Alien Contact? Don’t Wait Up

In the matter of UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena, aka UFOs, color me unimpressed. Extraterrestrial life forms who have “visited” Earth would either declare themselves directly or would be effectively clandestine, not blowing their cover on multiple occasions.

In fact, there is a very solid argument for NO life on other planets, best expressed in the Fermi paradox as follows:

There are 40 billion Earth sized planets in our galaxy (Milky Way), and 24 super-habitable planets with life-supporting characteristics equal to or superior to Earth.

There are somewhere between 10¹⁵ and 10²⁵ planets revolving around stars in the observable universe.

10¹⁵ is a billion trillion or 10,000,000,000,000,000.

And yet there is no real evidence for alien presence, ever, on earth. Our solar system is relatively young, approximately 4.6 billion years, compared to the age of the universe, approximately 14 billion years. So, there are solar systems and billions of planets that had billions of years of head-start on us — and yet, no contact, not even radio contact, as SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) researchers can tell us.

If we think about this from the perspective of inductive statistics, and posit our planet even as far more advanced than most other inhabited planets, say at the 95th percentile, there would still be 100 million planets with the possibility of life MORE advanced than Earth, with some immeasurably more advanced. And yet …. no established contact.

Of course, there are limits to space travel. The distances between solar systems in the Milky Way is quite large. The diameter of Milky Way is 105,000 light years, or 6x10¹⁴ miles (600 trillion miles) 600,000,000,000,000. Compare with 9x10⁷ miles from earth to sun (93,000,000).

So, a planet from our own galaxy would have to be very far advanced in order to reach Earth in some manner. But the Milky Way galaxy is nearly as old as the universe, so there have been billions of years for some planets in our own galaxy to advance far beyond us. Consider that Earth’s first manned space flight was only 60 years ago, not even a blink of an eye in the time span we are considering, and now we have space probes that have already traveled 150 AU into space (AU=distance from Earth to Sun). Extrapolate to a billion years and, well, you get the picture.

This is not to say there is no life on other planets somewhere in the universe. Not to say there is no intelligent life on other planets. But what some people consider the obvious inevitability of intelligent life on other planets is really not so obvious. In fact, the evidence to date seems to work in the other direction.