclear meltdowns.

In any case, if they are here, their ships are being regularly seen, at least since the advent of nuclear weapons, but an incontrovertible proof of the UFOs being alien ships has been elusive. If the aliens were truly indifferent to us noticing them, there probably wouldn’t be that much elusiveness.

On the other hand, if the aliens were truly deceptive, on a covert mission to take over our world, the UFO sightings would be even rarer and more cryptic. Many contact cases are cryptic and bizarre, but many other cases include alleged direct communication or strong implication of distinct statements like “we’re here”, “take care of your planet”, or “don’t mess with nukes”.

It can also be inevitable that as long as you’re conducting a global surveillance or have high traffic, no level of technology will allow you to hide 100% of your craft from some form of detection. Especially if high volumes are involved, there will be malfunctions, pilot errors, collisions, or skirmishes.

Which brings up again the question of factions. Any skeptical argument that says that aliens would or wouldn’t do something on the basis of their technological capabilities alone is fundamentally flawed because such perfection in application is only theoretical, impossible in practice.

Even if the technology somehow was flawless, or sufficiently statistically unlikely to fail given the number of encounters in the amount of time that has passed, there will still be errors in judgment and personal conflicts. It doesn’t matter how broad you make the definitions of “judgment” or “personal”.

Maybe the policy of the very rational Galactic Federation toward noob species is passive observation only and strict non-interference, just like the Prime Directive of the Federation. Great. How likely is it there will be no dissent? No crime? No difference of scientific analysis? We’re talking maybe trillions of individuals. Who knows, maybe trillions of civilizations. Across deep time.

It would be a miracle if there was only a single faction thinking in unison, if aliens are here, dealing with us. The safest conclusion is that some of the alien factions are indifferent to us, not caring if we detect them, most are trying to enforce some level of non-interference, and some are deceptive and have ulterior motives that may be variably criminal by their own standards. I guess there could also be space hippies, interfering for ethical reasons.

In any case, the expectation of many skeptical scientists that the aliens would do something like officially land on the White House lawn would require the aliens to be fairly irrational. Such an act would have to be viewed by us as very threatening, almost guaranteed to cause global panic. All reasonable strategies employ subtlety to some extent, if not outright deception. Aliens mostly hiding, but not perfectly, is a scenario that makes perfect sense.

The Life That We Don’t See

Which brings me to the remaining core skeptical arguments revolving around the so called Fermi paradox, or our inability to see evidence of advanced alien life anywhere in the universe. I think the issue as I see it was best summed up in one alien encounter account, where a group of aliens who looked like humans responded to a similar sentiment by chuckling and then saying:

Have you looked?

This anecdote could be made up, but I think the argument is valid. The current version of the search of extraterrestrial life is based on many assumptions, including plenty of statistical ones that are used as basis to ignore most anomalies and accounts, especially of alien contact on Earth.

The few astronomers actively involved in searching for aliens are either listening for radio signals, or looking for signatures of non-technological alien life. The instruments of astronomers are also pointed at space, not at Earth, for the most part. Despite this tunnel vision, some anomalies were observed.

There were a few candidates for a megastructure detected, like Tabby’s Star, which is the main current idea of what advanced technological species would build, so it was at least contemplated. There were also some interesting one-off radio signals detected, and some evidence for laser-based communication network between stars, but none of this seems to be able to ever be enough.

The key question is what kind of evidence would be enough for the mainstream scientists to start being truly convinced that anything is aliens. Recently, a close flyby of an entirely new type of extrasolar object, Omouamoua, for which there is no entirely satisfying natural explanation, was also not enough to change the attitude of most astrophysicists.

So far, the skeptical consensus seems to be that they would believe it may be aliens if they landed from space to the White House lawn (or near a symposium of astrophysicists) and gave us advanced scientific knowledge about the universe. But even then, skeptics couldn’t really believe anything the “aliens” are claiming anyway. After all, the “aliens” could fake evidence.

From a realistic political point of view, this is a silly policy. Beyond a certain point, skepticism, or more broadly doubt, becomes impractical. One of the main concerns of geopolitics in particular is security, and within the context of threat or risk management, there are much more important things to maximize than the probability that you won’t get embarrassed.

In this case, some level of paranoia and a lot of self-doubt are entirely justified. You can’t be content with assuming that aliens aren’t operating on or near Earth, you have to actually look to either confirm it, or rule it out. Which, like the astrophysicist Avi Loeb said, would require pointing all the instruments at Earth, especially at all the places with reported UFO activity.

But not just at the places with reported activity, which often seem to be around military installations. Loeb explained why that’s important — alien activity may actually be uniform everywhere, but so far mostly detected around places that are detecting stuff, like all the sensitive military areas.

The main problem at the moment is that most of the hard data on UFOs was gathered by militaries and is therefore classified, possibly for trivial reasons, like the need to keep the capabilities of military sensors secret from foreign adversaries. Unless the skeptics gather the data themselves, they won’t have it. Besides, skeptics never trust data collected by non-skeptics anyway.

From the point of view of trying to figure out the nature or motivations of aliens that might be here, it is essential that a thorough survey is conducted to discern whether they do or do not have a special interest in things like our military bases and activities. Or if their movements correlate with other stuff.

