Alien Life and Planet Earth

1. The Chances of Life in the Universe

Extraterrestrials have been imagined for at least 2300 years, if not longer. Epicurus wrote to Herodotus in 300BCE proposing there could be "infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours", even ones inhabited by "living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world"₁. The foremost evolutionary biologist, Prof. Richard Dawkins, makes some comments on the likelihood of life evolving on alien planets:

“It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. [...] Even with such absurdly looking odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one.”
"The God Delusion" by Prof. Richard Dawkins (2006)₂

2. UFOs Are Probably Not Aliens

2.1. Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?

“[UFOs] tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.”

Arthur C. Clarke₄

Unluckily, the distances between stars and galaxies in the Universe are so unimaginably large that, although hopeful data hints at a large number of inhabited planets, it is still unlikely that there is life nearby or even within the traveling distance of a hundred lifetimes. Even at the speed of light, the distances involve make traveling to alien planets a one-way journey. Out of all the UFO sightings, where there has been reliable evidence it has tended to lend itself to terrestrial explanations rather than extra-terrestrial ones₃. Where is no evidence, though, many people cling, out of hope or fear, to the idea that UFOs are aliens. It seems that in the absence of evidence people assume that 'sightings' are aliens even though, wherever evidence has emerged, it has pointed to Earthlings as the source.

2.2. The UFO Craze Was Created by Sensationalist Media and Hoaxes

A critical analysis of the modern mass media:

"The Commercialist Mass Media: The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution" by Vexen Crabtree (2009)

It is common sense that the popular press play up and exaggerate stories, including (and especially in previous decades) when it comes to UFOs. The press behaved in the same way as it did with other 'moral panics' - with much sensationalism, and with disregard for evidence₅. But it wasn't until I read the research of Martin Gardner that I realized just how much of a role imaginative newspaper editors had played in the creation of the UFO craze. It started in 1947, when Kenneth Arnold saw 9 small weather balloons that were strung together, 'flying' in formation in the sky. The papers came up with the idea of 'flying saucers' on their own, and henceforth, enthusiastically published hyped-up articles attributing all unidentified flying objects to mysterious advanced technology and aliens. It was a science-fiction decade, with a popular press to match.

Aside from the press, hoaxes added to the numbers of reports. Three military men lost their lives investigating UFOs such as those seen near Maury Island. Gardner reports that "the entire Maury Island episode later proved to be a hoax elaborately planned by two Tacoma men who hoped to sell the phony yarn to an adventure magazine. Both men eventually made a full confession"₆.

“At first the military forces brushed aside the flying-saucer mania as mass delusion, but after the reports grew to vast proportions, the Air Force set up a "Project Saucer" to make a careful investigation. After fifteen months they reported they had found no evidence which could not be explained as hoaxes, illusions, or misinterpretations or balloons and other familiar sky objects. [...]
A book could be written about flying saucer hoaxes perpetrated in the past few years by pranksters, publicity seekers, and psychotics. Unfortunately, exposure of the hoax seldom catches up with the original story.
Even more difficult to expose are the semi-lies - accounts which have a basis in fact, but may be grossly exaggerated. For example, an observer sees a balloon but is convinced it is a saucer. Others are skeptical and this irritates him. So to convince them, he adds details, or exaggerates what he has seen. He may do this without being aware of it, and later recall the episode not as he saw it, but as he has added to it in his desire to convince himself and others. This is a well-known human failing and there is no reason to suppose it could be involved in hundreds of so-called saucer sightings.”
"Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Martin Gardner (1957)₆

2.3. What We Learn From Skyhook Balloons

Investigation of UFOs has always found, where evidence is available, that the source of the sighting is an optical illusion, a result of human error or misunderstanding, or normal skybound objects that the observer has mistaken for something spooky. The example of Skyhook balloons teaches us much about the human predisposition to prefer exciting and stimulating theories to normal and mundane ones. First, the basics:

