I do not believe that we have been visited by extra-terrestrials. However, I do think it is quite possible, even likely, that intelligent life has emerged in many places in the universe. The universe is an immensely large place with an estimated 1022 stars within the visible part and since we know that the probability of intelligent life, let alone any kind of life, emerging is not zero (since it has happened here), it is not hard to imagine that it also emerged elsewhere.
What I do not believe is that they visited here, simply because of the vast distances that they would have had to travel, even if they originated on a planet of the nearest star to the Sun. To be able to traverse such distances would require some spectacularly new science and technology that is unlike anything that we know, that is also able to circumvent the limits of the speed of light and the lifetimes of organisms that seem to be so firmly based.
Furthermore, the idea that they have arrived and are playing coy by giving us just hints of their visits, and that the government is covering up those visits, adds another layer of implausibility. Why go to all the trouble of interstellar travel just to take a peek and go away? To arrive here would require incredibly sophisticated technology. To think that they were able to do that only to have their craft crash in the desert in the US, not just once but several times, just compounds the unbelievability.
But such arguments clearly do not hold sway with those who are convinced that we have been visited and that the government is covering this up, and they apparently get very angry with government officials who deny this.
Sean Kirkpatrick doesn’t seem too thrilled to be chatting with me about UFOs. Since taking over the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in 2022 – government-speak for UFO hunting – Kirkpatrick has received violent threats, social-media smear campaigns, and even had to call the FBI after a UFO fanatic showed up at his home.
“I’ve had people threaten my wife and daughter, and try to break into our online accounts – far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence [of US Strategic Command],” Kirkpatrick says. “I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.”
So, after 18 months in the job, Kirkpatrick called it quits last December. Then, last week, AARO published the first part of a report he had worked on that concluded there was no evidence “that any USG [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP [unidentified aerial phenomenon] represented extraterrestrial technology”.
AARO’s conclusions sent the world of ufology – the study of UFOs, the practitioners of which are known as ufologists – into a tailspin.
UFO believers’ hopes had been raised by a former intelligence official David Grush who told a packed congressional hearing last year that the government had been hoarding crashed spaceships for years in order to try to reverse engineer them. Why these spaceships seem to crash on approach to Earth is bizarre. Furthermore, a massive cover-up like that would require huge numbers of people to keep the secret over decades, adding another layer of implausibility.
At one point, Representative Tim Burchett asked Grusch if he had any personal knowledge of people being harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal extraterritorial technology. Grusch replied: “Yes.” Burchett then asked Grusch if he had heard of anyone being murdered. The former intelligence official answered: “I directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities.” Grusch also claimed that the Men in Black were on his case and were harassing other witnesses.
Crucially, Grusch said he hadn’t seen the spaceships and “biologics” with his own eyes; someone in the intelligence community told him the story.
Naturally, Kirkpatrick tried to talk to him. But although Grusch had dropped most of these bombshells months before on the cable channel NewsNation, when asked to discuss it with the one man in the US government who really needed to hear the yarn, he was a no-show. “We tried to reach out to him four or five times to get him to come in,” Kirkpatrick says. “And as of the time that I left, he had refused to come for a variety of reasons.”
…In Kirkpatrick’s report, he says all the stories – the alien bodies and crashed spaceships that Grusch peddled in Congress – “largely originate from the same group of individuals who have ties to AAWSAP/AATIP program” and “worked with each other consistently in various UAP-related efforts”.
I am not sure why some people are so vested in this belief. It has all the signs of a cult. Many people like to believe that there are greater forces at work than what we can see. Religions provide one outlet for those desires and UFO beliefs might be another. Unlike most cults that exploit believers for money or sex, the UFO one would be harmless, mostly a waste of time, except when believers threaten violence against government officials who pour cold water on it.
That Mitchell and Webb Look had a take on this.
With the decline of religions, the need for mystery is filled by pseudoscience and things like UFO belief.
I think Carl Sagan adressed the issue in his ‘The Demon-Haunted World’. Damn, I can’t believe it is 30 years since he died.
Sometimes cults clash -- some christians think alien abductions are done by demons pretending to be aliens. The brilliant Youtube podcast God Awful Movies found a ‘documentary’ that is comedy gold.
