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About Those UFOs. I Have a Theory.
One night in the spring of 1980, shortly before midnight, I left my dorm room at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, New Mexico, got in my pale blue 1972 VW Super Beetle, and drove west into the desert toward the tiny town of Magdalena. Magdalena, population 900 or so, isn’t precisely the middle of nowhere. The middle of nowhere, and my destination, was about 20 miles further west, in the high desert basin known as the Plains of San Augustin. The 1947 “Roswell Incident,” much featured in UFO mythology, purportedly occurred on that isolated plain, but that isn’t what drew me there that clear moonlit night.
The Very Large Array (VLA) is a group of 27 radio telescopes spread out in an enormous Y on the Plains of San Augustin. The dishes, weighing more than 200 tons each on their multi-story gantries, can be moved by rail to vary the size of the Y, the legs of which can be more than 20 miles long at their greatest extent. Using a technique known as interferometry, the array can achieve, in some instances, the resolving power of a single dish with a diameter equivalent to the span of the array.
I read voraciously as a child. I’d walk the few blocks from my elementary school to the library when school got out and then stay there reading until my father picked me up on his way home from work. I quickly exhausted the children’s section, one small room clearly demarcated from the much larger, newer area of the library, and so one day ventured cautiously around the corner and into the grown-up space. As it happens, the wall of books immediately adjacent to the children’s area contained science fiction; I stopped there, and never wandered farther into the library. Science fiction gripped my young imagination; it has never let go.
There are few sights more romantic and unworldly to a lover of science fiction than the VLA by moonlight.
I’ve never been a big Carl Sagan fan, but I enjoyed the 1997 movie adaptation of his 1985 novel Contact. Part of that enjoyment came from seeing Jodie Foster in the starring role, sitting on the hood of her car parked under that same VLA I visited repeatedly as a young man, listening for sounds of extraterrestrial life. I’d been there; more, I’d wondered the same thing her character wondered: is anyone out there?
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project, better known as SETI, is an effort to detect the faint radio transmissions of advanced life out in our galaxy. Many of us who think it unlikely that we occupy this universe alone expected to have discovered some distant radio source by now, some evidence that at least one other species has reached the level of technology we achieved a century ago. That hasn’t happened, and there are numerous theories as to why it hasn’t. One theory that I stubbornly reject as implausible is that there’s no one no thing out there, that we’re alone — at least alone in this portion of our galaxy. I’d prefer to think that the technological window during which a civilization might produce detectable radio emissions in a profligate fashion is narrow, and we’ve simply missed it: now their transmissions are so perfectly compressed as to be indistinguishable from static, and so efficiently directed as to miss us entirely. They’re out there; we just can’t hear them. Anyway, that’s my hope.
Now we hear that UFOs are real. What are we to make of that?
I have a theory.
Assume that we really can’t go faster than the speed of light, that that paltry 186 thousand miles per second is the best we can ever do. Assume that wormholes and warping and subspace and improbability drives and all the rest will forever remain fiction. Assume all that and we’re left with a depressing thought — depressing, at least, for anyone hopeful that we’ll make contact with another civilization.
There’s no plausible reason to journey across the light years in pursuit of material resources. There just isn’t an economic model under which that makes sense. Oh, maybe one could be contrived in a rare instance — say, the need of some race in a planet-poor system to collect the raw material with which to build its own Dyson sphere or parts thereof. But that’s a long way to go for stuff that can almost certainly be found closer to home.
That means no interstellar wars, no Independence Day, no Starship Troopers, no Ender’s Game. (And no mediocre sequels either.) I guess that’s good. But it also means no Close Encounters, no ET, no Day the Earth Stood Still. No Contact. No contact at all.
It seems unlikely that they’d make the trip simply to meet people. Presumably, if they were interested in making our acquaintance, they’d have called ahead, sent us a message by now, long before they arrived in “person.” And if they had made the trip, why would they flit around our planet for decades, never quite revealing themselves, never actually saying hello? Why be that way?
But I’m an optimist. I want to believe that there’s life out there, that UFOs could be real. I just need it to make sense.
Imagine that there are advanced civilizations out there. For reasons we don’t understand we’re unable to see their radio signature. Perhaps they’ve moved beyond radio; perhaps their encoding is simply too subtle, or their focus too precise, for us to detect them. But imagine that they’re out there. They’re technologically advanced, wealthy by material standards, vastly more knowledgeable than we are. What could we have that might possibly interest them, that they couldn’t find on their own?
Novelty. Authentic novelty.
The wonders of the ocean depths, of the darkest African jungle, or of the icy extremes of Antarctica will, when packaged in sufficiently high fidelity and seen enough times, lose their romantic appeal. Been there, done that: nothing, no matter how awe-inspiring and dramatic, retains its impact after sufficient viewing.
