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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 really don’t want to go there but just this once. The body and spirit together comprise the soul. Man and dogs have spirits whether or not they go to heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:20-21 All go to one place; all come from dust, and all return to dust. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal descends into the earth?
Faithful to Thee, Terra, In Our Fashion by James Tiptree, Jr.
Can we at least all agree that cats go to hell?
Pseudonym for Alice Bradley Sheldon.
The “unique endowments of the human soul” are rational intellect and will. I think it was Catholic teaching, but wouldn’t bet my soul on it ;-)
Before her identity was revealed there were quite a few interesting arguments about the author and his/her sex. Ursula K. LeGuin made the most sense of those that I read.
Cats are documented to be psychopaths, so I’ve read (probably in a headline-grabbing book somewhere).
But honestly, cats (that is, domesticated cats) are mentioned nowhere in the Bible. Yet in Morocco (the only muslim country I remember being in) cats were epidemic in all the open air souks; I suppose like cows in India, fed and given free reign. And dogs were very few (only seen with foreigners) and considered dirty and repulsive.
What’s it like in Pakistan?
No idea. I remember Urdu words for cat and dog. The only animal memories I have are of never seeing a snake, thank Heaven, and of the kites being jerks.
They really were jerks. Dive-bombed your head once in a while. But maybe they kept the snakes out.
Cats were revered in ancient times for protecting grain warehouses from vermin, etc. And that’s coming back too:
Not sure about the math. in TOS they managed to visit a new world every week. They even managed to arrive at the same time each week and leave about 42-46 minutes later.
That’s pretty fast!