UFO’s

This article (here is his TED talk if you prefer videos to reading) prompted me to think about UFO’s.  And it’s a small leap from thinking to writing.

I have been fascinated by the idea of superior alien intelligences since as long as I can remember, most probably for the same psychological reasons as everyone else who has ever been obsessed by them.  I recall the name of Donald Keyhoe as an author whose books I consumed; his writings go way back to 1950.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to distinguish between UFO’s and E.T.’s (extra-terrestrials).  A UFO is only an "Unidentified Flying Object."  If we left it at that -- unidentified flying objects -- no one would give a hoot.  It’s only interesting when we make the leap from unidentified to E.T.'s, alien intelligences.

Carl Sagan (yesterday’s Neil de Grasse Tyson, a popularizing man of all sciences) spent thousands of hours thinking about and working on SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).  He was responsible for the NASA Voyager Golden Record, a lead character in the first Star Trek movie.  Sagan believed that, in the vastness of the Observable Universe -- hundreds of billions (x00,000,000,000) of galaxies, with maybe hundreds of billions of stars per galaxy, and most of them surrounded by planets -- that it was statistically unlikely that we were IT, the ONLY place in the Universe with intelligent life.  A fellow astronomer named Frank Drake imagined a mathematical approach to the determination of just how many planets with intelligent life there might be in our galaxy -- in 1961! -- and here it is:

The Drake Equation (illustrated)

And while filling in the variables is anyone’s guess (not really; only astronomers interested in SETI get a vote on this one), some scientific wags recently calculated that the number of ET's in our galaxy -- the Milky Way -- is … 36.  If they are distributed more or less randomly around our galaxy, none of them is close enough -- less than 200 light years away from us -- to have been able to detect intelligence on OUR planet (electricity is a sign of intelligence that can be detected from afar, and we began to master that less than 200 years ago).

In addition to believing that we are NOT alone -- indeed, Sagan hypothesized that there may be one million(!) advanced civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy -- he also believed it very unlikely that the Earth has been visited by E.T.'s.  Not just because "why would such an advanced species take an interest in US, we are ants to them?"  And "what is the likelihood that we would be known to any species that lived close enough to be able to detect signs of intelligence (electricity again) on our planet?"  But, also "what is the likelihood that such an event would NOT be reported on by every news organization in the world as the biggest news story since the Second Coming of Christ?" (which hasn’t happened yet).  The idea that this event could be kept under wraps defies rational thought.  One of his most famous quips was "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

So, in all likelihood, E.T.’s exist, but they have not visited us.  People have reported sightings, visitations and even abductions.  But not enough to budge the scientific community’s skepticism.  Nevertheless, millions of Americans believe in E.T. visitations to planet Earth.  And you could do worse than to help out in the Search by devoting some of your idle computer time to SETIatHome (in hopefully temporary hibernation).

FWIW, I would fight you for the right to go aboard that E.T. space ship, like the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Addendum: Monday, 04/15/2024

The Fermi Paradox