Editor’s Note: A friend recently offered some speculation as to the Fermi Paradox, which ponders the absence of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, phrased by one source as, “If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.” I speculated similarly about four years ago, pre-Substack.
Unless we go down a deep metaphysical hole, in which case there'd really be no way for us to "know" anything, I'd ask why you'd want to speculate that the laws of physics aren't?
Now, I've read SF that posits that the laws of physics aren't consistent across the universe, but again, that's SF. For the basis of discussion on such matters, I feel drawn to presuming that our present knowledge of physics - as in what we do know, e.g. that protons exist and that hydrogen atoms have one of them - is true until shown otherwise. Else - how can we even have a conversation about things?
Socrates, as you can tell, was not one of us aliens. Otherwise, he would have understood that things which are neither true, nor good nor useful are often the most entertaining!
Otherwise, point taken - but it does go back to the matter of assuming that our best knowledge is true until shown otherwise. Else, we could never actually do anything
Interesting article. The VLA (your photo) does not actively “listen” for the presence of signals that could be from other life forms. It performs astronomy observations in the 5 to 50 GHz spectrum. It looks good, though, because it was in “Contact”.
Like you, I find the alien question interesting but not pressing. For me, the leaked Navy cockpit videos do pose a more pressing UFO question though: just what are these apparent objects that zoom around our military and yet avoid identification, and what are we doing to ensure they do not represent a threat? The WSJ’s Holman Jenkins thinks there is a conspiracy, but that it’s a conspiracy by the pentagon & intelligence agencies to make us think they may have uncovered evidence of alien UFOs when they really haven’t. Either way, I think it makes sense to ask our government to try to figure out what’s going on with those specific sightings and report back to us. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ufo-bubble-goes-pop-disinformation-pentagon-uap-sightings-china-nelson-nasa-secrets-11670010814
Having dabbled in that world just a bit, I think it far more likely that they're misdirecting us away from our own (or other nations') advanced tech.
Do we really think that the government just gave up on hypersonic surveillance craft when it retired the SR-71? There were reports (rumors? speculation?) in Aviation Week, back 30 years ago, of a diamond shaped Mach 6 vehicle coming out of Skunk Works.
The simplest answer is that some of what's unexplained is actually known, but they don't want to tell us for security reasons.
As you know, I like your columns and do not want you to waste time on speculations and so I'll give you the answers to your questions. Of course, no one who reads my answers will believe them and so I need have no hesitation in being completely forthright and honest. First, there is intelligent life in the universe and there are aliens on earth. I'm one of them. And if you were to subject me to your most detailed examinations, you would find nothing to indicate that I wasn't born on this world. If you can already conceive in your science fiction that you can create bodies which could even interbreed with the natives as in Avatar, then my existence should not come as a surprise. By the way, many of us aliens find Avatar just as dumb as do many of you. Any starfaring civilization could easily wipe out any pesky Na'vi to get whatever "unobtanium" is on that planet. After all, if you can create those human/Na'vi hybrids then you can also easily create a plague to wipe the Na'vi out much as happened to native populations in the Americas with the inadvertent introduction of smallpox.
Second, the reason why you have not been able to detect other alien civilizations is because we don't want you to be aware of our existence. That would spoil our entertainment as I'll explain below. We have shielded probes covering every planet in this part of the galaxy which could give rise to intelligent life. Once you reach a critical stage such as the controlled propagation of radio waves then we erect a shield which keeps you from listening in on our conversations and activities. I won't bother to try to explain how we do that to you. One of our best agents whom you know as Arthur C. Clarke got it right as you reference in your own column about "magic".
Third, why are we here on earth? Even though intelligent life exists in the universe it is exceedingly rare. Life is a precious gift and so we seek to encourage it wherever we find it. However, that doesn't come cheap and until you're ready as a species to go out upon the galactic stage we have to find a way to finance your makeover. Sadly, despite our best efforts, there are races which are so morally corrupt that the kindest thing we can do to them is to end their existence. That's happened twice in your solar system with both the Martians and Venusians. Hopefully, the third try will be lucky as a charming phrase puts it in your language.
