If UFOs are extraterrestrial, that’s good news!
The ETs will come in peace and will make excellent role models.
Hi!
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—Bob
The latest wave of speculation about UFOs—which seems to have started three weeks ago with a 60 Minutes episode on them—should crest near the end of this month, after the US government issues its long-awaited UFO report.
If leaks about the report are accurate, it will conclude that unidentified flying objects—or, as the government now calls them, unidentified aerial phenomena—are… unidentified. The report finds no good evidence of extraterrestrial origins, the New York Times told us last week, but on the other hand intelligence officials “still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military.”
I’ve gotten more immersed in this stuff than, from a time management standpoint, is optimal. In addition to watching the standard US Navy UFO videos, I’ve listened to two long interviews with former Navy pilot David Fravor, who in 2004 chased a UFO (in the presence of three airborne witnesses) and says he doesn’t think it was an aircraft developed “on this planet.” And I’ve watched veteran UFO debunker Mick West try to cast doubt on Fravor’s interpretation of what he saw. And I’ve watched a former fighter pilot try to cast doubt on Mick West’s analytical skills. I even spent some time on Joe Rogan’s conversation with a guy who says he’s looked inside an actual alien-built flying saucer that the US government got its hands on. (Then again, he says he has degrees from MIT and Caltech, and both schools disagree.)
This research program left me where it found me: I’m agnostic on the question of what’s behind the UFOs. However, I do have two UFO-related opinions: (1) If some of these UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin, there’s no cause for worry—the aliens almost certainly come in peace; (2) if none of these UFOs are alien craft, and if indeed there are no extraterrestrials on the horizon at all—no flying saucers orbiting at a discreet distance, no undetected radio waves coming in from a faraway civilization, nothing—then that’s cause for worry.
The logic behind these two opinions is intertwined with the logic behind the Apocalypse Aversion Project. In fact, fleshing out these opinions is a good way to frame AAP, a way to put it in fruitfully cosmic perspective.
The fleshing out begins with the “Fermi paradox,” named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. He raised the following question in 1950 during a casual conversation at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico: Given the number of stars out there, and the number of planets presumably orbiting them, why haven’t we seen clear signs of extraterrestrial life? Shouldn’t our own galaxy (aka the Milky Way) have at least a few alien civilizations that are at least a few millennia ahead of us technologically and so could send spacecraft zipping from solar system to solar system in search of fellow creatures, or at least broadcast an interstellar greeting?
The question has actually gotten more compelling since Fermi’s time. We’ve now confirmed that the stars we see in the sky do have planets circling them. And, according to a conversation I had about this stuff with physicist Adam Frank, around a fifth of those stars have a planet in the “Goldilocks zone”—neither too hot nor too cold for life. In our galaxy alone that’s at least 20 billion planets! And many of them are hundreds of millions, even billions, of years older than ours, and so have had plenty of time to sprout interesting stuff. Though speedy and sustained interstellar travel isn’t something humans are on the brink of developing, you’d think it’s been developed a number of times in our galaxy by now.
So the question Fermi asked in 1950— “Where are they?” was his simple formulation, according to one witness—would seem to be a good one.
On the other hand, the question does rest on some assumptions.
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