(No, really? … Where are they?)
Of late there has been a renewed interest in Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the media. The Pentagon recently released footage from US Navy F-18 Hornet aircraft undergoing maneuvers off Virginia where UFOs apparently zigzag around the sky at speeds and G-forces that would tear any military aircraft or drone to shreds:
Here is another video of a supposed UFO flying near a U.S. Navy ship off San Diego:
The Pentagon says that the vids are legit and cannot currently be explained (and I am inclined to believe this). Lue Elizondo, the former head of a Pentagon project to investigate UFO sightings, said that some objects seemed to defy what was believed to be technologically possible.
“Imagine a technology that can do 600 to 700 G-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar, and that can fly through air and water and possibly space. And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity,” he said.
Even more interesting is the announcement back in December, 2020 from former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s Space Directorate, Haim Eshed, who says that human governments have been in contact with a “galactic federation.” Haim is (or was) a respected professor and former brigadier general (tat aluf) in the IDF. This is no homeless bum shouting at the sky while riding the Night Train Express.
So, … what to make of all this? Seemingly credible sources reporting on incredible events that seem too fantastic to believe.
Anytime I run into such a situation, … one in which a clear expert gives an outlier opinion and possibly fantastic claim that appears to be too good to be believed (say Roger Penrose claiming that the mind is created by quantum microtubules), I fall back to the Laplacian Minimum (sometimes now called the Truzzi or Sagan Standard) which states:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Unlike stories of alien abduction where the witnesses produce no physical proof ( … they don’t manage to snag an alien ray gun after they escape from the medical experimentation gurney and jump into the forest canopy), the Pentagon and many reputable witnesses now have footage. Footage that is not easy to discount. Footage that I believe is not faked.
So, is that proof? Yes, it is, … but it is not extraordinary proof. And there are problems with what is captured in the vids and images that we will come back to in a bit.
Before we get to that, let’s first consider physicist Enrico Fermi and his famous paradox. While walking with friends to lunch one day in 1950, he got into a discussion concerning the apparent contradiction between the high probability that alien cultures should be abundant and yet had never been observed. In turn, Enrico asked, “Where is everyone?”
Last I checked, there were more than 51 reasonably intelligent hypotheses trying to explain this discontinuity. A few of the more popular would be:
1 – There is no one in the Universe but humanity.
2 – Concomitant with 1, humanity is the first to reach a high technology level.
3 – Advanced aliens are not interested in interstellar travel, contact, or colonization.
4 – Alien life is too far away and/or we have not explored long enough.
5 – Our solar system is like a zoo exhibit. (We are purposely being segregated.)
5 – Alien life is already here on Earth incognito.
…. And so on and so forth.
However, when you really begin to look at these 51 closely, they just do not fit the facts that are already apparent to astrobiologists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians.
So what does? How about something that better agrees with the both the probable extent of life and the apparent dearth of its visibility. Something that better agrees with what we actually see. (What I am going to throw out below is loosely affiliated with one of the 51 hypotheses but is different enough to present new arguments.)
What if extraterrestrial intelligence was all around us but not in a manner in which we could initiate communication? In short, consider Fermi’s bounds:
1 – No intelligent life but us exists in an observable universe at least ninety three billion light years across. I call this the 1560 A.D. Roman Catholic geocentric model of SETI.
2 – Alien civilizations should be numerous. They should have colonies and artifacts set up all over the local group and yet we see no signs, overhear no signals, see no starships, no Dyson spheres, no galactic engineering projects, etc…
You could call #2 the Fermi Upper Bound, but I call it the Sid Meier “civilization builder” video game model. So far, our best response to both of these unrealistic conditions, has been to listen in the radio spectrum in hopes of an alien Valentine’s Day greeting card. Not to be disrespectful of the hard work done by the SETI community, which I admire and support, but this is meatspace thought. (This does not mean I believe the scientists of SETI are meatheads. … They are obviously an extremely talented and highly intelligent group of astronomers, astrophysicists, exobiologists, etc … )
One word better fits all the observable data that has so far presented, … singularity.
