I have to heartily disagree with this. Unless the traveling aliens have discovered enough other life forms, including technological life forms, that it becomes routine by the time they discover us, I think they would very much find us interesting. Otherwise, despite how much more advanced they may be, if they haven’t discovered signs of (more or less) intelligent life until us, they would have been wondering, just as we do, whether they are alone in the universe or not.
Think about what a monumental discovery it would be if we discovered proof of any extraterrestrial life whatsoever, even alien lichen or bacteria.
“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”
“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say?” `Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”
Think about just how freaking big the universe is and what resources it would take to stumble upon ‘us’ - its egotistical of us to think we are that interesting or important to ‘others’ that they would find us at all interesting. ‘Traveling aliens’ - maybe they are on a trek amongst the stars? Quit thinking of space in terms of how science fiction portrays it for story telling - its BIG - i mean BIG.
If there is life out there - and I don’t doubt the possibility of it - there is just too much space (and other planets, etc) for the random chance they happen upon this one.
We will never get beyond the local nine for any type of ‘human’ exploration like you suggest they do.
I was responding to your hypothetical with one of my own, that if there were aliens much more advanced than us, they would still find us interesting.
As I’ve said in other posts in this thread, I don’t think there are advanced aliens visiting this planet, and I’m not too sure if any alien life, much less technologically advanced life, is out there at all.
Well, I’d refer you to the various threads on the Fermi Paradox for a discussion of this aspect. It may seem unlikely that an alien civilisation would find us among all the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, but as suggested by Tipler and Hart in the 1970s, a sufficiently advanced civilisation could replicate probes exponentially and explore the entire galaxy within a million years - much less time than the Earth has been supporting life.
One thing I’ve thought about is the motivation of aliens to come to our planet. Throughout human history, exploration was usually for the purpose of finding resources, such as gold. When that didn’t necessarily pan out, newly discovered lands could be occupied and claimed for their resources. That of course led to the oppression of natives and the start of wars. I can’t think of a massive relocation into a new country that didn’t have fatal repercussions offhand.
So if the aliens are here to determine what, if any resources they could use, their purposes would probably run contrary to ours, because we don’t want our planet torn apart with no benefit to ourselves. So far, we’ve (allegedly) only seen smaller and elusive aircraft, so it’s likely these are used for scouting and collecting data. If we have lots of something they want, they’d send bigger ships, more security and armaments. In other words, they’d be just as altruistic as Europeans settling into the New World and shove our human asses aside.
Think aliens are visiting just to study and establish friendly relations? HAH!
Considering that the OP was explicitly about alternatives to the UFO=Aliens hypothesis, it’s ironic (if nonetheless understandable) that aliens have dominated the thread.
The analogy I always come back to is Real Loud Hollerin.
Were I to challenge Archimedes to build a device that allowed a man in Thebes to yell such that a man in Athens could hear every word, he wouldn’t be able to do it. He was a genius, though, so he could probably have proven that it was impossible: no megaphone, no sound amplifier, could possibly take the decibels of a human voice and amplify them loudly enough to be heard across the Mediterranean Sea, more than a thousand miles away. He could probably demonstrate that even if it were possible, the curvature of the earth would prevent the travel of the sound to the listener.
And yet: cell phones.
Sometimes physics puts up hard limits. Engineers who butt their heads up against those limits fail, but engineers that focus on the problem and not the limits sometimes find a way. Solutions invisible today may be visible in a few millennia.
So: sure. It’s pretty certain that there will never be a spacecraft that travels in a straight line from point A to point B at a speed faster than the speed of light. But I’m much less certain that there won’t be meaningful exploration of space through a means unconstrained by this limit.
For me, I don’t think you can use process of elimination to conclude extra-terrestrial being. So, saying we don’t know/can’t identify what it is, should never equal ET. I mean, would a world-class expert in their field doctor would never do that with a working diagnosis…“I’ve never encountered this before nor read about it - maybe it’s an alien disease.” It’s not. It’s just some earthly disease you’ve never encountered before and never read about.
To conclude it’s ET, it has to be provably ET. Where is the craft, the probe, or part of it; where is the body, where is the tangible stuff, etc. If the UFO has to be filtered through a lens (camera, eyes, etc) I just don’t think that could ever be enough evidence.
With that, I assume “UFO” (or whatever it’s called today) doesn’t inherently mean a video of a UFO/on radar or saw with eyes, - we saw this thing, but can’t identify it…or does it mean that? Can UFO mean, we have this thing/hunk of craft, but we can’t identify it? Are there any tangible things that are considered UFOs? Doesn’t mean it’s ET, could be Chinese…but just curious. I’d assume no, because the Gov’t would assume it’s obviously from this world but just new tech from another country.
