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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 I mentioned in the comments while watching the ricochet flagship, there is entirely another source for the UFO phenomenon.
Ultraterrestrial
A superior, non-human entity of natural or supernatural origin that is indigenous to planet Earth.
So the UFOS could be Atlantis or Silurians or even Vril Powered Space Nazis.
The short lived show the visitor explored this concept in the 90s.
We need to develop space Indiana Jones if we are being spied on by space Nazis.
Check out “Iron Sky” …
When you finally know, it’ll be too late …
Was the line “You better come up with some evidence fast – or I am tossing this thing to the 2 clowns in the basement” was that a dig at the X Files?
A sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be “superior to nature” to an uninitiated observer.
The patent is US10144532. Do you have a link to analysis that elaborates from the patent’s proposed physics to those conclusions?
One thing I will say. Quite a few years ago a couple of guys in Florida started investigating reports of UFO sightings and abduction stories. And they made this determination: UFOs are real, and no one has ever been abducted by UFOs who hasn’t willingly accepted an invitation to enter, the extraterrestrials were malevolent, and the two guys became Christians as a result of their investigations.
Yeah, and dig his name. Applicant: Salvatore Cezar Pais
Consider what there is within 10 light years of earth. There are perhaps a dozen stars with at least one planet orbiting them.
Traveling to Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor with a planet, would require a lot of time and resources. If we use current technology it would take about 130 thousand years to make the trip one way. If we postulate some sort of engine that could accelerate a ship continuously at 1 g, taking a year to speed up and a year to slow down, then the trip would take 5 years, 3 years spent coasting at near light speed. But an engine like that would require enormous amounts of energy, and it would be nothing like what we currently use. Some sort of nuclear engine, perhaps. We would also need to have solved a number of other technical issues, such as life support for a 10 year voyage without re-supply. (But then I’m forgetting time dilation. Elapsed time on board would be only about 10 months.)
But that’s just to get to Proxima Centauri, which is not a very interesting star — a dim star unlikely to support life as we know it. To get to an interesting place, a medium, well behaved star like the sun with some planets, would take longer still.
This is assuming we don’t crack the speed of light limit, but there’s no reason to think we ever will. There are some limits that no amounts of research are going to exceed. To reach the speed of light would require infinite energy and infinite time. It is a place where mass become infinite and time stands still. There is in serious physics no scintilla of a hint of how we could change that. Concepts of warp drives that exceed the speed of light turn out to require impossible energies, like negative energy, which doesn’t exist. Warp drives, devices that travel by bending space-time, might be possible, but they can’t be used to exceed the speed of light.
Even if we did crack the speed of light limit, and we were capable of getting to Star Trek’s Warp 9, which was really blowing the doors off of the old Enterprise, then it would still take a long time to get anywhere. Traveling one third of the way across our own galaxy would take 27 years at Warp 9 (depending on the episode).
To the improbability of intelligent life add the improbability that this life is within reach.
You asked. :)
But from an answer on quora:
Robert Lazar explained how he believes the alien craft that he observed at S-4 generated the anti-gravity waves that propelled the craft. His theory is that the then unexplored element-115 (Unupendium) was responsible for the power source of the alien craft. Of course he was vehemently ridiculed by the scientific community. But element-115 was confirmed over a decade later to support Lazar’s assertion. The problem is, 115 is extremely unstable; and cannot be maintained longer than a fraction of a second with our current scientific knowledge. So once again, no, we do not have the power source for the energy required to put such craft in production.
From another answer:
Well, maybe. Did they have the metallurgy? Could they make the rails and the consistently-sized wheels etc? Just being able to heat and pound metal into swords, isn’t enough. Ball bearings weren’t invented until 1794, and the first steam locomotive was 1802. Coincidence?
Yeah, I’m sure that’s all true.
One thing that always bugs me is when movies/shows/books/etc don’t follow their own rules. In the first episodes of the Star Trek: Enterprise series, they gave actual speed figures, and said things like “Neptune and back in 6 minutes!” like that was astounding. But they didn’t bother to take into account just how vast space is. Even at that speed, it would take something like THREE MONTHS to reach Proxima Centauri, while they said the Klingon homeworld was only “two days there, two days back” which is clearly nonsense.
