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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
I thought of Unobtainium, similarly loony. But Upsydaisyum is much better.
IIRC, the original Star Trek book (I don’t know where my copy is) says Roddenberry et al thought this through and that warp speeds were something like exponentially faster that the previous warp. Warp I may have taken 3 months to reach Proxima Centauri, but warp 2 and 3 would have been much faster.
I think originally Warp was meant to be a logarithmic scale so warp 2 would be 10x faster than warp 1 instead of just double. .. If they had kept the original speed scales, episodes would have been much more like Firefly – where they openly talk about the weeks, and months they have to travel between destinations.
Well, I always thought it took a lot of time to travel throughout the galaxy. It was a five year mission to explore new worlds.
True. It would take a long time to get anywhere – back then we thought the Galaxy was 70 000 light years across – but now we think it maybe 100 000 light years or even larger.
The one thing that really was only addressed once – was time dilation – Do the crews experience time differently than the families that they left behind?
Star Wars gets analyzed plenty too, but they didn’t include definite numbers that make a hash of their stories.
Star Wars made plenty of OTHER mistakes, but not THAT one.
They wouldn’t, because warp drive isn’t faster-than-light in normal space, which would involve time dilation. (In addition to being impossible even in Trek Universe.) Warp drive creates a subspace/warp field around the ship, which is not subject to the speed-of-light limitation. The ship is not moving within the field.
There was one episode in TNG – where Picard traveled back to Earth for a death in the family – it might have been the first movie… He discussed it with his brother…
Not sure what you mean. There was an episode where they went back to Earth for repairs, and Picard visited his brother, his brother’s wife, and their son. None of whom were extremely old or decrepit, or even dead, as would have been the case with time dilation. Then in the Generations movie, he finds out this his brother and nephew were killed in a fire, but he didn’t go back to visit during the movie.
A lot of that kind of thing did happen in “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman.
That would make sub-space radio more or less pointless, wouldn’t it? And if I recall, not that it meant much to me at the time, I believe warp drive was a way of travelling through space at a sublight speed but essentially skipping a lot of space in between the front of the warp and the rear of the warp. So the net time disruption would only be what was required for impulse power, which as we know from the musical sound track is like 5 mph.
At least that the story I’m sticking to.
Yep, you beat me to the punch. It looks like we were writing at the same time, but you were faster.
Does this prove that great minds think alike? Not conclusively, as this might be true of other types of minds. :)
I think it demonstrates that the shorter post wins. Alas, that is not a concept I am likely to take to heart.
The warp drive vs “jumping” thing can be a bit obscure at times. In “Babylon 5” as with other “universes” that use “hyperspace” rather than something like warp drive, a ship is “jumped” into hyperspace somehow, and if you move say 1000 miles and then jump back to normal space, you’re maybe a light-year or more from where you started. Stuff like that. With no time dilation.
I must have that confused … They where playing on the hollo-deck sailing a Warship when he gets the news… I remember there where also arguments with his brother …
If I recall correctly, and it’s been nearly fifty years since I read The Making of Star Trek, the description was that space (A-B-C-D-E) was nearly folded (A-E) and the space ship drove across the near fold (or the actually the warp in space that the ship’s warp drive engines created in space) in a smooth continuous process. I just called it “jumping”.
Most of these stars are red dwarfs. 3/4 of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, but when you look at the night sky – not a single one is bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. I was always struck by the night sky – you’re only seeing a 1/4 of stars that are actually there.
The other problem with a red dwarf star, is that they dont give off a lot of heat. So the goldielocks zone will be quite close to the star – meaning that the planet would likely be tidally locked to the star (one side always faces the star) which is not thought to be conducive for life to develop.
Yes the holodeck warship thing, for Worf’s promotion, was near the start of the Generations movie, after the opening bit with Kirk etc.
If that means they skip over the space in between, that’s not how it works in the show because they see the stuff in between: stars, planets, etc.
Or perfectly standard angelic beings.
But why would an angel need a space ship?
A possibility not to be hastily discounted.
I would say that pretty unambiguous violation of the laws of physics would be a good clue it wasn’t just advanced technology. But we gotta be careful with that hypothesis too, as TWW points out:
Worth double-likes if this is a Star Trek reference.
Of course, if these are angelic beings they don’t need a spaceship.
More to the point, what does God need with a starship?
Exactly, Angels dont arrive in chariots like Egyptian, Greek or even Babylonian gods…
The hypothesis that UFOs are demonic is not one I endorse; I just don’t rule it out. If I ever figure out how to think through it and also figure out what is the available evidence, I might possibly endorse it.
Or possibly not.
But if they were, they wouldn’t be using UFOs for their personal transportation needs. It would merely, in what I take to be the likeliest version of the hypothesis, be part of their deception.
I forget where I saw it – but there is a sci-fi paperback about the 12 Olympians were aliens who crash landed in Greece and while they waited (centuries) for rescue they created ancient Greece to worship and serve them …
I saw that Star Trek episode. It was called “Who Mourns for Adonais.”
Let me put it this way. They travel I would think at normal sublight speeds through essentially shortened space. The space is shortened, or warped, immediately in front of the ship, the ship moves at a slow-ish speed across the shortened space, and the space is lengthened once again after the ship passes it. The greatly shortening of space travels with the ship. As I recall, the warp was shaped like a U or a V, but not folded to the form of a T in which the ship skipped any space entirely.
I’m not saying that it makes sense, but if I remember correctly, that’s what TV show “warping” was fifty-some years ago. I don’t think it had to be thought out in detail. I mean it’s like phasers, which were nothing more than being something beyond lasers, because as Roddenberry said: What if we’re a hit and last for five years and people know lasers and say lasers can’t do that? Phasers weren’t thought out beyond being not lasers.
Yea, Ive seen that one too… Except these people had no actual magical powers – just technology.
Apollo in that episode didn’t really have magical powers either. It was technology, combined in part with some kind of extra “liver” or something in his body that was used to direct it and stuff.