What if aliens really are here?

(Note the following is long and somewhat random, but if you’re interested in a nerdy subject, read on)

(Note 2, written while drinking instead of sleeping, may be terrible)

I have long held that due to the size and age of the universe that both the chances of intelligent extraterrestrial life are very near to 100% and the chances of that life visiting the earth are close to zero.  However, the release of the Navy’s UFO videos and pilot accounts this year means I think it’s time to revisit the second assumption.  I still think that these encounters are likely to have mundane explanations, but I no longer think that the idea of extraterrestrial life visiting the earth is something to immediately dismiss.  I’ve seen a few random discussions here and there on social media, and I think most of those discussions have been terribly tainted by pop-culture and are not an accurate reflection of what alien visitors would mean. So, I felt like I would add my own two cents.  Note, I am not a physicist, cosmologist, nor evolutionary biologists, but I have been following these sciences (and others) as an excited amateur for decades now.  To discuss the idea of alien visitors, we must delve through several related tangents.

Aliens will be alien

This sounds obvious, but when people tend to discuss alien life they give opinions colored by decades of pop-science fiction.  They tend to picture creatures that mostly resemble humans, that interact and exist in environments similar to humans, and possibly share one human trait exaggerated to a ridiculous degree.  Think of the logical Vulcan, the warlike Klingon, the naive ET, and a dozen other examples.  In reality, we would be talking about creatures that developed under completely different evolutionary pressures in an entirely different environment.  For a second, think about how completely different life is in the deep seas. Fish that literally cannot co-exist at the same atmospheric pressure as us (and the reverse is also true), with dramatically different sensory inputs and who likely process the world in an entirely different way.  

Now, those deep sea creatures still share most of the same DNA as a human being, an alien life form will be even more divergent.  It may operate at a different scale than we do, it may metabolize through dramatically different mechanisms, it may perceive the universe in unfathomable ways,  it may process time at a different pace, and other differences we cannot imagine because we do not have the experience.  These differences may reflect in societal norms that are completely incomprehensible to a human being.  Further, due to the size and scope of the universe itself (discussed below) and the possibilities of a technological singularity type event (this subject deserves its own essay), it’s likely that any alien we encounter will not be the biological life form from another planet, but rather machines created by that (potentially) indecipherable creature.  Forget everything movies have taught you, it is entirely impossible to predict the behavior of an alien creature.  The best we can do is make assumptions, mostly based on what we can assess from the technological leaps required to reach across the stars.

Space is big

Space is big, big in a way that people cannot easily comprehend.  For some context, the Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977.  Voyager 1 has currently traveled further from the Earth than any other man made objects and is one of the fastest objects ever launched by man (those faster are aimed towards the sun).  Were it traveling to our closest neighboring star system, it would get there in approximately 20,000 years.  This would mark a distance of about 4 light years.  For context, the Milky Way Galaxy is about 200,000 light years across and contains approximately 250 billion stars.  We believe there are approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, since trillion is a nonsense number for human brains, that’s a million millions (well, two of them).

Okay, so the Universe is big, so what?  If aliens are here, they can get here, it doesn’t matter if it’s big.  But it does matter, because it’s bigger than those abstract numbers really indicate.  The term “light year,” is really important.  For those who don’t know, a light year represents the distance that the speed of light in a vacuum travels in a year.  The “speed of light in a vacuum,” is an important thing.  It’s the speed limit of the universe.  As we understand physics, nothing can travel as fast as light. This makes the universe even bigger, because even if you could travel at the speed of light (or just under it actually), which is fast as you can travel, it would still take you 4 years to get to our nearest star, and two hundred thousand years to travel across the Milky Way.  

These facts combined, the size of the universe and the rules about the speed of light actually let us draw some valuable conclusions about our hypothetical aliens.  That is, we can ascertain a few things about their technology.  There are effectively three ways to travel between stars.  One, science as magic. Two, using relativity. Three, conventionally.  Each of these generates important information about potential aliens.

Science as magic

This is the easiest of the categories to delve into.   Basically, yet again, Science Fiction has lied to us.  It is certainly possible that our understanding of physics is wrong, and there are ways to bypass the speed limit of the universe.  Science fiction uses these all the time, “warp drive,” “hyperspace,” and the like.  The thing is, these are all just science fiction.  Any real science that “cheats” around light-speed is extremely esoteric, and almost always ends up requiring “infinite energy” to work.  Thus, in order to develop a functional faster than light (FTL) drive, we would need a society with an entirely different understanding of physics, which would have ripple effects through every possible technology.  Think about it this way, cavemen can’t develop a steam engine, they have to develop a thousand supporting technologies first.  In this scenario, we are cavemen, and the aliens with their FTL “steam engine,” are beyond us in every single possible area of technology.  It would not be like most science fiction, where other technological aspects seem modern (or just slightly beyond modern) but they have an FTL drive.  We are talking about a civilization with technological wonders that are, as Arthur C. Clarke once famously wrote, “indistinguishable from magic.”

