Joel Kontinen
Why haven’t we seen UFOs? In a long article, Kelsey Johnson points out that an unidentified flying object can have different meanings. Many would say that it refers to aliens.
We should also keep Oxfam’s razor in place, that is, that the simplest explanation could be true.
She reminds us of the object that fell in Rockwell in the 1940s and the famous Wow signal that happened in 1977. “An extremely strong narrow-band radio signal was detected by the Big Ear radio telescope at almost exactly the frequency of a fundamental hydrogen transition line (1420.41 MHz), which we expect an E.T. civilization might use to communicate. Fast-forward 40 years, and astronomers identify a previously unknown comet that was passing by back in 1977 and could have accounted for the "Wow!" signal.”
We might also think about Fermi's Paradox. “In a nutshell, given some basic assumptions about life, one could reasonably conclude that our galaxy ought to be teeming with it. So as Enrico Fermi famously asked: "Where are they?" There are three main categories of solutions: First, life could be really, really, really hard to get going. Our very limited evidence on Earth suggests this is not so;
The second class of explanations suggests that there is, in fact, E.T. life, but we just haven't detected it. That could be because we just haven't looked very hard yet, or because we are not looking in the right way, or because they don't want us to see them. Given the age of the universe and our galaxy, if life isn't super-hard to emerge, we are statistically most likely to be osmic babies. In this context, E.T. life is likely to be millions of years more technologically advanced than we are. Thinking about how far our technology has come in the last 100 years, it is unfathomable to think what we might be capable of in a million. If we survive that long. If E.T. life is millions of years more advanced than we are, and they don't want us to know about them, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't know about them.
Then there is the third set of solutions to Fermi's paradox. These go along the lines of the following: Life has formed and evolved elsewhere. Maybe lots of times. But it doesn't exist now. There are lots of ways the universe could kill us, for example a major asteroid impact. If we were sufficiently technologically advanced, however, I give us a fighting chance. Or we might kill ourselves off. This is where Fermi's Paradox gets really depressing. We are in our technological adolescence, by which I mean we are smart enough to destroy ourselves, but maybe aren't smart enough not to do so. It could be that any civilization that becomes sufficiently technologically advanced is doomed to destroy itself.”
So we are still waiting for a signal that might never come.
Source:
Johnson, Kelsey. 2019. No E.T. Life Yet? Here's Why That's Important. Live Science (5 August)
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