Fireflies signal around you all the time on a warm summer evening using their best tool, bioluminescence, while you perhaps set up your backyard telescope for some good viewing with your family. It is not that you are unaware of a firefly off your shoulder, it is simply that you and it are separated by a vast neural network sentience difference. You consider the firefly a simple curiosity and it cannot consider you any more than you can rotate a penteract in your mind. Which leads back to singularity. Right now, mankind is beginning to mate our tumorous chimp neural network structure which is loaded with a bloatware mid-brain from reptiles and simple circuits for respiration, circulation and defecation, to the speed of modern computers through brain-machine interfaces (BMI). In the near future (30 to 150 years) our minds will mate with massive real-time quantum processing. A growth so spectacular that our physical 1300 cm^3 brains will not be able to hold the resulting emergent property neural networks (they physically wont be able to match to the flesh). These advances by 2085 to 2150 should allow us finally to leave biology behind. At that point, we reach a horizon no unaugmented or slightly augmented human can see beyond with profound effects.
the same manner this field is filled with fireflies.
Also, consider the amount of time that we will have existed in the Jansky phase where we broadcast out our terran-centric silliness on radio waves, say roughly from the 1930s to eighty years from now. In comparison to our Homo sapien sapien lineage which began roughly 315,000 years ago, our Jansky Phase will have accounted for far less than one percent of our sentient development.
Taking into consideration the mediocrity principle; it would seem to indicate that civilizations do pop up on worlds and that once you can write an abstraction for 1 + 1 = 2 on a cave wall, the ascendancy to hyper-sentience begins, … call it singularity for now. So, unless jackpot of jackpots, we happen to be emerging from meatspace at almost exactly the same time as another nearby civilization, … let’s say in the Arm of Orion, … otherwise signal to noise ratio (SNR) gets way too low, and which, if you run the numbers, seems like pulling the winning handle on a fifty million dollar jackpot slot machine at Caesar’s Palace ten straight times in a row, you are shit outta luck. We aren’t going to see them, and they will not see us. Not because they cannot, but because we are fireflies. The chrysalid phase from wannabe to God is simply too fast on evolutionary time scales for communication between the phases, and I believe it is this model which best fits the observable data.
The exact reason why there is no intercommunication is the same reason that you do not normally wish to hold a conversation with a person who stutters badly and can only speak one word every three minutes. On your end, it simply is like watching a stalagmite grow. Their emergence to transcendence might have been during our early Bronze Age, and we now find our SETI radio calls falling on post-singularity ears uninterested in listening. When you can solve NP-complete problems out your bung hole, you are not worried about a bunch of townies fighting over whose god can fit more angels on the head of a pin in a closed loop environment. It is like which firefly gets to drink nectar from a certain flower in your backyard while you set up your telescope for your family completely uninterested. It is also the reason why aliens are uninterested in taking over the Earth B movie style, … how much time do you spend trying to “take over” the leaf of some plant in your back yard that a firefly alights on.
They are there. Right now, … all around I suspect. But unfortunately, we cannot speak to them because we and they are separated by a transcendence gulf.
I would briefly add that so much of the SETI modeling ultimately relies on models of geographical distance. They may be light year terms instead of Genghis Khan days of horse travel, but they are still X-Y-Z-T geographical models. After all, the Fermi Paradox model has at its heart an underlying geographical assumption. Eleanor Arroway’s benign father in Carl Sagan’s Contact novel represents nothing more than a lovey-dovey emissary of a peaceful version of the Galactic Roman Empire. …. meathead thought. And yet, SETI at its heart is not a geographical hunt, it is a sentience hunt. It is a geographical hunt if you want to find some methane emissions on some distant exoplanet orbiting Kepler-22, but not for the people you really seek who can inform on the wave equation or a beautiful piece of six dimensional art. We are ultimately searching for a neural network or networks that can abstract at our level or higher.