Sounds like Upsydaisyum, from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Obvously there where some advancements in the metallurgy in the 1700 years… However these folks believe that a practical steam engine could have been built as early as 50 BC…
http://www.foresightguide.com/50CE-a-steam-engine-in-ancient-rome/
Two thousand year old Ctesbius pump and fire (power water jet) hose, found in a copper mine in Spain (Museo Arqueológico Nacional de Madrid)
Its not that they’re not following their own rules – its they just dont know how much space there is in space.
They apparently took the time to figure out how far it is to Neptune, and how long it would take to get there and back at their supposedly-astounding speed. Looking up the distance to Proxima Centauri isn’t any more difficult. Maybe they just wanted to say “two days” so badly that they couldn’t bring themselves to admit it would be more than two MONTHS.
Indeed, the old formula was warp factor is squared the speed of light. So warp 5 – NX-01’s top speed – would be 25 times the speed of light. And if the Klingon homeworld is 25 light-years away, that means it would take a YEAR to get there, not 2 or 3 months, let alone 2 days.
Ultimately, like what J Michael Straczynski said in particular about the “star fury” fighters in Babylon 5, they travel at “the speed of plot.”
[ Don’t engage. Don’t get caught up in a discussion about anything that claims to be Star Trek that didn’t end in the 1960s. Don’t do it. Resist! ]
Well, suppose–
[ You’re weak. ]
Look, I didn’t watch this vaguely Star Trek-ish television show you’re talking about, but suppose warp drive or whatever they’re calling it includes continuous acceleration, just like normal physics? Maybe they plot the distance to Neptune, figure out how much of that will be used for warp acceleration and how much for warp deceleration, and come up with a number. The Klingon (huh — same name for an alien race used in the Star Trek series) home world is a lot farther away, so they reach a higher speed on the way.
I always wondered what that “factor” meant in “warp factor.” Part of the cleverness of Star Trek was to be sensibly ambiguous about nonsensical things.
I think some kind of steam-powered transportation is more demanding. Such as ball bearings, which I mentioned before. Even if the rest of a machine is made of iron, the ball bearings need to be made of steel to have any significant lifetime. And they need to be manufactured to pretty exacting standards. Precision steel bearings are crucial to an industrial technology. (And the plants for manufacturing them were mentioned as targets even in Hogan’s Heroes. :-) )
Well, for The Original Series (TOS) they were rather vague, in large part I suppose because it was meant to be less about specific technology and more about story-telling. But it was still kind of absurd at times, especially when they did things like saying they could travel 2,000 light-years in less than 48 hours. (“Obsession.”) And of course, in the original pilot with Captain Pike, parts of which were used to make a 2-part episode (“Menagerie” parts 1 and 2), Captain Pike tells the Talosians that they came from Earth which is “at the other end of this galaxy.” Which would mean something as much as 70,000 light years. And not only had THEY gotten there in a rather short time, within a period of a typical mission, the old Earth ship they were trying to rescue, had too!
Also, there was no continuing-acceleration. They specified the speed of Warp.
Meanwhile, Proxima Centauri is about 40 TRILLION kilometers. Dividing 40 trillion by 30 million gets you 1 1/3 million seconds. Just over 15 days. And yet they were supposed to get to the Klingon homeworld, which couldn’t possibly be closer than Proxima Centauri, in TWO days.
Was that speed mentioned during/in regard to the trip to Neptune, or as a general statement about “warp speed?”
I’m not sure that they intended Star Trek to be analyzed like this…
We aren’t talking about Star Trek.
[ Give it up already, you TOS snob. ]
Never.
This was a consistent problem on a show which had multiple writers and whose main purpose was to sell cars, beer, toothpaste, computers, etc. There was a formula: Warp factor ^3 C, i.e. Warp 3 was 27 times the C, Warp 4 was 64 times C, and so on. But whether an individual writer paid attention to it or a script editor cared enough to correct it (or didn’t because of time pressure) was another matter.
That was when they had gotten gotten up to Warp 4.4, on the way to the Klingon homeworld.
“Neptune and back in 6 minutes” was an earlier reference to a trial run at Warp 4.5. So, not that different.
Then all they had to do was leave the numbers OUT.
I think maybe that was the TNG standard. For TOS it seemed to be Warp factor ^2. But even if NX-01 could cruise at warp 5 – which seemed impossible based on later episodes, although it was supposed to be a “Warp 5 Starship” – and that’s 125 times the speed of light, it’s still almost 12 days just to Proxima Centauri.
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” – Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Then they should write something for Star Wars, not Star Trek. Star Trek will be analyzed like this 7 ways to Sunday. Its been 50 years they should know that by now.