Quote of the Day
If they can travel light years or at the speeds that we’ve seen, defy physics as we know it, fly underwater but don’t show a heat trail, then we are vastly out of our league. We can’t handle it. We couldn’t fight them off what we wanted to. That’s why I don’t think they’re a threat to us, or they would already have been.
Tim Burchett
U.S. Representative (R-Tenn.)
July 12, 2023
Evidence Shows UFO Tech ‘100 Percent’ Not From Earth, but That’s Not a Threat: Rep. Tim Burchett
“If.”
As cool as it might be to make “first contact” I’m waiting for the clear and convincing evidence to be made public and get a few million more eyeballs on it.
Maybe it is from this world and the evidence was stolen back in the Mar-a-Lago raid?
Until I see a Battle: Los Angeles-Chronicles of Riddick style invasion, I’m going to presume it is of earth. Although, They Live- is showing a shocking resemblance to life on earth these days.
A couple possibilities:
The extent of the alien visitations to date have not been a substantial threat. Scouts rarely are, in and of themselves.
Aliens are likely still vulnerable to bullets, explosives and bomb-pumped lasers. Even if they have some kind of superscience force field, unless it involves bending space-time to deflect or channeling energy into hyperspace, stopping kinetic energy takes equal and opposite energy. What is the mass and energy penalty to mount such equipment in their spaceships, maintain them and keep them turned on? If aliens are a threat, we’re likely to be just as much of a threat right back at them if they come into range. So, if they are hostile, they’re better off changing the orbit of some asteroids and waiting until the dust settles, literally.
Anyway, what do they want from us, if they can make interstellar yoyages? If it’s metals, they can get those more cheaply from asteroids than down in our gravity well. If it’s gasses, there is more in the gas giants. I’m reminded of small Pacific Islander tribes as the British Navy and merchantmen sailed by: we have nothing they need for the amount of trouble it would be to get it, and they have nothing we can afford. Supposing that they did have some great knowledge to convey to us, like their stardrive or force fields technology, maybe we do have some knowledge to give in exchange. Unfortunately, we’ll be spending a lot of time just trying to understand each other, first. Math will be the simplest to translate, then units of measure, then basic chemistry starting from the periodic table, then Newtonian physics, and it’s just going to take a while to build up to nuclear physics and doctorate level physical sciences.
Biology? A whole lot of irrelevance right up until it gets drastically interesting. If they are organic beings from another planet, they probably have very little in common with our biochemistry, so they can’t eat anything from this planet. Humans and mushrooms will have more in common, biologically, than something evolved on another planet. They can’t give us any diseases and we can’t give them any, but it is possible that we are irritated if not highly allergic to each other. If there is any biochemical compatibility between us, there will be a lot of explaining to be done.
Another possibility is that the “aliens” are drones. Interstellar travel, unless they’ve worked out how to warp space or jump through hyperspace, is still long. How much life support is needed for a long trip? Food equivalents, water equivalents, oxygen/nitrogen equivalents, unless their life support is 100% efficient in recycling, that’s a lot of ship volume and mass to devote to keeping squishies alive. You can make a smaller ship with an AI or virtualized intelligence onboard.
If there is a biological on board, why would we expect it to be the actual alien race? If you had enough information about humans, particularly because we’ve be broadcasting out into space for most of our late history, it wouldn’t have been hard to pluck some isolated samples from out in the wilderness, when you finally want to make contact, I’d send cloned humans back in suspended animation to act as ambassadors. I’d raise my little humans in an isolated environment so they’d be safe from my alien biochemistry, teach them what I’d want them to know and none of what I don’t want them to know, and send them back to say, “Hi! I represent The Aliens. Let’s agree not to interfere in each other’s territory so The Aliens don’t have to drop rocks on your only planet. Incidentally, I don’t know what The Aliens look like.”
I would suspect that, should such aliens exist, anonymity would be the order of the day. Were humans to discover only some of the physics that allow faster-than-light travel, that would cascade into learning all of it, much sooner than the constrained one-step-at-a-time process we currently employ.
Were aliens to exist, and travel such distances at speeds that make it profitable to do so, why would they want anyone else to learn their secrets? Limiting the competition, fairly or unfairly, is a basic premise. probably true throughout the universe.
I believe it was Carl Sagan who said a few decades ago that the surest proof that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe was the fact that they were smart enough to NOT make contact with us. Or as my daughter says…. When Alien UFO’s fly past our solar system I bet they lock the doors.