Fourth, how do we plan to change you as a race to one worthy to travel between the stars? We put agents in place like Clarke and myself to help guide your civilization to a higher level and when necessary engage in active interventions. We're the reason why Chicago wasn't turned into a nuclear hellhole when your scientists were tempting fate with their jerry built reactor. We also finance entertainment to help people become comfortable with the idea of aliens and faster than light travel and understanding that there are other ways than war to settle disputes. Some of our best successes were Star Trek TOS and the original three Star Wars movies. But, we don't always succeed. The less said about Star Trek Discovery and any of the other Star Wars movies the better.
As I mentioned earlier, this isn't cheap. And, this is the part that you may find most unattractive about our plans. To put it bluntly, we finance our operations by turning your world into the ultimate reality show in which the stakes are real and real people can die. When the ratings drop then we sometimes have to spice things up with incidents like the second world war. Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and Hitler were all our agents. Recently, we had to do something similar using one of our better agents who is known by you as Donald J. Trump. Please accept our apologies for how things turned out but the ratings went boffo and we made a mint with all the contributions from his supporters which were never used for their specified purpose. The NFTs were our idea as well. In fact, the $4.5 million made on earth was pocket change compared to the $450 billion made elsewhere. We'll have to come up something new soon since Trump's shtick is starting to wear thin but he's been one of our greatest assets when it comes to raising funds just like the Clintons. You can trust us. Eventually, we'll find another planet to take your place and we can proceed with "civilizing" you.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to leave comments below and I'll be glad to give you honest answers.
No. You can't blame Michael Jackson on us. Like those outsiders who crashed the Truman Show to tell him that he was on a tv show, MJ made it through our blockade in a misguided attempt to use music to uplift your world. By the time we noticed, he was already too ingrained in the show for us to remove him. However, since he did this on his own, his transformation into a human was badly done and wore off over time resulting in the dramatic changes to his appearance. That's also why his crypt is kept off limits to the public so that no one breaks in and finds evidence that MJ didn't have 46 chromosones but 460! One other thing. Your link represents Musk as one of us. That's not true. Your species is certainly capable of generating unstable whizbangs without our assistance. However, he has helped bring up the ratings a bit.
David, can you answer this question for me? I can understand why movie execs want to make sequels out of great movies. I figure they want to catch lightning (read: money) in a bottle again. But for the life of me I don't understand why anyone would want to create a sequel of a farce like Avatar. Hard enough to make a decent sequel out of a great movie, but who would expect the opposite to turn out well? Not much intelligent life in Hollywood I guess.
Well, even we aliens don't have all the answers. We had no idea that within a few decades that all of the original ideas for movies would be exhausted by you humans and so we developed color films and then widescreen films and then 3D films and finally IMAX presentations. We also tried to make the films less dumb but you saw what happened with Avatar. We're sorry but we are working on preventing sequel films like Star Trek: The Geritol Generation from being made. Although, you can argue that that's what you're getting with the upcoming third and hopefully final season of Picard. I was so disappointed that the previews show Worf with white hair. Don't they know that Klingons never get white hair until they're about several hundred years old? Oh, that's right - you have never met real Klingons. Trust me when I tell you that they are your biggest fans. They really went ape over that Klingon wedding that was held a few years ago in Chicago. They loved how that couple said at the beginning of their ceremony that "Yesterday's wedding in a chapel was done for our families. Today's wedding is for the Empire!". And, unfortunately, you're right about there not being a lot of intelligent life in Hollywood.
Peter you know how much I love your writing, and this article epitomizes your excellence. I must, however, indulge myself in some pedantry, which I pray is not errant. In the paragraph beginning with “Consider the speed of light...” you make the statement that “c” is a limiting value for “objects and information”. Given that there is strong evidence for quantum entanglement, mustn’t you qualify that statement at least to the extent of “objects and SOME information”? BTW, when it comes to rocketry, my fav word is “hpergolic”😍 Best, Dan Anderson.
Thanks as always for the thought-inducing content. I've found that I shouldn't read your column in my "reading room" lest my legs go numb from the ponderance time required.
I strive to shorter offerings since I moved to Substack, and have mostly succeeded. But, some of the older bits, that I'm republishing here when some reason to pops up, run much longer than the goal. This one, at 2600 words or so, is more than 4x my goal.
Unless we go down a deep metaphysical hole, in which case there'd really be no way for us to "know" anything, I'd ask why you'd want to speculate that the laws of physics aren't?
