We Are Early (probably)

The last few days have seen the mainstream media light up with stories of UFOs, or as they are now called UAPs - basically aliens. I even got an email from Dan Carlin’s (of Hardcore History fame) mailing list about it. The House of Representatives convened a landmark panel to investigate this. Let’s just stop and think about that for a second. Public hearings conducted by the highest level of the US government into little green men.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66320498

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-update-congress-whistleblower

https://time.com/6298287/congress-ufo-hearing/

Now I love a good science fiction movie and I am not saying there is no-one out there. However, the Fermi paradox is somewhat of a paradox right now. Why is that? When it comes to concepts like this, I think the most appropriate tool to use is Occam’s razor. Basically, ‘the simplest explanation is usually the best one’. When it comes to aliens, we are early.

For an in-depth explanation, see the excellent video ‘Why Aliens Might Already Be On Their Way To Us’ from the brilliant YouTube channel ‘Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell’.

Essentially, it boils down to this. Our timing is exquisite. The universe is already thirteen point eight billion years old. Despite this, it is unlikely other complex civilizations have had a chance to evolve. The environment was just too hostile. The early stars constantly blew up. After all, this is where all of our heavy elements came from. Galaxies would crash into each other and supermassive black holes emitted massive amounts of radiation. All of this effectively sterilized the early universe over and over again. Our sun - formed from the remnants of this chaotic and destructive early universe - came into being right at the end of this period. Conditions therefore could not be more fertile for life than they are now. Life evolved on earth pretty much as soon as the oceans formed. However, it took two billion years for single-celled organisms to evolve into multicellular organisms and another two billion for us to arrive. On how many other worlds has this happened? How often do bacteria progress to building spaceships?

If aliens have visited, would we even be aware of it? The technology required to travel from even the closest of stars is far in advance of anything humans possess right now. So there is a very good chance - almost a certainty - that our visitors would remain undetected.

Let’s just suppose for a moment that we have been visited by explorers from another civilisation and some were indeed misfortunate enough to have crashed here on earth. Governments would have very good reason to conceal this. Number one, it would undermine the authority of world governments. Not to mention the effect it would have on the world’s religions and the associated fallout from that. So yes, governments would have very good reason to conceal evidence of alien visitors. But would they be able to? From the testimonies before the US Congress, it would appear the number of individuals ‘in the know’ whilst not necessarily large would need to be in the tens absolute minimum and probably at least in the hundreds.

After all, this talk and speculation of aliens is actually helpful to the government in some respects. It is well known that rumors of alien activity actually helped to maintain the secrecy of Area 51. What better way to cover up testing of new military aircraft than to not try too hard to suppress supposed UFO sightings?

There undoubtedly are aircraft far in advance of what is known outside of top secret military circles and occasionally they might even be seen. It is perfectly conceivable if sighted they could be assumed to have extraterrestrial origins. The first Have Blue (predecessor to the F-117 Nighthawk) prototype made its maiden flight on 1 December 1977. If a regular frontline or civilian pilot of the late 70s caught a fleeting glimpse of this aircraft, they could easily be forgiven for supposing an extraterrestrial origin.

This prototype was lost on 4 May 1978. An aborted landing damaged the undercarriage, after efforts to lower it again failed the pilot ejected and the aircraft crashed. When the wreckage of that aircraft was recovered, it is perfectly conceivable people on the periphery of the recovery operation could have got the wrong end of the stick.

So when it comes to aliens, ‘the simplest explanation is usually the best one’. However, Occam’s razor is a theory and just because the simplest explanation is usually the best, it doesn’t explicitly rule out others.

We are early (probably).