“[In 1951 Feb] the Office of Naval Research distributed a ten-page report on the Navy's huge skyhook balloons, used for cosmic-ray research. The report pointed out in detail the ease with which these giant plastic bags - a hundred feet in diameter - could be mistaken for flying disks. The balloons reach a height of 100,000 feet, and are often borne by jetstream winds at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. If the observer guesses the balloon to be farther away than it is, then, of course, estimates of speed can be incredibly high.
At a distance, a balloon loses entirely its three-dimensional spherical aspect. It takes on the appearance of a disk [and] a globular object viewed through a telescope looks remarkably like a plate. [...] The plastic composition of a skyhook balloon offers a surface that seems highly metallic in reflected sunlight. Most of the saucer reports describe the disks as silvery in color. At sunset the balloons may shine in the sky for thirty minutes after the earth has become dark [due to their height]. "If your imagination soars," the Navy release said, "[...] rhe wisp of the balloon's instrument-filled tail may impress you as the exhaust. The sun's rays may suffuse the plastic bag to a fiery glow" [...].
One of the few points on which all observers of flying saucers agree is that there is no noise. This excludes, of course, any known type of propulsion, but is precisely the way a balloon behaves. Observers have sometimes insisted that what they saw could not be a balloon because it was moving against the wind. They forget that wind directions in the stratosphere may be quite different from wind directions on the ground.[...]
The first skyhooks went up in 1947, the year flying saucers were first reported. [...]
At the time of the Navy's report, 270 skyhooks had been released from various spots in the United States, often remaining in the sky more than thirty hours. Frequently, lost balloons were actually traced by following press reports of flying saucer sightings!”
"Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Martin Gardner (1957)₆

“We all suffer from systematic cognitive dysfunctions; they infuse the very way we notice and analyse data, and distort our forming of conclusions. Even our very perceptions are effected by pre-conscious cognitive factors [...]. Our brains were never meant to be the cool, rational, mathematical-logical computers that we like to sometimes pretend them to be.”

"Errors in Thinking: Cognitive Errors, Wishful Thinking and Sacred Truths" by Vexen Crabtree (2008)

This tells us about the human reasoning process: We are inclined towards seeing things in a more dramatic and exciting light. We learn that before concluding extraordinary things, we should first check our basic perceptions and thinking processes, because we can fool ourselves in obscure yet routine ways.

3. Communication with Aliens

3.1. A Very Slow Affair

Let us presume that we have detected intelligent aliens, 100 light-years away. This is not a long way but still covers a thousand stars and their planets. If we want to communicate with someone who we know exists, who probably do not know we exist we must first attract their attention. Someone could be trying to contact us but so far we could have missed the signal by unfortunately not facing a receiver in the correct direction!

If we sent a message to them it would take 100 years to get there. They would have to detect it and then send one back, which would take another 100 years. This means that a reply would take 200 years from the time our first message was sent. This is the fastest possible two-way communication allowed by the laws of physics. And this assuming they are close by. We would have to keep scanning from about 190 yrs after our first message up to 250 years after our transmission to see if they have replied to our one message. We would have to keep re-sending the signal for the 100 years in case they have not detected it yet! Only when we receive a response could we stop resending the original signal. Even if we did discover intelligent alien life in our lifetimes we certainly would not be alive to learn the outcome. If Human life was extended to beyond 200 years on average then perhaps it would seem more exciting - the prospect of still being alive when we are expecting an answer!

How long would it take us to establish a dictionary of mathematical terms with which to communicate? Depending on the length of the transmissions (they would have to be highly repetitive in order to be easily recognizable and to prevent data corruption) it could take well over a thousand years to learn anything about them, or them about us, apart from the fact that we both have well-financed radio astronomers and reasonable mathematicians.

3.2. Our Transmissions into Space Already Span 100 Light Years

On the other hand, luckily, our transmissions into space actually got a head start on our present intention to find life in the Universe:

“Humans have been sending radio waves into space at the speed of light for nearly one hundred years now. Although our goal has seldom been interstellar communication, radio is especially appropriate to that task because electromagnetic waves generally require no travel media, and because radio waves penetrate very efficiently through gas and dust clouds. To date, our "radio bubble," as Tyson calls it, encompasses every star around which a planet has thus far been found, including Alpha Centauri, at 4.3 light-years away; Sirius, our sky's brightest star at ten light-years out; and about a thousand others. So, if aliens are listening, they might have an opportunity to partake in any message sent at frequencies greater than twenty megahertz, including FM radio and television."”
Kenneth W. Krause in Skeptical Inquirer (2007)₇

The mechanics of listening to such weakened signals requires massive effort, massive receivers pointing in the right direction, "and, if the yearning stargazer actually wanted to decode our message's content, it would have to first adjust for Doppler's shifts caused by Earth's rotation and revolution, and then build a dish about twenty miles wide, or four hundred times Arecibo. That's a lot of work - and for what? A weekly dose of Desperate Housewives and reruns of Welcome Back, Kotter"₃.

So although we might despair at the vastness of space and the remoteness of life on Earth, we might also get lucky. I explore the potential results of discovering alien intelligence in: "Discovering Alien Intelligence: The Politics of War and Fear" by Vexen Crabtree (1999).