Now, I've read SF that posits that the laws of physics aren't consistent across the universe, but again, that's SF. For the basis of discussion on such matters, I feel drawn to presuming that our present knowledge of physics - as in what we do know, e.g. that protons exist and that hydrogen atoms have one of them - is true until shown otherwise. Else - how can we even have a conversation about things?
Socrates, as you can tell, was not one of us aliens. Otherwise, he would have understood that things which are neither true, nor good nor useful are often the most entertaining!
Ah, but I'd suggest that there IS utility in this conversation. At a very minimum, it provides entertainment on a Sunday morning.
Now I'll pick a nit. "The isotropy of the speed of light is one of the POSTULATES of the special theory of relativity"
The isotropy, not the speed itself.
Otherwise, point taken - but it does go back to the matter of assuming that our best knowledge is true until shown otherwise. Else, we could never actually do anything
Interesting article. The VLA (your photo) does not actively “listen” for the presence of signals that could be from other life forms. It performs astronomy observations in the 5 to 50 GHz spectrum. It looks good, though, because it was in “Contact”.
Don't read too much into my art selections. Just a visual to dress up a block of text.
Like you, I find the alien question interesting but not pressing. For me, the leaked Navy cockpit videos do pose a more pressing UFO question though: just what are these apparent objects that zoom around our military and yet avoid identification, and what are we doing to ensure they do not represent a threat? The WSJ’s Holman Jenkins thinks there is a conspiracy, but that it’s a conspiracy by the pentagon & intelligence agencies to make us think they may have uncovered evidence of alien UFOs when they really haven’t. Either way, I think it makes sense to ask our government to try to figure out what’s going on with those specific sightings and report back to us. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ufo-bubble-goes-pop-disinformation-pentagon-uap-sightings-china-nelson-nasa-secrets-11670010814
Having dabbled in that world just a bit, I think it far more likely that they're misdirecting us away from our own (or other nations') advanced tech.
Do we really think that the government just gave up on hypersonic surveillance craft when it retired the SR-71? There were reports (rumors? speculation?) in Aviation Week, back 30 years ago, of a diamond shaped Mach 6 vehicle coming out of Skunk Works.
The simplest answer is that some of what's unexplained is actually known, but they don't want to tell us for security reasons.
The Reuters link at the end is also worth a read.
As you know, I like your columns and do not want you to waste time on speculations and so I'll give you the answers to your questions. Of course, no one who reads my answers will believe them and so I need have no hesitation in being completely forthright and honest. First, there is intelligent life in the universe and there are aliens on earth. I'm one of them. And if you were to subject me to your most detailed examinations, you would find nothing to indicate that I wasn't born on this world. If you can already conceive in your science fiction that you can create bodies which could even interbreed with the natives as in Avatar, then my existence should not come as a surprise. By the way, many of us aliens find Avatar just as dumb as do many of you. Any starfaring civilization could easily wipe out any pesky Na'vi to get whatever "unobtanium" is on that planet. After all, if you can create those human/Na'vi hybrids then you can also easily create a plague to wipe the Na'vi out much as happened to native populations in the Americas with the inadvertent introduction of smallpox.
Second, the reason why you have not been able to detect other alien civilizations is because we don't want you to be aware of our existence. That would spoil our entertainment as I'll explain below. We have shielded probes covering every planet in this part of the galaxy which could give rise to intelligent life. Once you reach a critical stage such as the controlled propagation of radio waves then we erect a shield which keeps you from listening in on our conversations and activities. I won't bother to try to explain how we do that to you. One of our best agents whom you know as Arthur C. Clarke got it right as you reference in your own column about "magic".
Third, why are we here on earth? Even though intelligent life exists in the universe it is exceedingly rare. Life is a precious gift and so we seek to encourage it wherever we find it. However, that doesn't come cheap and until you're ready as a species to go out upon the galactic stage we have to find a way to finance your makeover. Sadly, despite our best efforts, there are races which are so morally corrupt that the kindest thing we can do to them is to end their existence. That's happened twice in your solar system with both the Martians and Venusians. Hopefully, the third try will be lucky as a charming phrase puts it in your language.