“Gam196 Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a Deception”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=llUWbX4M618
This is something I have not seen analysis on, so let me just drop it here and see if anyone takes it up…
The Drake Equation models estimates that there is other life in the universe but does not model the likelihood that life might arise within the same nearspace and time. Let’s say “nearspace” is a hugely generous 1000 light years and let’s assume hyperdrives are fiction and any civilizations that arise in nearspace contemporaneously have a 100% chance of surviving 10,000 years. What is the likelihood that they have any chance at all of meeting?
It seems to me that the best likelihood is that rarely two civilizations arise close enough to meet and, by the time one has geared up to visit the other for some vigorous anal probing, they fail and die. By the time the insanely expensive generations ship arrives, the civilization has long gone.
More likely, since FTL communications appear to be fictional (even if we had a Quantum! entanglement phone, we’d have to spend 1000+ years getting it there) the dialogue might be:
A) “hi!”
1000 years go by
B) “oh hello.”
1000 years go by
A) “do you want to trade? we have fancy math”
1000 years go by
A) “hello are you still there?”
Civilizations might rise and fall, trapped in vast spacetime, and all they would share was eachothers’ dying screams
Marcus, Aaron Adair estimates that there is a 50% chance for another civilization in this galaxy:
Goodreads: Aliens and Religion: Where Two Worlds Collide: Assessing the Impact of Discovering Extraterrestrial Intelligence on Religion and Theology
Crucially, Grusch said he hadn’t seen the spaceships and “biologics” with his own eyes; someone in the intelligence community told him the story.
Even more crucially, did he ever ASK to see the spaceships and “biologics” with his own eyes?
1. Distances involved are immense, however the objects caught on multiple military systems, e.g. Gimbal and GOFAST do not follow the laws of physics as we understand them. If space-time can be manipulated then the distance argument may be moot. Also, Von Neumann AI style probes may have travelled for thousands or millions of years.
2. The discussions with the Gang of Eight in the SCIF report the phenomena maybe interdimensional.
3. The denial is always that there is no proof of extra terrestrial. However unless the objects have a star map engraved on them, then that would be a correct a statement. The US agencies do not make denials based on the Non Human Intelligence (NHI) category. The objects may be of NHI ultraterrestrial origin. Archaeologists have discovered and dated some tools to be 3 million years old, if so this blows the consensus history of human development out of the window -- this may be part of the puzzle.
Pariah @6
Lots of claims there, no evidence, show me real evidence or you are just another fantasist.
Marcus @3: Just for the record, quantum entanglement doesn’t allow FTL communication.
I somehow got on a list for a UFO organization, and each year experience a glut of emails about a major annual conference they hold.
This year’s “Contact in the Desert” show will include:
Surely only the terminally-closed-minded will miss this once-in-a-lifetime (until next year) opportunity!
Not really. Sure, the speed of light looks like an absolute limit imposed by fundamental physics, but there’s nothing comparable with regard to organisms’ lifespans -- indeed, there are organisms that do not age -- or perhaps more to the point, those of machines. That we haven’t apparently been visited is evidence that technological civilizations that last long are indeed very rare.
You say you’re not sure why, but then give a perfectly adequate explanation!
UFO cults harmless? Don’t forget that Heaven’s Gate of mass suicide fame was a UFO cult.
Jazzlet, it would depend once your definition of evidence. I assume you’re taking the understandable position of Carl Sagan, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence position.
Hearsay can be a form of evidence, and can be a deciding factor in a court of law. He said, she said, etc.
If you have millions of hearsay accounts, that generally claim the same kind of things, that often corroborate and support each other in way that that trumps other peripheral considerations, could that be evidence enough? The answer is, as it often is the case, well, it depends….
Rob, I understand that professors who would be in a position to generally know more about the subject than I, say Avi Loeb and Gary Nolan, not that they’d necessarily be best placed, would say that the defining parameters for this assertion could amount to a convenient ‘loophole’ or get out of jail free card for the current model.
We’re using language to attempt to cognise situations that may be more ‘quantum’ than we realise, a superposition of differing things (until the universe is forced to make a decision).
And I may well, or may well not, be a UFO fantasist -- but that doesn’t necessarily discount my understanding, or gist of the possibilities here!
I think we should also be aware of possible constraining parameters of our neurology, as in be aware of false dichotomies/a misleading degree of clarity to refer to an ever changing and dynamic complexity (which seems to be the province of the left hemisphere, a la Ian McGilchrist).
