But the point of my little fictional interview is precisely that there is not one scintilla of evidence, or physical law, that says they CANNOT, either! You quote Fermi to me, as if somehow stating his paradox explains something, when it is the foundational basis of the paradox, the assumption that we have never encountered aliens, that I very simply pointed out may be flawed.

Forgive me, I am an amateur astronomer and a pilot, and the assertion that 97% percent of UFO sightings are easily explained does not comport with the facts as I know them. Throuugh my expertise, I have been able to deduce the probable cause of many UFO sightings I have read, but to say that 97% are explained is simply wrong, unless you count saying “It was a meteor” everytime a huge silent black triangle is reported flying slowly over someone’s house as “explaining” something.

And at that point is exactly where most scientists DO question the witnesses credibility. It is a simple strategy: like you they say they can explain almost all, and when they find ones that they can’t, they discredit or simply assume utterly idiotic levels of credulity on the part of the witnesses, and voila - no mystery!

I do not claim to know what UFO’s are, but my point is that many others seem to claim that they CANNOT be a certain kind of phenomenon, one for which there is absolutely no scientific prohibition, and they rely on excluding evidence they cannot explain to do so. That is not science.

This galaxy contains approximaytely one hundred billion stars(~10^11) and there are approximately one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe (~10^11) which gives us at least 10^22 suns in the observable universe. There are enough suns and a virtualy infinite possibility of life so that literally anything is possible.

Let us assume that the universe is ten billion years old and that only one-hundreth of the stars have a single planet with intelligent life (10^20 planets with intelligent life). This is, in my opinion, a very conservative estimate but yet it is a number so large as to boggle the imagination.

I suspect that once we learn the theory and application of interstellar travel we will also fing that it also includes a method of viewing distant locations without having to be present. Just set the 3d coordinates of your viewing node and you would receive all of the inputes (visual, auditory, odors, etc.) as if you were there. I know; crazy wacko Star Trek stuff but 100 years ago walking on the moon, Dick Tracy-type cell phone wrist videos, laptop computers, etc. were all just as crazy.

Of course rare - we’re talking probabilities approaching the statistical impossible - in face of a universe of planets so vast in number it’s beyond our comprehension leads me to the conclusions there are a good many planets out there with life - at least at some point in time.

Because there’s geologic time to consider. Civilization (written word) has been around like 7,000 years on Earth. That’s nothing in geologic time measured in millions or billions of years. Other planets a ‘hair’ off our schedule could have civilization come and go hundreds of thousands or even millions of years out of sync with our own.

As has been pointed out we’re talking vast, vast distances as well.

But let’s buck the odds and say there’s a planet with a civilization relatively close to ours in distance and development. As has been pointed out, the politics on their planet may be to sit back and listen as well.

I’ve always thought SETI was worth the try but never really expected it to bear fruit. It’s fighting longer odds than playing the lottery.

Even in a Star Trek world of warp drives and life-detecting sensors, I think finding life in this universe is like digging for a needle in a hay stack. And, when we find it, it likely won’t be a case of a civilization a few years out of sync with our own. Life will be many thousands of years out of sync. Maybe we’ll find a civilization where they’re like gods to us or one where it’s stone knives versus dinosaurs.

Just my 2 cents worth.

All excellent points. Throw in the unknowns like how long an intelligent species lasts before going extinct and fold that into the 13-15 billion year age of the Universe and you may have millions of species who have come and gone before earth was even born.

And let’s go one step further and contemplate how many advanced civilizations last long enough to become space faring civilizations. That number must be very small (comparaed to life in the Universe). These are some of the reasons why I would love the idea of aliens visiting us (even that governments would attempt to hide that from the rest of us) I just don’t think the laws of probabilty are good enough to believe it.

ed.

Interview with a Famous Scientist:

Q: Do you think there is life on other worlds?
A: Oh, yes, almost certainly.

Q: Do you think intelligent life exists on other worlds?
A: Statistically, I think it is quite likely.

Q: Do you think interstellar travel is possible?
A: I think it will be in the future, perhaps the distant future, say in several thousand years.

Q: So, if life on Earth is about 4 billion years old, and the universe is about 14 billion years old, there could vast numbers of civilizations ahead of us by the few thousand years required to be able to travel between stars?
A: Yes, that could be the situation.

