WaPo: What We Know About Aliens
It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”
Don’t forget the unexplainable Wow! signal detected by Ohio State in 1977.
Hold on, astronomers believe they have figured out the Wow! signal. Who’s to say?
Oumaumau is putting out no radio signals and nothing approaching intelligent signals have been detected anywhere else.
Only a small fraction of our galaxy has been studied. Absence of evidence, as everyone knows, is not evidence of absence. Aliens may not consider radio waves to be a useful or dignified way to communicate. They could be pathologically shy. Or, at least with the kind of technology we have today, they could be just a little bit out of range.
We have no evidence of other life in the universe, but it’s probably there.
The Big Numbers argument notes that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has something like 400 billion stars, and it’s just one of untold billions of galaxies in a universe that might be infinite. Moreover, in the past 30 years, astronomers have discovered that planets of all shapes and sizes are common in the universe.
Currently, astronomers have detected 59 planets that could sustain life. That’s arguable, since the criteria for sustaining life is arguable. Astronomers can only make that determination for nearby stars. This constitutes a minuscule percentage of the universe.
The Copernican Principle states that we aren’t special. Here is representative of everywhere else in the universe.
Logically, those 59 planets that have been detected had, have or will have life, but it’s likely to be slime, mold, fungus or other muck. It took 3.5 billion years for Earth to get anything better than muck. Anything like humans have only been around for a 100,000 years.
“I think there’s a massive, massive difference between being able to find life elsewhere, and being able to find evidence of intelligent life and being able to contact them,” Mitchell said.
It has only been perhaps a 100 years since we could detect alien life that didn’t come to Earth to make first contact. In another 100 years, we may be comfortable with the fact that other intelligent life is likely to exist, but that we are effectively alone. The Copernican Principle suggests that other intelligent life would come to the same realization.
Ward told The Washington Post that he assumes aliens do exist somewhere in the vast universe, but we’ll never know because they’re just too far away to make contact. We’re not literally alone, in his scenario, but we’re functionally alone.
“The chances that there’s one close enough to ever interact with is vanishingly small,” Ward said.
There is no reason to think that faster-than-light travel will ever by possible. Eventually, we could certainly send out long-range exploratory spaceships taking hundreds or thousands of years to get somewhere. Hibernation, artificial intelligence or generational ships are conceivable. Why would we bother?
It’s likely that we will find reasons to colonize some parts of the solar system. Astronomy from the dark side of the moon would have big advantages due to the lack of atmosphere. Colonization will be difficult, uncomfortable and limited. It won’t be colonization, but rather a few outposts in the wild. There may be no point in going farther than the solar system until our sun runs out of hydrogen in a few billion years.
We won’t colonize to reduce population density on Earth. Civilized countries already have a declining birthrate. High birthrates are a characteristic of undeveloped countries. That population issue will be solved with wars, closed borders or recolonization of those countries.
We won’t leave Earth because the environment is untenable. No change to the environment could be so catastrophic that the wealthy people won’t find it vastly easier to mitigate the problem on Earth, rather than establish such a pleasant environment on a sterile planet. Having an atmosphere and magnetic field make Earth a nice place.
Earth’s magnetic field could go away for a while. I am worried about that, and it is past due, but the atmosphere would remain.
Climate change is real. It’s been happening the whole time, so is likely to continue. If the climate gets too hot or too cold, geoengineering can be employed. The problem would need to be very severe to justify the risk. A massive volcano, also overdue, would spew enough dust in the air to alter the climate and reduce available sunlight for several years.
Plenty of nuclear power plants would allow us to survive several catastrophes. We could survive indoors, underwater or underground if necessary.
Faster-than-light travel may be impossible, but genetics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are advancing. Humans need to explore and have a horrible track record establishing a utopia, but it’s difficult to come up with a scenario where leaving the solar system makes sense to anyone. Emerging technologies could make life more comfortable and secure on Earth. Sure, those technologies could be abused, making life worse for some, but our species would thrive.
Perhaps wondering and pursuing contact with intelligent alien life is a phase of civilization that will pass. If that’s true for us, then Copernicus implies it’s true for the aliens. It’s more likely that eventually we will encounter some ancient alien artifact, but by then, we may not care.