Can’t recall the source, but not long ago l saw a map marking the location of every reported UFO sighting. The US was covered as was the populated areas of Canada, some in the UK and a smattering across the rest of Europe and Australia. Almost none in the rest of the world. So it seems aliens have a cultural preference about which parts of Earth they visit. Given that virtually everyone carries a camera with them everywhere they go these days, I’m surprised we haven’t had a surge in photographic proof.
@Pariah, 6:
I agree the huge distances are not necessarily a problem -- not because I think ET has FTL, but rather that statistically they’re just as likely to have been around a LOT longer than us and had time to put something out there -- be it generation ship or Von Neuman probe -- that by now would have passed by. But the huge distances are still a hurdle, if not an insurmountable one.
Your second comment is essentially meaningless. What does “interdimensional” even mean in this context? It’s sf fanboy gobbledegook.
Really? We diverged from chimpanzees more like six million years ago… they use tools.
Well, a citation or a link to reputable source would be a start.
I would suspect that even you would agree that while it definitely is evidence, it hardly constitutes extraordinary evidence. If a woman tells me Harvey Weinstein showed her his penis, I’m inclined to believe her. If a woman tells me Harvey Weinstein peeled off his human skin to reveal the lizardoid beneath and showed her BOTH his penises, then I hope I won’t get my “woke” card revoke if I don’t immediately believe her and shout her tale from the rooftops. You see the difference, right?
Could be. Do those accounts start off relatively diverse and rare, but massively increase in volume and consistency after the release of a popular media representation of one of them? And suspiciously their consistency is not just with each other, but with that media presentation? Because if they do (and they do), you have to wonder if that media presentation isn’t directly responsible for most if not all of the subsequent reports. Don’t you? It certainly strikes me as a more likely explanation.
Well, you’re certainly “using language”. Not very well, though.
This, and what follows it, is again mostly meaningless.
Do you get much traction with this stuff normally? Honestly curious.
@14: https://xkcd.com/1235/
Pariah, you’re hilarious 🤣 🤣 🤣. Thats the problem with posting articles on UFOs Mano, you attract complete nuts
Pariah @13
So you’re a fantasist.
The Raelian UFO cult -like other cults- scam people out of their money.
But it might be less malign than the scientologs, I am not familiar with the details.
Their choice of a swastika as a symbol hopefully scare possible victims away.
All religions are true!
[Holms, heh. I know you’re trying to be subtle in your hobby-horse riding.]
The phenomena (plasma?) that give rise to UFO claims would be a fascinating issue in itself. Ball lightning has some suggested explanations but none that covers all instances.
Intelligent entities travelling through interstellar space are in our future, not in our present or past.
Bona fide AIs can wait the time it takes to cross the abyss. Von Neumann machines can do the rest.
As for the Drake equation and the rest, I strongly recommend the book ‘Lucky Planet’ by D. Waltham.
.
There is also the “grabby aliens” idea (aliens who expand and grab real estate). Any new technological civilization would statistically be likely to exist as early as possible since the opportunities will shrink later.
Being the very first civilisation in our corner of the galaxy makes sense in this context.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QI73eSvYmi4
(It is a pity this idea arrived after Stanislaw Lem died, he spent a lot of effort trying to explain “silentium universii”)
The discussions with the Gang of Eight in the SCIF report the phenomena maybe interdimensional.
Any evidence to back up those “discussions?”
The US agencies do not make denials based on the Non Human Intelligence (NHI) category.
No, they make denials based on the “lack of evidence” category.
Archaeologists have discovered and dated some tools to be 3 million years old, if so this blows the consensus history of human development out of the window…
That depends on what sort of tools were discovered.
…this may be part of the puzzle.
How so, exactly?
…it would depend once your definition of evidence.
Yeah, that’s what god-believers say when we demand evidence for their god’s existence.
Hearsay can be a form of evidence…
Not in this case it can’t.
If you have millions of hearsay accounts, that generally claim the same kind of things, that often corroborate and support each other in way that that trumps other peripheral considerations, could that be evidence enough?
No, just like it isn’t “evidence enough” to “prove” the existence of god(s).
I think we should also be aware of possible constraining parameters of our neurology, as in be aware of false dichotomies/a misleading degree of clarity to refer to an ever changing and dynamic complexity (which seems to be the province of the left hemisphere, a la Ian McGilchrist).
The meaninglessness of that sentence is matched only by its irrelevance.