Fourth, how do we plan to change you as a race to one worthy to travel between the stars? We put agents in place like Clarke and myself to help guide your civilization to a higher level and when necessary engage in active interventions. We're the reason why Chicago wasn't turned into a nuclear hellhole when your scientists were tempting fate with their jerry built reactor. We also finance entertainment to help people become comfortable with the idea of aliens and faster than light travel and understanding that there are other ways than war to settle disputes. Some of our best successes were Star Trek TOS and the original three Star Wars movies. But, we don't always succeed. The less said about Star Trek Discovery and any of the other Star Wars movies the better.
As I mentioned earlier, this isn't cheap. And, this is the part that you may find most unattractive about our plans. To put it bluntly, we finance our operations by turning your world into the ultimate reality show in which the stakes are real and real people can die. When the ratings drop then we sometimes have to spice things up with incidents like the second world war. Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and Hitler were all our agents. Recently, we had to do something similar using one of our better agents who is known by you as Donald J. Trump. Please accept our apologies for how things turned out but the ratings went boffo and we made a mint with all the contributions from his supporters which were never used for their specified purpose. The NFTs were our idea as well. In fact, the $4.5 million made on earth was pocket change compared to the $450 billion made elsewhere. We'll have to come up something new soon since Trump's shtick is starting to wear thin but he's been one of our greatest assets when it comes to raising funds just like the Clintons. You can trust us. Eventually, we'll find another planet to take your place and we can proceed with "civilizing" you.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to leave comments below and I'll be glad to give you honest answers.
But not Michael Jackson?
https://screenrant.com/men-black-movies-alien-celebrity-cameos/
No. You can't blame Michael Jackson on us. Like those outsiders who crashed the Truman Show to tell him that he was on a tv show, MJ made it through our blockade in a misguided attempt to use music to uplift your world. By the time we noticed, he was already too ingrained in the show for us to remove him. However, since he did this on his own, his transformation into a human was badly done and wore off over time resulting in the dramatic changes to his appearance. That's also why his crypt is kept off limits to the public so that no one breaks in and finds evidence that MJ didn't have 46 chromosones but 460! One other thing. Your link represents Musk as one of us. That's not true. Your species is certainly capable of generating unstable whizbangs without our assistance. However, he has helped bring up the ratings a bit.
David, can you answer this question for me? I can understand why movie execs want to make sequels out of great movies. I figure they want to catch lightning (read: money) in a bottle again. But for the life of me I don't understand why anyone would want to create a sequel of a farce like Avatar. Hard enough to make a decent sequel out of a great movie, but who would expect the opposite to turn out well? Not much intelligent life in Hollywood I guess.
Well, even we aliens don't have all the answers. We had no idea that within a few decades that all of the original ideas for movies would be exhausted by you humans and so we developed color films and then widescreen films and then 3D films and finally IMAX presentations. We also tried to make the films less dumb but you saw what happened with Avatar. We're sorry but we are working on preventing sequel films like Star Trek: The Geritol Generation from being made. Although, you can argue that that's what you're getting with the upcoming third and hopefully final season of Picard. I was so disappointed that the previews show Worf with white hair. Don't they know that Klingons never get white hair until they're about several hundred years old? Oh, that's right - you have never met real Klingons. Trust me when I tell you that they are your biggest fans. They really went ape over that Klingon wedding that was held a few years ago in Chicago. They loved how that couple said at the beginning of their ceremony that "Yesterday's wedding in a chapel was done for our families. Today's wedding is for the Empire!". And, unfortunately, you're right about there not being a lot of intelligent life in Hollywood.
Best comment I've read in a while! Bravo!
Peter you know how much I love your writing, and this article epitomizes your excellence. I must, however, indulge myself in some pedantry, which I pray is not errant. In the paragraph beginning with “Consider the speed of light...” you make the statement that “c” is a limiting value for “objects and information”. Given that there is strong evidence for quantum entanglement, mustn’t you qualify that statement at least to the extent of “objects and SOME information”? BTW, when it comes to rocketry, my fav word is “hpergolic”😍 Best, Dan Anderson.
You are correct, and this is what happens when I resurrect and 'touch up' old content. Self-editing is hard :). Fixed.
Thanks as always for the thought-inducing content. I've found that I shouldn't read your column in my "reading room" lest my legs go numb from the ponderance time required.
I strive to shorter offerings since I moved to Substack, and have mostly succeeded. But, some of the older bits, that I'm republishing here when some reason to pops up, run much longer than the goal. This one, at 2600 words or so, is more than 4x my goal.
Apologies to your thighs....