Unfortunately, the reason why we are not hearing from them is because we can not ourselves communicate our ideas on frequency hopping, Shannon entropy content in animal signaling, or radial velocity exoplanet detection algorithms to a special needs child with a slightly less emergent network, much less to Homo erectus or a chimpanzee. Fermi, Sagan, and everyone else has not framed the problem correctly. To explain why ET is not interested in giving us their Encyclopedia Galactica, we need only examine why we cannot pass Wikipedia to a chimpanzee troop in the Gombe forest. They do not possess the emergent property abstraction level required to comprehend the relevant semiotics. Ultimately, if the scale of sentience is neural network arrangement, then output modality is not likely to be geographical in nature.
I ultimately believe what we are seeking is a Sentience Quotient (call it SQ for now), that denotes pattern matching of greater than sapient complexity. And as much as I admire Carl Sagan along with Paul Allen and the ATA, I think a high order intelligence using radio waves to send greetings randomly through the interstellar void is like someone who cuts a loud fart during a lull in an opera aria. I cannot articulate it any better than to say it strikes me as gauche. As does the idea of a Singularity civilization committing to a Roman Empire colonization model with their hyperdrive ships, while they wait for heat death leaving their artifacts and technology behind on colony worlds. …. Archie Bunker meathead thought. This universe, despite its massive size, is still a very small place I suspect. One too small to contain a post-Singularity intelligence. Although I have no data to suggest otherwise, I suspect this Universe it is but one rung of a very very large ladder. If I carefully consider the physical bounds of the Universe (since the Curvature Constant (Omega) is likely zero, space is infinite, and lazy coders always leave the periphery as unbounded), I come to the conclusion that this whole reality is a playpen. A crib for intelligences not yet equivalent to the critical escape threshold. You don’t get to leave Earth until you can travel faster than 11.2 km/sec. You don’t get to leave this reality until you bootstrap to post-Singularity.
Which brings us back to the zipping UFOs captured on video by U.S. naval fighter aircraft.
So here is the rub for me, either you reveal yourself or you don’t. No one travels light years to play footsie and then leave you all hot and bothered.
Imagine for a moment, a group of cultural anthropologists traveling back in time to observe Ancient Roman culture. Say your temporal distortion bubble placed you five miles outside the gates of ancient Rome in 150 A.D. in the forest near the Appian Way. As you begin to walk through the darkened forest, you notice the lights of sentries and a Roman army checkpoint up ahead. You’re going to do one of two things, either observe from the distance with your advanced technology (night vision goggles, binoculars, telephoto lens, etc …) or initiate contact (perhaps in disguise).
The one thing you are not going to do is drop down to their technological level by lighting up torches not far from the checkpoint, making loud noises, and then watching as Romans troops come out to investigate, only to extinguish your torches and run back into the darkness. Either you came for contact or you came for observation. If you came for observation, your technological edge will allow you to remain at a distance. If you came for contact and wish to speak to one of the wiser men of Rome (say, … a man like Galen), you would likely enter the city walls in disguise undetected.
The UFO “ships” zigzagging through the air in wild gesticulations to gain our attention have the psychological imprint of a small child denied attention who has become frantic to be noticed. And these wild flying patterns have been going on since at least World War II. Okay, … yes, … we noticed you. Go use the bathroom and clear that blockage, and stop butterfingering the controls.
In my opinion, none of these sightings, despite their apparent validity, is indicative of an intelligence that can cross interstellar distances but of the reflections of the human mind. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (a widely panned and criticized program) in the early 2000s spent some time investigating the possibility of mass generated delusions. They never found a correlation but the whole UFO sighting thing has the same ring about it. How and why there are so many credible UFO sightings I cannot yet explain, but with no extraordinary proof, I remain dubious and unbelieving. … That last bit is very important, … so far the very high bar of extraordinary proof has not been met.
With the astrophysical and exoplanet bounds as we currently understand them, I very much suspect that the real answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we are fireflies signaling off the shoulder of post-singularity ET while it sets up its multiverse transwarper boobedee bobedee machine on a warm summer night. For me personally, that is the best fit so far for the data that presents.
So where are the aliens? I suspect the remnants of some of them are right here in the Milky Way, … all around us. Yes, they know about us, and no, they aren’t interested in talking because really, … how much time do you spend during your typical evening barbecue earnestly speaking to fireflies?