@ 1
I can’t believe it’s December 2026 either. 😉
Another question: Why visit Earth? A bacteria-filled world wouldn’t be as interesting as one with intelligent life, and how would you know if a particular planet HAD intelligent life? We’ve had electromagnetic signals strong enough to exit Earth’s atmosphere for about 100 years, a blink of an eye in cosmological time. How many planets exist inside that sphere with a diameter of 200 lightyears?
Rob Grigjanis@#8:
Just for the record, quantum entanglement doesn’t allow FTL communication.
Oh, good to know. I think I’ve run across that as a mcguffin in a few sci-fi stories.
Because of the problem I was describing, FTL communications enable there to be a story at all, other than perhaps a story about archeology.
Huh, that might be an interesting plot: civilization A has a first contact with civilization B and their reaction is to send (robotic) archeologists, immediately, because nobody expects a civilization to last long enough for there to be a round trip dialog. Of course by the time the robotic archeological probe returns with its information and some artifacts, there is nothing left of its civilization, either.
We/ve no idea how long civilization can last. Humans have been building cities for 6000 years or so (Ur dates to at least 3800 BCE). Gobekli Tepe goes back some 11,500 years. Governments fail, empires fall, societies collapse or evolve, but civilization keeps chugging right along. Even the Bronze Age Collapse didn’t end it, it just altered the status quo.
PS. I will believe that something ‘came from another dimension’ only after you’ve gone and lived in the 2nd dimension for a time.
This common claim always irks me because it’s so obviously fallacious. You can’t just say one side is a big number and the other side is less than infinity so the big number wins! X-D
Obviously, you need the other side of the calculation -- how likely is any given star to spawn an intelligent industrialized species? And I would say it’s very easy to make a case that the odds are much less than 1 in 10^22.
You need a planet with lots of water. But not too much water. There must be dry land. Otherwise there’s no possibility of fire.
You need the right pressure and temperature that water is near its triple point, otherwise no hydrological cycle.
You need a molten churning core, otherwise no magnetic field to shield against solar radiation that would destroy complex chemistry.
You need the right atmospheric gases to allow respiration and combustion.
You need an origin of life. How does that happen? We don’t know. But it’s such an extraordinarily rare event it happened exactly once in four billion years.
You need one branch on the metaphorical tree of life to grow towards intelligence. This is by no means guaranteed! Most life is not getting any smarter. Trees are not smarter than they have ever been. The most successful life on Earth is the most mindless -- single celled.
You need regular extinction events -- like baby bear’s porridge not too much, not too little, but juuust right. Extinction events were a spur to evolution.
You need any intelligent life to be in the right environment. Like, octopuses are famously smart, but they’re never going to have an industrial revolution because, again, no fire.
You need that bizarre set of coincidences that resulted in us having limbs for making stuff. It was an accident! We evolved grasping limbs for swinging in trees, then came down and learned to walk upright, and all of a sudden we had spare limbs for manipulation. How unlikely was that?
You need your proto-intelligent species to nearly go extinct, but not quite go extinct. It’s baby bear’s porridge again. My understanding is anthropologists believe it was nearly going extinct that created the evolutionary pressure for humans to develop abstract thought, and a conception of the future.
You need the right ingredients for metallurgy to be available & accessible at least near the surface of the planet.
Many, many, many things had to be juuuust right to enable an intelligent industrialized species to emerge on Earth. It’s one unlikely happenstance after another.
If just, say, four of these things were a one in a million chance -- well then we’re already up to 10^24 aren’t we. That is, one chance in 10^24.
If those are the odds, then all other things being equal we are not only the only intelligent life in the visible universe, but in a region of space one hundred times the volume.
Don’t get me wrong -- I would love there to be aliens as much as the next sci-fi nerd. But you can’t just say space is big therefore they exist. It’s not rational thinking.
Silentbob @#29,
It is not a question of simply comparing two big numbers but using them to make a quantitative estimate.
Let us assume that the probability p that conditions for the emergence of life in any given solar system is as small as you assume, i.e., p=10-24. Then the probability for life NOT to emerge in such a system is (1-p). If there are N stars, and since the events are independent, the probability that life does not emerge in any of them is given by P=(1-p)N.