Take for example the whole issue of alleged alien abductions. You could take the maps based on where the alleged abductees were taken from, or the maps of the mysteriously missing, and try to compare them with any patterns in detected UFO movements. That would be a hard scientific way to further investigate soft data. Also a kind of thing you should want to check.

In terms of the politics of alien abductions, if they are to any extent a real thing, it would establish a potential point of interest or a kind of resource that the aliens care about. In this case, it would be something in the life or information category. It would also make sense that even non-interfering benevolent aliens would try to monitor our health or development.

If that’s what that is, monitoring of our development, it could also give some weight to the hypothesis that we specifically or the Earth as a whole might be their seeding or uplifting-type project. This would also explain why they didn’t wipe us out, try to prevent our extinction, and mostly leave us alone.

There’s also the much darker alien hybrid-type program and related numerous accounts, but this type of thing has been reported for so many decades already that one has to ask, where are all the hybrids taking us over? I guess that could be a kind of alien crime or a covert program, breeding workers or agents not to take over Earth as such, but to achieve smaller goals.

To return once more to the idea of factions, if any aliens abduct humans for any reasons at all, like medical observation, there are bound to be some groups within the alien civilization that would abuse the same process to achieve more morally questionable ends. The existence of a darker abduction program isn’t surprising, and neither is its apparent lack of taking us over.

If the majority of the aliens is operating within the non-interference paradigm, that’s the side on which the alien version of law enforcement will be. That’s why the darker and more deceptive the general feel of an alien encounter is, the more likely it is an illegal/minority paranormal activity.

How to Journey into Mystery

So, to sum up, we don’t really know anything. We simply haven’t taken this issue seriously so far and we haven’t gathered enough data to make any definitive conclusions. I’m well aware that this whole article is conjecture, but in fields like political science, you can’t really do much more than that. Still, you should be doing at least that, because doing nothing means no progress.

Or, in the case of politics, betting on theoretical assumptions, instead of making sure to check, can get your whole civilization destroyed. If aliens are here, this fortunately doesn’t appear to be their goal. If anything, they seem to be trying, and failing, to prevent us from destroying ourselves.

They also don’t appear to be all-knowing or all-powerful, or perfectly unified in their aims or methods, though they almost definitely are a civilization with a very long-term perspective. That could mean they’re generally conservative, maybe even stagnating, but they do appear to be curious and not xenophobic.

Assuming they do see us as some kind of children, and their actions so far, if there were any, are certainly compatible with some form of respectful paternalism, we’re more likely to provoke a more direct intervention from them the more we endanger ourselves and the rest of the biosphere.

Conversely, the more we grow up as a civilization (not just grow, grow up), the more likely they are to engage directly with us on a more equal footing. We’re already showing signs of getting sufficiently accultured to the idea of alien contact as a species, and wouldn’t you know it, the first steps have recently been taken to get some kind of official disclosure rolling.

There have been some accounts that indicate that at least some people in positions of power are in on the fact of alien presence here, and from a political science standpoint, it is a rational strategy that advanced aliens might want to adopt. That’s the limited contact scenario that I mentioned.

In that case, the gradual rise of science fiction as a genre from a lowly status to the dominating force in global culture could be an intentional project. Or the organic trend could have been taken advantage of and helped along, or some particular ideas could have been planted and sponsored to become popular.

Or the aliens, if they are here, didn’t feel the need to contact or involve any humans at all. Or maybe the aliens tried, but our psychopathic elites refused to budge, tried to take advantage of alien gifts, or mostly just went even more crazy, looking forward to the apocalypse or making plans to leave Earth.

Like I said, these are not things that we know, these are some possible scenarios that would make some sense from the point of view of how political powers and players tend to operate in the real world, regardless of the level of technology that one has. Scenarios that any strategist should be aware of.

If, going forward, we want to learn anything about the potential alien presence on Earth, then we need to take steps to investigate the possible scenarios. For example, if you think that science fiction is a psyop, you can do comprehensive critical review of it in comparison to any alien accounts.

If you think that there are some humans who have been approached by aliens, try to hypothesize who would make the most sense to contact and to achieve what end, and then investigate the opinions and actions of those people. In particular, look for apparently irrational behaviors of apparently hyper-rational actors, or for actions based on miraculous foresight or inspiration.

Or try to think of a completely different angle of approach, based broadly on how a rational political actor would try to deal with a much less advanced and pretty petty and irrational species. Just make sure that you don’t rule any possibility out preemptively, especially not only because it sounds crazy.

From our point of view, aliens can be crazy, while fully rational from their own point of view. You can start from the geopolitical basics, like the fundamental biological imperatives like survival, how threats work, game theory, control over resources, those sorts of things. But don’t limit yourself.

To a technologically advanced species, extremely abstract things may be more essential than the basics, while the whole concept of military conflict could be archaic. Maybe they never were violent in a conventional sense to begin with. Maybe they don’t even have emotions, and study us because we have them.

At the same time, maybe all of these assumptions are just based on science fiction tropes and nothing really works like that in the real universe in the case of advanced technological species. Or, maybe the aliens aren’t originally from our universe and their minds and biology aren’t based on our physics.

But whatever the case may be, don’t let yourself be intimidated from trying to make progress. We may never be able to figure out our own politics fully, let alone the exopolitics of any other species, but the most rational, most scientific course of action is to try anyway. As the saying goes, knowledge is power. There is no field in which it is more true than in political science.