With all the evidence and observations in recent years, can we finally accept that aliens exist here on earth?

Do aliens exist here on earth?

If you look only at all the observations, grainy footage, people testifying that aliens exist and that they’ve seen strange light formations in the sky, or pilots stating that they’re being followed by flying objects that fly in a way that no known airplane can… Then it seems obvious that there has to be someone else out there. And why shouldn’t there?

Is it possible that we are the only ones living, dying, loving, and evolving in this amazing Universe?

Let’s take a look at what we know…

There have been many observations… Or maybe not?

In April, this year, 2020, the Pentagon released three videos of UFOs spotted by American military aircraft. The videos weren’t new as they were leaked already in 2007 and 2017. But the Pentagon wanted to clear up all misunderstandings and clarify that the footage was real in all three occasions, so they declassified them.

One video from 2004 shows two navy fighter pilots following a round object hovering above the water, about 100 miles (160 km) out over the Pacific Ocean. The other two videos are from 2015 and they show a few other very fast unidentified objects, one of which rotating.

Watch this video on YouTube

The Pentagon Videos

The most interesting fact about these videos is that they are official and very credible, as they come directly from the US military. What they show is probably very real and should be considered trustworthy.

The problem, of course, is that the images are blurry. As are all the other thousands of photos and videos showing possible alien flying aircraft. Up until today, we don’t have any conclusive evidence of existing aliens or UFOs. There’s no extraterrestrial aircraft on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C and there has been no documented “encounter of the third kind” ever.

From the various UFO observations, we don’t have any substantial evidence that aliens exist. It’s still a question of believing, much like believing in a Deity.

The Universe is big.

The Universe is big… Let me rephrase that. The Universe is so big that a normal human brain can’t even begin to comprehend it.

When talking about aliens and if they exist or not, you, first of all, have to acknowledge this fact. The distances are astronomical (…right). The known universe, that is the observable universe is 93 billion light-years in diameter. The Big Bang happened 13,8 billion years ago, but the radius of the Universe is still 46 billion light-years,

The reason for this seemingly paradoxical fact, I will write about in another post.

But these vast distances make it very difficult to observe other stars, planets, and galaxies, to see if the aliens exist there. Not only because it’s far away and you need very good binoculars. But more so because what we see is the past.

If Alfie, the alien, waves his hand on a planet that orbits our closest neighboring star, 4 light-years away, that image and the light from his salute will take 4 years to reach the earth. When we look at that star, we see what happened four years ago.

If we look at something on the other side of the Universe, we see what happened there, billions of years ago. And a lot can happen in a few billion years.

If Aliens exist on earth and we wanted to see them, they would have to be from our neighborhood, very close by.

The speed of light in a vacuum is fixed, it doesn’t change… Ever.

It is 299 792 458 meters per second, exactly. The first scientist ever who determined the light speed was the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Rømer, also known as Olaus Roemer. The year was 1676. Before him, light was supposed to not have any speed at all. It just appeared and vanished instantaneously.

But from Roemer and onward, people knew about the speed of light. And they knew how immensely fast it is.

Light also doesn’t accelerate or decelerate, and it doesn’t matter from what angle, or if you yourself are moving towards, or away from the light source. It’s always 299 792 458 m/s.

Albert Einstein

Many hundreds of years after Roemer, the German scientist Albert Einstein determined a relationship between mass, speed, and time in his special theory of relativity.

His conclusion was that if the speed of light is constant, then mass and time must be variable. Modern research has confirmed these theories. Experiments at the Cern Particle Accelerator complex in Bern, Switzerland show that when you close in on the speed of light, and you reach speeds that are hundreds of thousands of meters per second, the mass increases. It increases so much, in fact, that if you should reach light speed the mass would be infinite. And if the mass is infinite, it would take infinite energy to accelerate it further.

And this makes Faster than Light travel impossible.

But if aliens exist they could be very smart.

Of course, it’s impossible for us to say for sure that Alfie, the alien, doesn’t have some super technology that is far beyond our understanding. But the problem with this is that Einstein’s theories are not technologies. They are physical and scientific facts. And the only way the aliens could have faster than light aircraft is if we simply are wrong about how the physics in the universe work. And that couldn’t happen… Or could it?

… Or they could have developed teleportation… Or they could use the quantum entanglement… Or they could exploit the curves in time-space or the expansion of the Universe. They could have technical knowledge that we couldn’t even imagine.

Our space shuttles and our science would probably be very rudimentary in the eyes of the aliens. We would be like a medieval peasant looking at a moving car.

So, if we can’t see them, maybe we could hear them?