One thing an advanced civilization can’t simply create is something natural and authentic and unexpected. It may be able to synthesize, simulate, and invent almost anything, but not anything authentically alien and mysterious. It can’t create novelty.
So what they do is send automated probes out into the universe. These probes have a mission, to collect information about other places and send that information home. They’re instructed to avoid contaminating the worlds they find, because contamination diminishes the authenticity of their discoveries, and hence their value. So these probes scatter throughout the galaxy, replicating in out-of-the-way places, always looking for that most novel of things, life, and, beyond that, for the even greater richness of alien intelligence. What could be more novel, after all, than alien civilization?
The probes would try to avoid contaminating such a civilization as it developed. Its novelty and authenticity would depend on that. But, once that civilization reached a certain level of development, once all the knowledge that could be safely gathered without risk of discovery had been accumulated, it would be time to communicate with the alien civilization, to learn as much as possible for the eager minds far away. Perhaps the probes would offer knowledge in return, as an incentive for greater openness and communication.
Perhaps we’ve reached that level of development.
I don’t write fiction because I’m not good at it. I’ve tried. But I thought about a short story years ago, the gist of which is this:
Aliens land at the White House. They tell the President et al that the galaxy is full of advanced civilizations, Earth is a dirt poor little backwater planet with nothing of value… except for that novelty I’ve described. They explain that they’ve been sent to catalog everything about our world and to hold that information in trust, so that the profit from its release to the galactic federation can be invested in Earth’s technological development and we can join the fellowship of other advanced civilizations.
With the permission of Earth’s leaders, the aliens exhaustively catalog everything about our world. Their cameras and probes and scanners are everywhere, we’re tripping over them as they rush to document everything before it’s contaminated by exposure to the inevitable tourists and sightseers who we’re told will soon follow the discovery of our planet. And then one day they’re all gone, their ships and their cameras all vanished.
A few weeks later another delegation arrives at the White House. They explain that they are the official representatives of the galactic federation. They regret to inform us that poachers have preceded them to Earth, that Earth’s pirated intellectual property has been disseminated to the stars — we’re the latest fad, our three minutes of fame are almost up, and there are, unfortunately, no profits banked for the development of our sad little backwater.
Then one of the aliens looks at the Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist and says they have to go.
Published in Science & Technology
As it happens, the full text of Rescue Party is available online, for free:
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/0743498747/0743498747___1.htm
Also his story The Star:
https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf
1. IIRC, in Star Trek, first contact was authorized when a civilization was warp-capable, AND had a unified planetary government. On one hand, that seems to be a reasonable criterion: they have gotten their bleep together. On the other, it’s a ridiculous criterion: who’s to say that one-state rule is a sign of enlightenment? On the gripping hand, it might be the diplomatic corps’ insistence that they have to deal with one set of bureaucrats, please, not a babbling batch of competing voices.
2. Oh, but if aliens can traverse great distances, they are obviously so advanced; why would they be interested in us? Maybe because we’re . . . interesting? After cataloguing 120345 planets dominated by mollusks or ambulatory trees, you come across a planet where they’re running iron rails across the land and stringing telegraph wire, and the next time you drop by they have robots on Mars?
3. Also: just because a civilization figured out FTL travel, or juiced some trick that let them ride a superstring and pop out of black hole (technobabble, yes, but c’mon, we have no idea what we don’t know, yet) doesn’t mean they conform to our idea of an Advanced Civilization, all rational and pure and disengaged. Imagine how Western Civ would’ve turned out if the late Romans had figured out the internal combustion engine.
That’s the part I love to consider: they have good tech, but they’re not perfect. The reason we’re starting to notice them is because they’re fallible.
I’m hard-pressed to think of an ep from that series I wouldn’t recommend.
They were all over the map on that. They contacted many planets where the people may not have even gone into space themselves, let alone achieved warp drive. And a lot of that seemed to come from the First Contact (TNG movie, not the same-named episode) retcon where Vulcans had it first, whereas in the TOS episode “Metamorphosis” it’s made pretty clear that Zefram Cochrane discovered warp drive for EVERYONE, not just Earth. And meanwhile there was the Mob Planet, and the TNG episode “Code Of Honor” which I refer to as Planet Liberia… And so many more…
The biggest issue is still likely to be the crossing-timelines one. Even if there have been civilizations capable of crossing interstellar or even intergalactic space, are they likely to exist right during the timeline needed to contact US?