Q: So what do you think when you hear about people seeing what they think are alien spaceships, you know, UFOs?
A: They are all either crazy or hoaxers!!

No reputable scientist I know of today claims that people who see UFO’s are all crazy or hoaxers. That’s ridiculous. There is no doubt people are seeing something. But there is absolutely not one scintilla of evidence that they come from another planet. Eye witness testimony is not scientific evidence and scientists are not going to proclaim that it is a dead scientific certainty that we are being visited by aliens based on it.

With 97% of all UFO sightings explained to date as terrestial (or explainable cosmological phenomena) in origin, I believe it more than likely that the only reason we haven’t explained that last 3% is due to our own ignorance of earthbound phenomenons like ball lightening or other atmospheric tricks that have yet to be catalogued. This is the reasonable and logical position of most scientists and does not diminish what people claim they have seen in any way.

To quote Enrico Fermi about ET’s, “So where are they?”

ed.

“Wouldn’t the dominant species on any planet be top predator much like us,just food for thought.”

Actually, that was kind of my ultimate hope . . . that another species might be “just like us”. Somehow though I didn’t equate “just like us” with “detect another sentient species and immediately focus on their complete enslavement and/or annihilation.” Guess I’m a bit naive: I thought they might at least say howdy before launching Death Wave Alpha.

SATURDAY, JULY 12Mommy Cat must be nursing something.  She has “tanks”.  She’s starting to come upstairs more often.  For the early part of the week she stayed in the closet - constantly.  I have no earthly idea how many survivin…

Or the transmissions haven’t gotten here yet. Even at the speed of light (radio waves obviously aren’t) and even if the closest civilization was the next cluster of rocks-and-a-sun over (Epsilon Eridani, an unlikely source for life as we know it) it would take over a decade for a signal to reach us. Slow the signal considerably, have it eminating from a more likely source (much, much farther away) and the signal would have to have been sent hundreds of years in the past (minimum) to even begin to arrive. Certainly might not be anybody sending a signal, but there’s a pleathora of reasons why there might be and we still haven’t heard them. Hope springs eternal, I guess . . .

“As I said, the question of whether or not to engage in active SETI research should hang on erring on the side of caution.”

2 comments to this:
a) With all the bandwith we already spewed out into the cosmos, worrying about waking potential neighbors is a bit too late. Frankly, I’m not sure why the need to send more powerful signals exists — they’re not going to move any faster than the ones we already sent. Our First Contact with another species will probably be episodes of I Dream of Genie, which might damn us to a quick oblivion or work in our favor (Ms. Eden certainly knew how to work a veil).
b) Why gamble the future of humanity against the risk of potentially meeting reeeeeely bad critters? Because that’s what we do. Better not send Pioneer out with a roadmap. Better not try to land on the moon. There might be baddies under the soil. To be safe, we better not even send somebody up in orbit. After all, they might catch an unknown space virus and then it’ll be Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Odds are slim, true, but can we be sure it won’t happen? Better not ride through the frontier to California. Probably isn’t a threatening society out there, but why take the chance? Better to stay on the East Coast and build defenses (btw, flying a kite on the rain is a dman fool stunt, Mr. Franklin. Save making discoveries until you can find a safer plan). We probably shouldn’t sail across the Atlantic looking for a shortcut to India either. I mean, nobody’s been out that far, and there might be sea monsters or Atlantis laser-tridents or something. Probaly not, but why risk it?
Because (foolishly) exploring is what we do. As a species undoubtedly, but beyond that I egotistically pride myself on being a member of (IMHO) the tribe that has more “Lets-do-it-because-we-can-and-we-haven’t-before” moxie than any other group of humans that have ever existed. To me, its a defining human and American characteristic, as deeply rooted in our national identity as The American Dream.
Sometimes, you have to damn the (imaginary) torpedoes and go full speed ahead. Or curl up with a nice comforter and a cup of hot choclate next to the fireplace and worry about Boogeymen. As I said before it’s really irrevelant at this point anyways, but my insignificant vote is for the former. It may be a risky gamble, but some bets need to be made.

Read Brin’s piece from 2006. He points out that the radar,TV, and radio emissions are very weak and don’t stay coherent for more than a few light years.

As for a more powerful signal, I imagine some kind of interferometer could be cobbled together with a bunch of space telescopes. Don’t know if that would make the signal more powerful or not.

ed.