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a collective term for all kinds of searches for extraterrestrial life. This is mostly through “listening” to radio signals and sometimes looking for visible light signals. Quite a few projects have started and concluded ever since we first developed communication through radio signals. Huge telescopes are used to collect radio waves. These are then analyzed for patterns and groups of signals that could indicate an intelligent source.

In 1995 the Phoenix project started listening to 800 solar systems similar to ours in a 200-light-year radius. In 2004 the project leader Peter Backus concluded that “we live in a quiet neighborhood”.
In fact, none of all these projects have ever found any proof of signals that could have been sent by an intelligent source.
Between September 16, 2018, and October 30, 2019, researchers with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment detected a pattern in radio signal bursts occurring every 16.35 days. The pattern consists of one or two bursts every hour for four days. Then silence for 12 days. Possible sources could be the orbital motion of a star or a double star system, the scientists are puzzled. This is the first time such a periodical signal has been detected. The source is 500 light-years away

Aliens exist, but maybe we shouldn’t let them know we’re here…

In 1974, the Arecibo Message, the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space was made from Puerto Rico. It contains 73 lines of 23 characters. Our solar system, DNA, and a simple human being are displayed. It’s beamed towards the globular star cluster M13 which is 21.000 light-years away. We will have to wait quite some time for the answer.
In 2015 a competition was announced to create a similar message, the Breakthrough Message, with a prize pot of $1.000.000 to whoever writes the best letter to our alien friends.
Many scientists, among them Stephen Hawking, argue that it’s not a good idea to make our existence known to whoever is out there. Not until we have an idea who we are talking to. Thus it would be smarter to just listen.
In January 2016 the Breakthrough Listen was launched. It is the biggest, most well-funded SETI-project in history, with $100 million in funding and thousands of hours of dedicated telescope time on state-of-the-art facilities. The announcement was flanked by some of the greatest scientists of our time, including Stephen Hawking, and Frank Drake.

And for those of you, who do not know who Frank Drake is…

The Drake equation.

In 1961 Frank Drake, the American astronomer and astrophysicist hosted a SETI-meeting at the Green Bank facility in West Virginia. Ten of the most famous scientists in the field should meet and discuss the possibility of alien life. Drake was occupied with all the practical aspects of everything, and a few days before they were all to arrive, he realized that he didn’t know what they were going to talk about… He didn’t have an agenda.

So he put together a formula to determine the probability for the existence of alien life forms. And it goes like this:

N = N∗ x FQ x FHZ x FO x FL x FS

N = the number of planets with detectable signs of life
N∗ = the number of stars observed
FQ = the fraction of stars that are quiet
FHZ = the fraction of stars with rocky planets in the habitable zone
FO = the fraction of those planets that can be observed
FL = the fraction of planets that have life
FS = the fraction on which life is detectable… Intelligent life that transmits radio signals.

The Drake Equation is getting better with time.

It is easy to see that almost all of these parameters are extremely uncertain. And the result of the Drake equation can be within a very wide range. But now in 2020, we know more than Frank Drake did in 1961, and a few of the numbers can be estimated rather well.

The number of stars in the Milky Way is 250 billion give or take some hundred billion.
The number of planets is estimated to be at least one around each star.
The number of planets within the habitable zone, the distance from the star that would have temperatures that could permit life to evolve, could be as much as 40 billion.

But how many of these develop life?

Even if it’s just 1 in a thousand, it would mean 40 million planets with life on them. And even if, of all the aliens living there, only 1 in a thousand arrived at an intelligent form… Someone who could transmit radio signals, that would still mean 40.000 planets with intelligent life, just within the Milky Way.

The last part of the equation is the time aspect.

The Earth was formed 4,6 billion years ago.
After only half a billion years the first cellular organisms came to life.
After the first bacteria, we had to wait 2,5 billion years before anything similar to a multicellular animal was developed.
Another billion years before the first land-living vertebrates came up.
60 million years ago the Dinosaurs died out and the era of mammals started.
The first homo sapiens walked the earth 300.000 years ago.
In all this, we’ve had radio transmission in merely 100 years. 100 out of 4.6 billion is 0,00000217% of the total time the world has existed.

If every one of the 40.000 worlds in our galaxy that hosts intelligent life, would have the radio technology for only 100 years. Then the probability that they are there right now, at this very moment, is very small. It’s still just a fraction of a percent.

Aliens could exist on more worlds out there, though…

But, on the other hand, if life isn’t all that rare among the planets… And intelligent life isn’t all that rare on the planets hosting life.

And, on the other hand, if their intelligent life-form would exist for more than a hundred years… Maybe thousands or millions of years.

Then, the number of intelligent life could be enormous… Only counting our little galaxy.

And the number of intelligent aliens in the whole of the universe could be more than we could ever imagine.