Using Relativity

Many have probably heard about the “Theory of Relativity,” but I suspect that most people do not understand all the implications of it.  The key one, for our purposes, is that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down for the traveler, relative to the rest of the universe.  The easiest way to illustrate this is the twin paradox, if one twin stays on earth and another twin travels out to our neighboring stars and back (8 light years) at just under the speed of light, they will experience time differently.  The earth twin will experience 8 years.  The traveling twin will experience a matter of weeks or months (depending on how close to light he gets).  This effect, called “time dilation” is real.  It’s been verified using atomic clocks in orbit.  The reason why the universe works this way is very complicated and really should be the subject of its own essay, but in simple terms it’s because all the things that we think of being absolute (time, gravity, etc) are actually relative, the true absolute in the universe is the speed of light in a vacuum, and all other forms of measurement change relative to that absolute.

Thus, again, to simplify, as you travel really fast time slows down.  We normally refer to this as “relativistic speed,” and it seems like the most obvious way for our hypothetical aliens to travel to earth.  Journeys that would take hundreds of thousands of years to an observer, would only take a few hundred years for the traveler.  This, in theory, allows the impossible distances of the universe to be crossed.   However, while we cannot travel at relativistic speeds, we understand them mathematically enough to determine a few things about them (many things really, but two are most important).  One, to travel at relativistic speeds would require an absurd amount of energy, the kind of energy that makes nuclear weapons look like firecrackers.  The kind of energy that, if harnessed, could extinguish a planet entirely a thousand times over.  Two, to travel at relativistic speeds would require materials sciences beyond anything we can design, or even think of designing.  An impact with a dust mote would be nuclear in force, the stresses on a ship’s structure would be more intense than the bottom of the Marianas French.  These two facts together are important, to travel between the stars, an alien civilization would have access to energy sources a thousand times more potent than a nuclear weapon and materials that would shrug off the entire arsenal of the planet earth.

Conventionally

It is also possible, perhaps, that aliens could travel here using conventional methods of space travel: rockets, ion drives, nuclear propulsion, things that we can either build now, or could build if we put enough effort into it.  There is actually a lot of interesting stuff out there about what this would look like (mostly using small Von Neumann devices), but here is the important take away, a species exploring the galaxy using these types of engines would be planning on a multi million year timeline.  Even if their technology is something we can understand, their ability to plan and execute concepts conveys a power beyond reckoning.  For example, given enough time and patience, it would be simple to move asteroids and comets around, or deconstruct planets, or construct macro engineering projects of immense complexity.  

Regardless of how these hypothetical aliens arrived at earth, their capabilities would be far beyond those of the human race.  Which brings us to a commonly discussed point.

What if they’re hostile?

Quite simply, it doesn’t matter.  This is another area where pop culture has fed us a lie enough times that we believe it, the lie of the noble human resistance defeating an alien invasion through guile, determination or a well placed computer virus.  In reality, any possible technology that allows for travel between the stars, whether based on extreme longevity, a mastery of the relativistic universe we (kind of) understand, or the utilization of technology completely beyond our reckoning, would create a capability gap more akin to the military difference between the United States Army and a pack of stray dogs than between civilizations.  At the very minimum, any star faring race could move around asteroids with impunity and destroy us without facing opposition.  More likely, they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, however they wanted, and we would be completely powerless to impact them, let alone stop their efforts.  Thus, it’s pointless to worry about it, pointless to discuss hypothetical questions about it, and pointless to ask our governments to build military contingency plans.

As a caveat to this, there is a school of thought, common among scientists, that any star-faring race would be peaceful, because they survived developing the nuclear weapon, and the antimatter bomb, and the relativistic kinetic weapon, and so forth and so on, and thus would have to be peaceful in order to not use those weapons to destroy themselves.  There is another theory, perhaps first articulated by Steven Hawking, but more famously promulgated by the famous Chinese science fiction author, Liu Cixin, known as “the Dark Forest,”  that all star faring races would be extremely warlike in order to guarantee their survival.  The Dark Forest relies on three axioms, you can never understand the intention of alien creatures, travel and communication between stars takes a long time, and technology can develop rapidly.  Thus, contacting another species may lead to a scenario where that species outpaces you technologically during the long communication or travel times and destroys you.  Because of these axioms, the logical conclusion is to treat the universe like a dark forest full of dangerous creatures, to be quiet and avoid contact, and if someone else makes a noise, kill them immediately, because it is impossible to tell whether or not they are a monster.  However, in our scenario, where we (hypothetically) already have an alien civilization on the earth, it doesn’t matter.  We can’t hurt them.  If they’re peaceful, great, if they’re a monster out of the dark forest, they’re already here to feed, and there is no sense in worrying.

So why come here?

But, we are discussing the idea that aliens are here, that’s the entire hypothetical.  And they haven’t wiped us out, even if they easily could.  So why are they here?  (again, hypothetically).  It’s important we don’t try to ascribe cultural motivation here, because, remember, aliens will be alien, it’s possible we can’t truly understand their motivations.  