I’ve read a lot about this, and the “panic” was not nearly as big as legend has it. There were a few who tuned in late and did go nuts. Remember, this was 1938 when the world situation was not looking too hot.
As for Hynek, I was a teenager when that book came out, and I read it and many like it. I’m now 72. They all expected the aliens to contact us real soon now. No one has. And the shape of the UFOs have changed with the fashions, and we’ve had the mentioned abduction craze.
Remember, when that meteorite fell in Russia, the very epitome of an unexpected short lived event, there were tons of videos of it. That there is no similar evidence for alien spacecraft is very telling.
Indeed. But if you follow the debates about the UAP phenomenon in Congress and elsewhere, you might notice that many of the proponents talk about an ‘extradimensional’ hypothesis; the idea that these phenomena are too weird to be ‘nuts and bolts’ alien craft. They don’t follow any sensible strategy, they fly about with all their lights on at night while avoiding contact, and they cut cattle up for no discernable reason. The ‘aliens’ are so utterly alien and idiotic they can’t possibly come from our dimension.
We have the remarkable Jacques Vallée to thank for this nonsense.
Nevertheless, I note that two similar broadcasts of War of the Worlds in South America in subsequent years also lead to widespread panic, as did a similar story (about a non-Martian invasion) broadcast in the UK before Welles’ Halloween stunt. There was also a fictionalized news broadcast about home-grown terrorists with an atomic bomb in Atlanta that went on TV in the early 1980s. Despite multiple warnings that it was a dramatization, it freaked some people out.
I observe that any of the people listening could have found out that the shows were fictional merely by switching to another channel and seeing that there was no corroboration. That a lot of people didn’t says something about — I don’t know – Human Nature or Gullibility or Lack of Investigative Skills.
Regarding faster-than-light travel, there are two possibilties: FTL is impossible, whihch allows for other extraterrestrial civilizations without us yet knowing about them or,
FTL travel is possible, in which case we are utterly alone in the universe or at least in this galaxy.
I say that because the speed of light limit is the only thing I can think of that could allow for other civilizations in the universe without the universe being totally colonized. Space is vast, and we really don’t have a good sense yet of how fast a ship could reasonably travel through interstellar space. So it may be that travelling between the stars at high sublight speeds is extremely difficult and risky.
But if FTL is possible, that goes away. The first civilization to reach FTL level tech could colonize an entire galaxy in very short order, cosmologically speaking. Since they haven’t, we’re either alone or FTL doesn’t work. I choose the latter based on the Copernican principle that there’s nothing special about us.
Not necessarily. FTL is not equivalent to “instantaneous”. It just means that it is possible to go some unknown speed that is faster than the speed of light.
Well yeah, but I don’t think we’re talking about a difference between .99C and 1.01C. The assumption is that if there is FTL travel you’ve broken the only speed limit we really know of, and could go multiple times the speed of light.
But you’re right - maybe it’s possible to go faster than the speed of light, but not THAT much faster. Being able to go 1.5C or 2C doesn’t really change the math much.
Let’s rephrase it then: The faster we think other civilizations could possibly travel, the less likely it is that they exist. If tech is possible to reduce travel times between stars to weeks, months or even years, then the universe should be fully colonized by now. So if there is FTL, it’s ‘weak’ FTL like you described - just a little faster than FTL.
I think we might discover that there are practical limits that will keep us well below FTL speeds. Interstellar dust, radition pressure, etc.
There’s a lot of reason to not believe in aliens visiting us, but this isn’t one.
Maybe in the universe, intelligent species form once every billion years, let’s say. The anti-Star Trek universe, the “one-world” universe. So if there happened to be two in existence at this same time, who would pass at the chance to observe?
Especially if they don’t look like humans with bumpy foreheads. Maybe they’re just looking for friends.
Angels.
Seriously, (more or less). Every generation has fantastical beings that come in the night and more often than not, have sex with us. And these magical creatures are no more complex than the minds of the humans creating them, or imagining them. Once it was fairies, once it was the gods themselves, once it was demons and angels, once it was ghosts. And now that we are more tech savvy, these magical beings are technology based. Same shit different day.
Or, there is such a ridiculous amount of ET activity out there that it’s likely to have found us by now. There has to be civilizations out there that are millions of years ahead of us with all manner of advanced states of technology. We are just scratching the surface with what knowledge and information we have access to. Imagine how complex we will be in 50, 100, 500, 1000, or 10,000 years from now. 1 million years of advancements? I cant even fathom…