UFOs: Are We Their Lucky Generation? Part One

There are some pro-UFO ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis) believers who state that aliens have only recently arrived on Earth in response to modern human activities, like our nuclear weapons detonations. Sceptics counter that it’s unlikely in the extreme that 1) aliens could have gotten from there to here that quickly, and 2) the odds that we current humans would just happen by chance be the lucky generation, after four and a half billion years have passed Earth by in cosmic isolation, to now experience for the very first time on-site cosmic company are astronomically against. So, are we the lucky generation to be the first graced by E.T., or not?

It’s only in the last couple of generations that humans have had the ability to answer the question “are we alone?” Prior to the building of radio telescopes and the launching of space probes, that question rested more with philosophy and speculative science (often sci-fi) than hardcore science. So it would be coincidence beyond belief that E.T. would pop in for a visit within just those last couple of human generations that enabled us to finally search for him (or it) out there. 

If you were to throw a dart randomly at four and a half billion balloons, each balloon labeled with one year since Planet Earth came into existence (starting with one and ending up with number four and a half billion), what odds that the dart would hit any of those balloons that had dates that coincided with humanity’s time on Planet Earth, even being generous and giving us (humanity) an existence of say two million balloon years, far less hitting the one balloon that we would call 1947 (the accepted start of the modern UFO era)? Bugger all odds against! But does that of necessity negate the UFO ETH?

Aliens Are Here Because We Are Here Scenario - Otherwise Known As The 1947 UFO Scenario:

UFOs, if alien owned and operated, can only be here on (or above) Earth, in response to the on-site presence of the modern technological human. That’s actually advocated by many pro-UFO extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) buffs. They ask can be a coincidence that aliens have arrived here just at the same time we started playing around with dangerous toys like nuclear weapons; trespassing on their turf by going into space; and illustrating our overall stupidity by reeking environmental havoc upon ourselves.

Now the ‘aliens are here because we are here’ argument for extraterrestrial UFOs is IMHO actually the best anti-UFO ETH arguments going. Skeptics counter that for mankind to be ‘visible’ to those out there; those out there can only know about us, our ‘visibility’, via our electromagnetic (EM) signals, which propagate outwards into the cosmos at light speed. Our EM signals (optical nuclear blasts, radio/TV broadcasts, radar emissions, etc.) haven’t had much time to get very far out into the cosmos, because prior to say 1900 Earth was pretty damn quiet in terms of giving off human technological EM noise. Even our atmospheric pollution, potentially detectable from way out there via spectroscopic analysis, wasn’t really at highly abnormal levels prior to 1900. It’s only in the 20^th Century did our visibility really kick into high gear.

So, if you take 1947 as the start year of the modern UFO era – their arrival date – and assuming the aliens left home as soon as they detected our EM signal(s), then their home has got to be so relatively near to Earth as to be statistically unlikely in the extreme. Since E.T.’s home is certainly not within our solar system, then by elimination, that leaves the nearby stars. But only subluminal interstellar travel is possible (so proclaimed Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity), and even interstellar velocities of say ten percent light speed are really pushing reasonable limits. Our closest stellar companions are over four light years away, so it would take E.T. over forty years to reach us from our closest stellar abode at ten percent light speed. Add to that the four light years it took our EM signal to reach them in the first place, well that’s about forty-four years all up. Subtract that from 1947 – well, 1903 isn’t known for our high intensity radio broadcasts; radar, TV and the light from our nuclear blasts were still future technology. Our city lights weren’t exactly going to be blinding their telescopes either. Therefore, according to the skeptics, E.T. didn’t arrive in 1947 due to any human activity, and since obviously only human activity would attract E.T. to travel here in the first place, therefore UFOs can not be anything alien! So say the skeptics. 

But the skeptic’s basic assumption here is that E.T. was out of range back at home. E.T. was in another extra-solar planetary hemisphere, country or city, across the gulf of interstellar space and far away from where the terrestrial action was. Alas for the skeptics, even if the aliens arrived out of concern to post-1900’s human activities (according to some UFO believers), that could mean the aliens were already here, if not on-site, then in our immediate solar system neighborhood, like having a lunar base, or even an orbiting space colony ship, say out in the asteroid belt, as base of operations. One doesn’t have to postulate them being a minimum of over four light years away (the distance to our nearest stellar neighbor).

So the basic assumption here by some pro-UFO ETH believers, that aliens arrived first in 1947 because of human activity is just so anthropomorphic (human centered) as to be laughable It’s an egocentric inspired, but just a coincidence, that alien UFOs are around when humans dominate Earth’s environment. As we’ve seen, the skeptic’s counter argument fares little better in the logic department.

But when taken to its logical conclusion, skeptics do provide the very answer which makes the UFO ETH nearly inevitable. Indeed, it would be utterly extraordinary in the extreme if that tiny niche of terrestrial time, say 1947 to the present, were the first and only niche of terrestrial time to host a visit by extraterrestrial intelligence(s).

Let’s forget the human element – as per the above argument for E.T. being here. Planet Earth has been noted and logged in a galactic database for a minimum of millions of years, more likely as not at least an order or two of magnitude greater – say billions of years.

The obvious answer is that there have been previous niches within terrestrial time, intervals of time, probably lots and lots of them, when E.T. paid a visit. E.T. has had billions of years to randomly (or selectively) explore our galaxy. At ten percent light speed the galaxy can be explored, even colonized in one million years. At one percent light speed it only takes ten million years to cross the galaxy edge-to-edge. Only ten million years? You might think that’s a hell of a long time, but the galaxy is ten billion years old. If there are lots of space-faring extraterrestrial civilizations, or even if there is just one, they are probably a lot closer to us than the worst case scenario of edge-to-edge, obviously, since we’re not situated on the galactic edge, we’re more like two-thirds the way out from the galactic centre.

Those who have pondered this issue and crunched the numbers, suggest that every ten thousand to one hundred thousand years is a rough guesstimate of intervals of time between random visits from E.T. 1947-to-date could easily and probably would fall outside that range. Maybe the last random visit was nine thousand years ago, or ninety thousand years ago. We’d still have a bit of a wait (one thousand to ten thousand years worth of wait) for the next call. But, and there’s always a “but”…

To be continued...