We can rule out natural resources, if you can travel between the stars, there is no element or compound present on earth that would be of value to you that you couldn’t extract anywhere.  It’s possible they could be atmospheric mining the gas giants for H3, but that wouldn’t entirely explain their presence on Earth.  There is a zero percent chance they would be capable of eating our foods, so it wouldn’t be a culinary diversion.  The only guess that I can imagine is that there is something inherently interesting to life, in general, and maybe civilizations in particular.  However, this is me attributing motivation to something alien, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.  It could be cultural or artistic, it could be simple biological interest.  It could be an interest in just humanity and its societies, or the nature of all life on earth.  We know that life is rare in the solar system, and if we broaden our lens to look at the entire age of the solar system, that civilization is even more rare.  Looking at the size and age of the universe, as discussed above, it seems possible, even probable, that these things are rare everywhere in every time period.  Maybe we’re worth visiting not for our own merits, but because what we are is rare.  Again, to be clear, this is just my guess.  It could very well be something that we are not capable of understanding.

So how did we detect them?

Okay, but this all came out of the Navy releasing videos and testimony of events that indicate it’s possible (not probably, not even likely) that aliens are here.  If they are so advanced, how did a Navy F/A-18 with a typically substandard Navy Officer detect them?  This is a good question, and I think is actually a pretty good indicator that these encounters were not with alien craft.  That said, I see two explanations for how we would have detected them. 

The first is pretty ominous actually.  There’s no reason to assume they just arrived, or arrived with just the three craft the Navy possibly detected.  They could have been here for centuries, or millennia (remember, barring science as magic, they are certainly operating on a longer time scale than we are) and they could be here in vast numbers.  If there are millions of alien probes operating on the earth, no matter how advanced they are, it’s possible the giant roulette wheel of the universe came out in the Navy’s favor, and the blind squirrel caught the nut a couple of times.  It’s not impossible.

The second explanation is the one I find more likely.  That they let the Navy detect their craft on purpose. But why?  Well, that’s heady.  In short, the alien visitors may be worried about causing societal collapse, not through conquest, but through their very existence, and they may be slowly revealing themselves in order to make the transition to a new world more palpable for humanity. 

In movies, first contact with aliens is usually pretty blatant and obvious, think “take me to your leader,” or a summit on the White House Lawn.  But that I think ignores what we know about human nature.  The author Ian M. Banks came up with a term, called an “Outside Context Problem,” which he summarized as this

“The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.”

Basically, in our history, when a civilization encounters something entirely outside of its context, that civilization usually collapses. A problem set beyond reckoning, beyond experience, is usually unsolvable.  Now this is an abstract idea, pulled from human history, but it’s not any sort of law of the universe.  

More acutely, we can kind of identify some of the problems that may rise from first contact with a technologically superior species.  For one, a complete collapse of the state is a possibility.  Remember, one of the primary definitions of the state is that it is the entity with a  monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory.  This is the dirty secret from where a state gains its sovereignty.  Well, alien visitors would be beyond the state’s ability to use violence, and if they wished, they could inflict violence without any sort of state intervention.  It is possible that the authority of the state would almost immediately collapse.

Second, the arrival of high technology, long lived aliens (and remember, probably machines), would almost certainly lead to a breakdown in most of the world’s religions.  It seems pretty likely they would never have received a visit from Jesus, so unstoppable heathens would arrive at our doorstep.  (but for fun, what if they were Christians, that would pretty much kill all the other religions).  Similarly, it’s unlikely they received messages from Mohammad, nor believed in Karma, or any other specific human belief.  They would also carry proof of things outside the scope of most religions.  Plus, they would be capable of miracles.  To some they would be demons, to others gods, to others mass hallucinations. It would be a mess.  Many, if not all, religions would collapse and we would be facing a planet wide crisis of faith.

If the alien visitors can predict that first contact may lead to the end of both the state and the church, perhaps the two most important things keeping human civilization together, they may wish to unveil themselves slowly, at a pace that is best for human survival.  If we are no threat to them (and we aren’t), why accidentally destroy us through their very existence?  Why not tease it out, a glimpse here, a glimpse there, continually building towards a period of time where we are more prepared for contact.  

Okay, so what?

That’s a lot, is there a point?  In short, I still don’t think there is any reason to think aliens are visiting earth.  But, because of the US Navy’s recent releases, I’m no longer willing to entirely discount it.  That said, I’ve seen a lot of discussion on the subject that is clearly rooted in pop culture and not educated guesses based on what we know about the universe.  I thought it might be helpful to explain some of the more complex parts of this discussion in simple language, in one combined (and rambling) essay.  If the above was too long, hopefully the next paragraph will suffice.

Remember, the universe is really big.  Any species that can travel between stars could easily destroy us, so we can be confident that they aren’t here with that intent, because we haven’t been destroyed.  Beyond that, it’s impossible to guess what their purpose could be, because alien creatures will have alien behavior.  My guess would be that life is rare, and looking at life is interesting.  If we really are detecting them, it’s either because there are enough of them here that once in a million odds are starting to cash in, or more likely, because they are gradually revealing themselves to us in order to avoid causing an inadvertent breakdown of our society.