That episode of Star Trek was called “Bread And Circuses.” :-)
And of course there are other reasons aliens might come to Earth, because of what even their advanced technology couldn’t solve:
For those unfamiliar with them…
The Drake Equation is a back-of-the-envelope guesstimation of the number of civilizations which we might plausibly be able to detect by their technological signatures (radio, light, etc.). It was created by Frank Drake, one of the founders of the SETI program in the last 1950s and early 1960s. The equation contains seven terms, at least four of which are wildly speculative, such things as the probability that life will develop on a planet, the probability that some of it will be intelligent, the probability that it will develop technology, and the time span during which a technological civilization will emit detectable signals.
We really have no clue what any of those parameters are. Beyond that, at least one of the remaining three terms, having to do with the distribution of “habitable” planets, is also little more than a guess.
The Fermi Paradox, credited to the great physicist himself, is the name given to the seemingly perplexing contradiction raised by the very large number of potential civilizations the Drake Equation tends to generate, combined with the fact that we appear not to have been visited by any of them. The assumption is that, given a sufficiently large number of civilizations and the age of our galaxy, we should expect that, even limited to slower-than-light travel, the galaxy should be teeming with artifacts such as ships and probes and radio-emitting planets.
Literally dozens of explanations have been offered to resolve the Fermi Paradox. This post was intended to be my own contribution to that effort.
The question of whether UFOs are “real” doesn’t seem to go far enough. Even if the UFO phenomenon is purely psychological, what could explain its development, extent and persistence?
The phenomenon is undoubtedly real. But real what?
Yup. “The Changeling: The Movie”.
It is an incredibly dark and depressing series. Also, for my money, Bandersnatch really didn’t work. Black Museum was too preachy for my taste.
Nosedive is great for covering the Chinese social system, Smithereens covers internet addiction and White Bear should be viewed as an analogy for Derek Chauvin.
These are people who are being honest about the real math, not the “oh the universe is soooo bit it just has to have happened somewhere else” nonsense.
See also: Far & Away Above Average by John D. Martin – Salvo Magazine
Hugh Ross co-wrote a book on this very topic with Ken Samples and Mark Clark. If you are interested in their take on the subject, you can find it here: Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men (reasons.org) .
Yup. The Drake Equation is just a fun intellectual toy. It has no real value in exploring the question it supposedly addresses seriously.
Intelligent extraterrestrial life…the existence of which all Christians, Jews, Muslims and even Hindus take as a given. This is one of my favorite points to make in these discussions: Theists of every kind have a better warrant for expecting there to be extraterrestrial life than those locked in the mental prison known as philosophical materialism.
Whereas, of course, I would, for reasons we’ve beaten to death elsewhere.
Thanks for the reecommendations. I am really digging Ringo’s entries in the Monster Hunter series.
I could not agree with you more about Black Mirror. I tried sampling an episode and did not finish it. Nope.
I wasn’t going to comment on it, but I’m glad to see others feel similarly. I found it… perverse. Creepy. I watched a few episodes, was annoyed by that creepiness, and gave up on it. (For what it’s worth, I’ve never watched Silence of the Lambs, either. Probably just a matter of taste.)
I found Electric Dreams much more to my liking.
I didn’t find anything that wasn’t done better by Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, for that matter even The Orville.
They’re not fallible – we havent caught them – yet. (at least not that’s been disclosed) I think we’re noticing them now is that we’ve now got near global electronic sensor coverage. UFO sightings go back into history – Bomber pilots flying missions in WW II reported seeing UFOs…
I liked The Stars My Destination.
And people made fun of Rumsfeld for his “unknown unknowns.”
If I don’t take it as given, does that make me “none of the above?”
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
God is by definition, extraterrestrial…pre-terrestrial…extra-temporal intelligent life. So, if you believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, by definition, you believe in extraterrestrial intelligent life. Not biological life as we understand “biology”, but definitely life.
How do we know you weren’t replaced with an alien lookalike? Hmmmmm?
Do I dare recommend this science fiction series?
https://www.amazon.com/Venus-Rising-Linda-Daniels-Adventures-ebook/dp/B008NXCDJC/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=rowena+tulley&qid=1621689657&sr=8-3
Fran talks about the 60 Minutes interviews with the Navy Pilots:
Neat that she watched most of the same shows many of us watched back in the 70s. She’s right about demanding data.
Apparently the physics has been worked out for how these vehicles could work now exists. It requires metals and elements that we have not been able to manufacture though.
You should read Harry Turledoves short story Herbig Haro. Its got quite a surprise in it and its along these lines. It also explains the Fermi Paradox in a clever fashion.
https://files.shroomery.org/attachments/22672366-Herbig-Haro%20-%20Harry%20Turtledove_20254.pdf