It looks like my father was right about UFOs. Back in the Fifties, the decade of my adolescence, a spike in UFO sightings made him a believer. “I think visitors from another planet are having a look at us,” he said with enthusiasm. Not dread or concern — enthusiasm.
As it happened, the school I attended was introducing me to science, the hardest of hard-nosed disciplines. I said, “Dad, that’s just not possible.”
My certainty startled him. “What? You doubt there’s other intelligent life in the universe?”
“No, just the opposite. The universe is so vast that it’s mathematically impossible for us to be alone.” He seemed relieved that I wasn’t an ignoramus.
“Good. And it also stands to reason that some of the sentient beings out there are below our level of development and some are beyond it. In fact, some must have technologies that far exceed ours.” I agreed, of course.
“So, their visits are possible,” he said with satisfaction.
Now I had him. “Dad, it doesn’t matter how advanced they are. There are statements in physics called laws. They are the rules that all the matter and energy in the universe obey. Einstein showed that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — no atom, no comet, no spaceship. And if any spaceship approached the speed of light, its mass would grow to the point that any life aboard would die. But suppose a UFO somehow could travel near the speed of light. Its voyage would be doomed because the planets that orbit distant stars are so far away that the journey to Earth could take thousands or millions of years, even at that extreme speed. And how would they know the Earth was worth visiting? Even if they had a miraculous telescope that could show closeup TV pictures, the pictures would be of Earth as it was before any human had been born. They’d have no way of knowing we were here!”
Surely he could have no more to say, but he did. “What’s a law today may not be a law tomorrow. Remember, we’re imagining a civilization that may have practiced science much longer than we have. Say, a million years longer. It’s hard to believe that what limits us today will still limit us in a million years.”
He didn’t shake my skepticism, which persisted for decades. I did get a bit rattled when string theorists started talking about 11 dimensions of reality and when I began learning about the claims of quantum physics. I was fine with molecules and atoms, and even with quarks and gluons, but superposition and entanglement seemed a bit much. Next the Higgs boson came along, a particle that imparts mass to other particles. Modern physics was clearly in post-Einsteinian territory. Nevertheless, in all that new science, there was nothing to give hope to UFO enthusiasts. Not until October 19, 2017 came along.
That was an exciting day for astronomers at the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Maui. Their mission is to track comets and asteroids in Earth’s vicinity. They thought they’d caught sight of a comet, but one unlike any that had ever been seen. It wasn’t outgassing — leaving an evaporation trail — as comets do. On the other hand, it wasn’t an asteroid because it was accelerating on its course out of our solar system. Its shape was elongated, about a quarter-mile long and a tenth as wide. No one has ever observed a celestial object with a similar aspect ratio. Its trajectory showed it had been traveling for hundreds of millions of years from one of four possible star systems. Maybe it was something manufactured, like a space probe. Holy crap! That would mean an extraterrestrial intelligence existed! In this spirit, it was named ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “scout.”
Ever since, cosmologists have been torn between two camps. One holds that ‘Oumuamua is very rare but nevertheless an object found in nature. The other holds that it is alien made. Of the explanations by those in the former camp, all but one has been discarded. It holds that ‘Oumuamua is a glacier of frozen nitrogen that was flung into space when a planetoid was destroyed. Supporters point to the fact that nitrogen glaciers have been observed on Pluto. Hmm… Maybe I missed something when I read this. A dwarf planet explodes and shoots debris into the cosmos. One of them is a huge chunk of frozen nitrogen. An eon later, that improbable chunk enters our solar system and accelerates on its way out. Oddly, there’s no observable nitrogen outgassing. In fact, there’s no observable nitrogen! Laughable.
Even though ‘Oumuamua’s passage is a jaw-dropping event, reported UFOs presumably don’t arrive here after an eon of travel. I don’t claim to be a reader of alien minds, but it seems unlikely that an intelligent creature would sign up for such a voyage. So the problem of the transit time still needs to be addressed. It happens that I found a news story that does exactly that.
Einstein showed us that space and time — spacetime, as he called it — is curved by gravity. Substitute other verbs if you like — warped, bent, folded, compressed, dilated — all of them are apt descriptions of what can be done to spacetime. With this as their inspiration, a team of NASA engineers and physicists have demonstrated mathematically that if a bubble of negative vacuum energy could be formed, its attraction to the outer positive vacuum energy would create a means of propulsion by compressing the spacetime that lay ahead. Potentially, enormous distances could be traversed in very little time. The bubble would not move faster than the speed of light, but it would cause the spacetime between here and there to decrease by orders of magnitude. The NASA team plans to create such a bubble, beginning on an extremely small scale.
So I can now imagine an advanced alien civilization becoming the masters of spacetime and journeying to our world and back in much less than a lifetime. This leaves the question of how they would know we’re here. It turns out to be easy to answer. We’ve just deployed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a device that can capture images of distant objects as they were when the universe was very young. The data it collects will lead to discoveries that were never before possible. For example, we’ll be able to determine whether any of a planet’s reflected light is artificial. Artificial light is a biosignature — a substance or phenomenon that indicates the presence of life. It would signal, in this case, the presence of intelligent life. We’ll also be able to detect chirality. This is the property of a molecule whose mirror image is not the same as itself. Chiral molecules are the building blocks of life, like proteins and nucleic acids. A civilization capable of intergalactic travel would surely be able to launch telescopes toward dozens of star systems. The telescopes would be superior to the JWST, probably more compact, and programmed to detect life.
The clinchers for me were an article published in the The New York Times in 2017 and a “60 Minutes” segment broadcast last year. I came upon both a few weeks ago. The Times article, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program,” describes how credible people have battled with the Pentagon to conduct an earnest, open, and ongoing investigation of UFO sightings. The “60 Minutes” segment contains riveting interviews and videos that lead to inescapable conclusions about UFOs. I challenge any UFO doubter to look at these and come away with their convictions intact. It seems certain to me that we’re being visited from afar. My only uncertainty is whether there are living beings aboard. It may be that the objects are probes loaded with artificial intelligence. For the most part, that is how we’ve chosen to explore our solar system.
The discoveries we’re making about extraterrestrial life will accelerate in the next decade and seem likely to grow geometrically thereafter. We know what the consequences of these discoveries will be because we’ve seen them before. Once we thought Earth was at the center of everything. Then we learned that the Sun was the center of everything, and “everything” was our solar system. For a long time, espousing this belief was heresy. Then we learned that many of the visible stars were galaxies, and the Sun was a relatively minor star in an outer arm of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Then we learned that, by the latest estimates, there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Now there are mathematical models that predict the existence of multiple universes. Now astronomers tell us they’ve discovered nearly 5,000 exoplanets, and the counting has barely begun. A very small percentage of exoplanets resemble the Earth in size, mass, atmosphere, temperature, and the presence of chiral molecules. An actual twin hasn’t been found. It follows then that an intelligent life form on another planet will not look like a human being.
Throughout history, anything thought to be at the center of existence has been an ignorant guess. When it eventually sinks in that neither God nor humanity is at the center, it will be a bitch to stay grounded. To say these are unpleasant prospects is a grim understatement. The only remedy I see is to collectively forge a value system whose logic and appeal will form a new, durable center. That is likely the greatest challenge humanity will ever face — greater than controlling the climate, greater than extending longevity, greater than reaching the unreachable stars.
The Scratching Post 