Because the number of galaxies in the whole visible universe is estimated to be around 2.000.000.000.000… Yes, 2 trillion. And now we’re talking a very high probability that intelligent aliens actually exist.

The Fermi paradox.

So, where are they? If there are millions and billions of aliens existing in the universe here and there, why don’t we encounter any?

Why isn’t there an alien spaceship at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C?

And why don’t we hear or see anything no matter how much we look for them?

The architect of the nuclear bomb — Enrico Fermi

This is called the Fermi Paradox, the obvious contradiction between the estimated probability for alien life, and the complete lack of evidence for it.

The Nobel prize winner and leading member of the Manhattan Project (the development of an American nuclear bomb during ww2), Italian physicist Enrico Fermi uttered something along those lines at a lunch with his colleagues in 1950.

He was neither the first nor the last to object to the often too positive estimates with the simple… If aliens exist, where are they?

So, if aliens exist, why can’t we see them?

Finally, we arrive at the most interesting piece of the argument… The reason for their complete absence.

The answer to that question can be divided into various categories of possible reasons:

They don’t exist. We’re alone.
They exist, but they are too far away or for some other reason they are difficult to detect.
They’re here, but they’re hiding.

The first possibility is not all that bad. It’s sad and very lonely, but at least we can feel reasonably secure. Apart from meteorites and comets, we can sleep safely.

The third possibility is less encouraging. Why would they hide? The answer could be that they are afraid or that they have hostile intentions. But maybe we should have noticed any hostility by now. The time span of possible alien interactions is vast and if they just wanted to eat us, maybe they would have done so already.

Another reason could be the Zoo hypothesis. We are so inferior and fragile, that the alien race prefers to keep us in a zoo. Like pets they let us live out our lives and develop our civilization until we’re ready for the galactic community. Or their life-form is so strange that, for our own good, they don’t reveal themselves.

Aliens exist but they’re not here and we can’t see them.

The second category, however, is maybe the scariest. At least I think so.

There are quite a few hypotheses as to why aliens exist, will exist, or have existed, but we can’t get in contact with them.

It could be that life is very rare, and that’s that. Our neighbors are simply too far away.
Or that of all the life out there, intelligent life is very rare. (After the last months of the global pandemic, this is a highly sustainable hypothesis.).
It could be that natural disasters are much more common elsewhere and that civilizations die out regularly because of heating or cooling suns, meteorites, or other cosmic dangers. These events could be much more common in other parts of the galaxy, f.ex. close to the center where there are much more objects flying around. Maybe the majority never reach intelligence at all. They die already in the bacteria phase.

Aliens existed but they all auto-destruct after some time.

Intelligence is closely connected to the will to destroy itself and others.

The theory is this.

To arrive at intelligent life, you need two things… Aggressiveness and Laziness.

Looking at the earth, aggression is common also among non-intelligent classes, but with intelligence, the bullying becomes much more effective. On our planet we humans have already destroyed most of nature, we have killed and extinct around 500 higher species in the last hundred years… And we continue to kill each other through warfare, and economic unbalance.

In 1979 a computer error at NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) was minutes away from causing a full retaliation against the Soviet Union for an attack on the US with 2.200 nuclear missiles. The retaliation had to be confirmed by President Carter, but he waited a few seconds, and the defense satellites could determine that it was a false alarm.

In 1983 there were two more incidents, and there have been many others, before and after.

We are destroying natural resources in a way that jeopardizes our own future.

Sebastian Rudolf Karl von Hoerner, a German astrophysicist, was a supporter of the theory that all civilizations must destroy themselves after some time. Either by killing and destroying or by degeneration through laziness.

In this case, it’s dead-end… We will all die and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The last option. The scariest of them all.

But the aggression could also be focused on other alien races. Let’s say that the aggression isn’t directed at the own race but at the other groups, species, and worlds. Just like the ants attack ants of another species if they come close, the aliens would make sure nobody can compete with them.

Once they have a technological advantage they start to take out anyone that could propose a threat to them. By doing so they keep the star cluster, the galaxy, and possibly eventually the universe free from competition.

In this case, we will not only die, but we will have a brutal, cruel, immediate, and definite death. War of the Worlds. And in this case, just like Steven Hawking pointed out, it would be very, very stupid to send out random signals in the universe.

————

But going back to Enrico Fermi… If it’s so, and they’re coming for us, to destroy us and kill us, and if they have mind-blowingly advanced technology after thousands, and maybe millions of years of evolving….

Where are they?

Back to the top of the page

Conclusion

No, we can’t say for sure that aliens exist. And we can not say that they don’t.

Like my grandpa used to say after the mandatory political discussion at the family dinner. We actually don’t know shit!

home

sources: