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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
Well that’s kind of the same thing, in a way. The main issue is that the ship itself never was going faster-than-light through “space.”
Here is a video that explains Warp Drives:
I thought when he died at the end of the show Apollo let himself slip from existence. From his natural ability.
These things were discussed in the episode, but over 50+ years the episodes were getting shown on broadcast TV with more and more cut from the original running times, as the commercial time in an “hour” time slot increased. TOS was made with a running time of about 51 minutes per episode, now many times – especially on channels like Me TV – an “hour” time slot might be 40 minutes or even less, allowing for commercials. The H&I channel (Heroes & Icons) does a better job, but they’re the exception that proves the rule. A while back I saw the “Flint” episode (“Requiem for Methuselah”) on Me TV and, among other things, the whole end part about Flint no longer being immortal since he left Earth, was cut out.
I’ve seen episodes of MASH where, one time, one part of an episode is cut, and the next time that episode is on, different parts are cut. So over time you may see the whole thing, but not at once. And nobody seems to do that with Star Trek.
Continued due to word limit…
Adding further to Apollo’s non-god status was about his internal stuff etc:
Now that “probably” didn’t evolved naturally, but even if they did genetic-engineering on themselves, they’re still aliens, not gods.
And:
Continued again…
And then, kinda finally:
And so, like with “what does God need with a starship,” we’ve got “what does (a) God need with a power plant in a building?”
What the heck was that? is 1/2 the episode missing? It made no sense at all.
My understanding is, tentative as it is, that demons are the immortal spirits of the nephilim, which were corporeal mortal human-angel hybrids, cursed by God to walk the earth as spirits in unquenchable thirst after their deaths. (This much is documented.)
My presumption is that they miss having corporeal bodies, and that’s why if given permission to enter, they like living inside people.
My guess is that while they can walk, they likely cannot fly. So they need space ships to save time. They have no fear of death, so that’s why they prefer fast agile roadsters for their space ships. They play with aircraft because they are evil, and being immortal giving them lots of free time, and there is no place they have to be anyway.
Documented by the SciFi channel?
On whittling down those 51 minutes: TOS on Amazon has all episodes restored to original length. Sometimes the results are surprising. And then there are the retrofitted SFX which benefit “The Doomsday Machine” enormously.
On “Who Mourns for Adonis?”- you have seen “Pilgrim of Eternity” from “Star Trek Continues”, right?
I dipped a toe into “Star Trek Continues” and it made me gag.
Also, the SFX “improvements” are debatable, at minimum. A lot of it looks more 2-dimensional and even fake, I’d say, than the originals. The “improved” shuttlecraft SFX don’t match the physical “model” that people got into and out of… Much of the “Doomsday Machine” SFX “improvements” mess up the scale and positioning…
No, I have not seen any of the Star Trek Continues… Other than knowing the Grant Imahara played Sulu, I dont know anything about it.
What sometimes amuses me is people who think that the TOS DVDs etc have “additional footage” that was never in them before. The poor saps never knew what they were missing, for maybe 50 years.
Maybe the reason that no one has ever contacted us is that there are zillions of planets with life on them so why bother? We’re just a dime a zillion.
I love the idea of extraterrestrial life, and I believe it exists, most likely in many forms, but I don’t believe any life anywhere is remotely aware of our big blue marble.
It’s fun to think about, though. I particularly like bug-eyed monsters.
Your mom is a bug-eyed monster.
The biggest “problem” with life elsewhere in the galaxy/universe is that it’s unlikely to look human with just pointed ears or ridged noses etc, as we’ve been taught on Star Trek.
A couple of the best examples I’ve found for various more-likely possibilities of life throughout the galaxy are “Voyage Of The Space Beagle” by A.E. van Vogt, one part of which seems very similar to at least the first Alien movie; and “Memoirs Of A Spacewoman” by Naomi Mitchison.
The various “Known Space” stories by Larry Niven also have a lot more variation of life forms. For example, the Puppeteer:
With webbed feet, if I recall correctly.
If one looks at the planetary systems in our universe as a seemingly infinite number of potentially inhabited worlds, as I do, one can shrug off the unlikeliness of finding humanoid life forms and revel in the delightful notion that our fellow universe dwellers are most likely unimaginably wonderous and diverse. However impractical human space travel is, and will most likely remain, the idea of life in the stars lights a fire of discovery in men’s hearts.
But isn’t humans developing out of the slime scientifically justified by saying that the laws of physics predetermine it?
Even if humanoid forms develop from slime on other worlds, doesn’t necessarily mean they will continue to evolve and become dominant as on Earth. A lot of other forms also came from the slime, and in other environments on other worlds, one or more of those might become dominant instead.
So when the universe made humans it broke the slime mold?
Maybe just on Earth.
The Star Trek aliens have more to do with the limitations of effects, make up and budget of making a tv show. Thats why the Caitians were saved for the Star Trek Animated series (and have appeared in no other Star Trek project)
Well of course. The Talosians were originally meant to be crab-like creatures, but they didn’t have the budget or effects for that either, in the mid-1960s. (I think the first pilot was made in 1964.) Making them basically human except for the head, was the path of least resistance, but also led to some stupidity such as Vina talking about how the Talosians had never seen a human before and so didn’t know how to put her back together after the crash. But the Talosians wound up being bipeds etc too, which made that excuse kinda ridiculous. (In addition to their ability to read minds which would have made it possible for them to find out how Vina saw herself, and work from that…)
At the risk of turning the discussion away from the oh-my-God-just-shoot-me-now topic of Star Trek…
One of the most unknown of unknowns in the Drake equation is the probability of life evolving into intelligence. Intelligence obviously has enormous survival value, as evidenced by the fact that humanity completely rocks the business of dominating this planet.
It would be interesting to know if, before sapiens rose to stardom, any other branch of the tree of life demonstrated significant intellectual development. Or to identify neurological traits which would suggest a potential in that regard for some other order of life.
Without any particular reason for believing so, other than our own example here on Earth, I suspect that life is much more common than intelligence. I am skeptical that life itself is all that rare. Intelligence may be another matter.
Incidentally, I once heard a definition of life as “chemical reactions that evolve.” I kind of like that one.
Well it would have to be, since life has to exist before intelligence.
It might have been better phrased as something like “while life may actually be very common, intelligence/sentience could be quite rare.”
Sorry. Star Trek is dead.
I think we can generally agree that the Drake Equation is not really science. There are so many unknowns in that equations – things that we can’t even provide a reasoned estimate for – that it becomes pointless algebra. To quote Sheldon “everybody knows 9 smells like gasoline”…
And that life is far more common than intelligence… The clouds of Venus, Mars, Moons of Jupiter and Saturn of all been speculated to be hosts of life – but nothing much more complex than bacteria … I have to disagree that chemical reactions evolve – the chemical reaction that occur in a human cell is not different that occur in bacteria or cats… What differs is the complexity of the organism harnessing those reactions. Maybe I am splitting hares on that concept. I’ll have to think on that one some more.
Why do such a thing?
Heretic.