Now, I would be totally convinced if I saw Beyonce getting abducted during Superbowl halftime by a UFO, but since there's no definitive proof that neither confirms nor denies the existence of aliens on earth, such claims aren't as easy to dismiss as you would think. Like many scientists I do think that there are other forms of life out there, but this one question makes me skeptical about living in a men-in-black-esc world where aliens are hiding among us.
My one question is this. If I were an intelligent alien from the other side of the galaxy, why on earth would I travel across the galaxy just to visit this dirt ball we call earth?
To give some terrestrial perspective to the answer to this question, imagine the map of the world as if it were a map of the universe, where each region is its own galaxy that is a few flights away. Your going on board a starship enterprise like expedition that is departing from, say the galactic region of New York City.
Now ask yourself this. If you were going to lead a galactic expedition to discover new frontiers of the universe, would you pick the galactic equivalent of Topica, Kansas, Thunder Bay, Ontario, or Abbottobad, Pakistan of the universe as your destination? Or even for a vacation?
We humans can take ourselves too seriously, and believing in the idea that somehow we're naturally worthy of being studied by an advanced race from the stars seems to be a classic symptom of our own hubris. So let's be honest about our status in the galaxy. We live in a cosmic backwater, which likely puts us in the running to be the Mississippi of intelligent life in the universe. (You know why Mississippi, you know why.) We only just succeeded in landing a satellite on a comet; we have no supply bases, colonies, or defense mechanisms built on the Moon or Mars, and to paraphrase the words of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, we're the species that gave up flying cars for the sake of 140 characters. While there's no denying that we have indeed make progress, but does the direction of our progress make any sense from an extraterrestrial point of view?
Now, so far I have put words together under the assumption that the ET's we have yet to meet are comfortably able to travel through space. But does this assumption hold up at all to begin with?
To be able to travel across the cosmos, you need some advanced technology to build a capable spaceship. To have such technologies in your hand, you need an advanced civilization. And letting any civilization develop and prosper is a messy and ugly business, just like it is with ours. And to even get to the historical point where we're flying through space on hyper drive, a great number of competition will inevitably be wiped out in the process. Now, there's no way to determine how many galactic societies would make it out of all the war and mayhem in one piece, but looking back on how our species is faring so far I'll just say that personally the prospects look slim.
Now that we're done with the easy part of space travel, before we get back to talking aliens we need to talk about space.
While we have sent a satellite only as far as Jupiter, thanks to our modern day mega telescopes and the scientists that wield it, we have a much better idea of what space is actually like. And it is chaos out there, to say the least. To illustrate the galactic hazards that a space traveler has to endure, here's a list of the lethal space hazards of space according to everyone's favorite astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
- Monstrous gamma ray bursts (which would fry any electricity based machine)
- Deadly pulsars
- Matter-crushing gravitational fields
- Matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors
- Newborn starts igniting within pockets of collapsing gas
- Galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other
- Explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits
- The shooting gallery full of rouge asteroids and planet colliding comets that is our inner solar system
To further quote Tyson "the evidence points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo." Now add the red light shift discovered by Edwin Hubble, who found that as the universe continues to expands, each galaxy is moving away from each other on an ongoing basis. Space is a crazy place, and you might need to be crazier than space itself to even think about making it across, let alone booking a return flight.
Now consider all the listed risks that space travel entails along with the fact that there may be no going back to your home world. Imagine how the aliens must feel when they travel all those light years and survive all the galactic mayhem and barley make it to earth, only to see us obsessing over cat videos, hashtags and Candy Crush, without any actual candy or any actual crushing to be seen. We're not even interested in our friends sitting across the table at a bar on a Friday night, yet we can't stop crushing all those virtual sweets with our phones. And we think intelligent life from a galaxy far far away would be more interested in humans than ourselves?
To be frank we look ridiculous, even to our own species. So why should any intelligent alien think otherwise? Let alone abduct or study us? If any alien ethnologists, slave traders, conquers or oil companies are traveling through space as we speak, couldn't they easily find other planets that are more interesting, advanced, or in better ecological shape? Do we really have anything to offer a species that's much more advanced than us? Will aliens even notice earth when they pass through our galaxy?
Really, who on earth do we think we are?
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