Why Advanced Aliens Are Almost Certainly Out There
And why it isn’t reasonable to doubt their existence at this point
By MARTIN REZNY
I understand that the default skeptical position is that nothing that sounds “out there” is, in fact, out there, but I’m not just declaring what I want to believe as the truth. What I believe is that it is the disbelief of mainstream academia that has gone way too far in recent decades, and I believe it because there are good reasons to reach that conclusion.
In the context of alien life and the (non)existence thereof, NASA is itching to do a fishing expedition to Europa right now, which is a moon within our own solar system. That’s already moving the goalpost of doubt to the existence of intelligent life, but that’s not where the buck stops today, anyway.
The terms most commonly mentioned in connection with intelligent alien life are the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox. Note the use of the word “paradox”, as in, why can’t we see any signs of intelligent life anywhere? We wouldn’t be asking why we can’t see them, if we didn’t expect to see them.
We can’t make an exact estimate of how likely intelligent life should be in our vicinity because there are some variables in the Drake equation that we can’t narrow down yet. But the latest one that we have narrowed down, the number of planets, came out as about one per solar system. That adds up.
At this point, the most reasonable guess why intelligent life would be exceedingly rare is the so called “rare Earth” hypothesis, which is based on the expectation that there are so many specific attributes of our planet and solar system required to produce us, that you’d need at least a galaxy’s worth of planets to get one intelligent, technology-using life to develop.
And fair enough, but that’s still only a guess. The universe seems to have been around for several times longer than it should take for something like us to evolve. Which brings me to the time issue. We have (maybe) found no evidence of intelligent life, but we haven’t been looking for very long.
A few decades may sound like a lot, but on cosmic scales, limited by the speed of light, that’s barely a blip. We also haven’t thoroughly scanned a huge portion of the sky that we can see, and there’s a whole swath of the night sky that’s blocked from view by the plane of our galaxy. We have barely set foot on any other planet in our own solar system. We almost haven’t looked at all.
But that’s basic stuff that most space experts of any specialization already agree on. What I find more problematic is the selective blindness to all kinds of evidence that we do have of alien intelligence being places and doing things. Though admittedly, an alien mothership still hasn’t crash-landed on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s head in front of the White House on live TV.
Covering just last two years or so, there is a paper written by a Harvard physicist that the first extrasolar asteroid, Oumuamua, may have been a solar sail. On account of the fact that it was accelerating away from the Sun, while being really weird about it. U.S. Army officially admitted the existence of UFOs, and of a program for tracking them, and there was footage released, and a testimony from a top gun pilot. There were also leaked documents talking about alien technology. How much more does anybody want?
To be fair, it is new only in that the U.S. Army admitted to anything, given that there has been a continuous stream of all kinds of testimony, footage, and even material evidence about this very thing since the second world war. There have been many whistleblowers and leaks. It’s just not believed. Here’s a challenge for you — watch a couple of videos from Richard Dolan, for example his reviews of the facts of historical cases, and prove he’s lying.
If you look at what the testimonies are saying, chances are that these UFOs are craft that potentially have faster than light capability. That’s actually a big part of the Fermi paradox — if FTL is possible, then time travel probably also is, and both combined mean that you should expect aliens with this capability always being everywhere. Yeah, exactly like the testimony shows.
But if you really can’t bring yourself to believe anyone’s own eyes ever, regardless of how expert they are at being an observer, or any footage at all, however long it had existed before Photoshop or PCs, there is still more evidence up there that something’s up (there). Anomalies were found.
There is a paper about a potential alien communication network and there are potential megastructures around stars. Sure, scientists are skeptical about these possibilities, but of course they are. Apriori, to a baffling degree. It is reasonable to say that you don’t believe something because there’s objectively no evidence indicating that it may be real, but that’s not our situation.
Put bluntly, people who say that there is no evidence for intelligent alien life somewhere around us, well, aren’t looking, or seeing. It’s not absolutely clear or conclusive, it’s a confusing mess at times, but it is, as in, it exists.
I guess you could choose to believe that somehow, no secret service or any similar governmental organization has ever investigated the possibility or that all of them have disclosed everything they’ve ever discovered about it. Which only goes against their purpose (watching out for potential existential threats and seeking to learn any hidden knowledge that may give them more power), attitude (paranoid to the extreme), and methods (secretive and ruthless).
Don’t get me wrong, I understand perfectly why you wouldn’t want to startle the public with such potentially horrifying and ultimately useless knowledge — hey, just so you know, aliens exist, are vastly more advanced, and are flying all over the place around here. Well, when they’re not busy hovering over our nuclear facilities without telling us why. Night night everyone! Which honestly makes the recent admission by the U.S. Army sound really odd.
In the end, what I’m trying to say is that there’s a lot of middle ground between laughing at the very idea of aliens and believing every alien story. It is reasonable to entertain the possibility, given the available evidence.
What’s unwarranted is ridiculing people for exploring the idea or having an experience, or getting all upset about it, trying to shut down people who wish to discuss the issue openly. I guess I could try to formulate this more diplomatically, but I honestly believe that the skeptics are being irrational about this and need to be snapped out of it, for their own good. There’s a lot of science to be made in this area, and the first people to do it will make history.