P can become surprisingly large even for small probability events, provided there are many opportunities for that event to occur. For example, suppose you have an event that has a one in 1000 (0.1%) chance of occurring, i.e. p=1/1000=0.001. If N=10, then P=0.990. i.e. there is a 0.01 (1%) probability of it occurring at least once. If we repeat with p=0.0001 and N=100, then P is again roughly 0.99.
The catch is that I cannot calculate P exactly (given the limits of the calculators) when p is extremely small and N is extremely large as we have here. If we take just the leading terms in the binomial expansion of (1-p)N as a very rough approximation (reasonable provided Np<0.1), then P=(1-p)N=1-Np=1-1022 x 10-24 =1-0.01=0.99. So there is a 1% chance of life emerging. This is not that small, and that is even with the very low value of p that you provided.
Since estimates of p are highly uncertain, estimates of of P can vary wildly depending on the choice made for p.
For example, if we take p=10-23, then P=0.9 which means that there is a 10% chance of life emerging somewhere.
“Million to one chances happen nine times out of ten” -- Terry Pratchett.
We are deep down the well of wild speculation. But as far as planets having the right conditions for life to exist on, we had another in this very solar system: Venus, the planet that’s sometimes called “Earth’s twin” because of its remarkable similarity to ours. Ok, habitable only before the runaway greenhouse effect that caused it to lose all its water, and there’s still the problem of how the first life originated, but it’s still a sign that habitable planets might not be that rare. It would be an absolutely unbelievable coincidence otherwise.
Regarding life only having originated once, we can’t be sure of that. And once our strain of life got established, I speculate that any different strain of life that developed would be seen by our strain as lunch. Devouring, that’s what life is good at.
Intelligent life may still be very rare. It’s possible that some might even develop on Earth eventually, but I’m not holding my breath. /s
#26 Matt
Bear in mind signal strength declines proportionally to the square of the distance travelled. A TV transmission that leaves the atmosphere is not going to be detectable at interstellar distances.
And with that, the Fermi ‘paradox’ is resolved.
Any “strain of life” sufficiently different from ours to deserve the distinction would be, for us, about as suitable a lunch as a bowl of gravel, surely?
[inigomontoya]You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means[/inigomontoya]
The Fermi paradox does not wonder why nobody has received our radio broadcasts and come looking for us as a result. The Fermi paradox wonders why they’re not already here in some form, visibly, entirely independent of our activities, perhaps to steal our trashcans.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5746675
@sonof #34:
On a planet with a completely different environment, absolutely! On Earth, not necessarily. My understanding is that proteins existed here before life got going, and I was thinking of another carbon based lifeform. If it still used proteins in it, it would definitely be appetising. Even if it didn’t, presumably it would have to have some structures in it that store energy, and those would be appetising. Life tries to eat everything, eg. some bacteria thrive on chemical processes.
sonof, are you saying we might soon be attacked by starfaring raccoons?
@RB, 37: thank you for confirming you didn’t get the joke. You really are not very bright, are you? It wasn’t complicated -- go on, try again.
I find this fascinating in itself, elected politicians that seem reasonably intelligent, saying these things.
SDC: You made this remark about UAP: “Regardless of what it is — aliens, angels, or just us.” That is an interesting configuration of possibilities. What did you mean by that?
Burlison: Whenever I proposed the improbability of extraterrestrial travel, the response that I got from Grusch and others has been that they’re not traveling through space-time, they’re transitioning into our plane of existence
https://sgfcitizen.org/government/if-the-truth-is-out-there-about-uaps-eric-burlison-wants-to-know/
Well, yeah, someone says interstellar travel is unlikely or improbable and a UFO-buff responds with vague meaningless rubbish. That’s not “fascinating,” it’s just another day wasted listening to loony cranks and conspiracy buffs.
Silentbob@29 wasn’t talking about the probability of life emerging, but that of “an intelligent industrialized species”. That could well be very much smaller. LIfe seems to have got started on Earth early in its existence, maybe 3,500Mya, but animals not until about 600Mya, and “an intelligent industrialized species” (intelligent?) only hundreds of Kya at most. At least one big step on the way, the origin of eukaryotes, looks very chancy. Once Bilateria (most animals other than sponges and jellyfish) evolved, I’d say there’s a weak tendency for the most behaviourally complex animals around at any one time getting more so -- possibly because although selection can push in any direction, there’s a clear lower bound to such complexity but no obvious upper bound, so Bilaterian evolution was a branching asymmetric random walk. But getting there from the first life on a planet might be extremely unlikely.