Alien Attack & UFOs

I put this category in as a potential problem as we need to consider what we are doing with all our attempts to communicate with other civilisations on other planets or around other stars. This is being done blindly on the assumption that anybody who hears will be more advanced and happy to let us continue the way we are.

There are a number of options.

1. Nobody will hear. This is the likeliest option. Voyager 1 is about 14.5 billion light years away, and knowing exactly where it is we can concentrate a world-wide deep space network in its direction. It knows where we are so points its communications, which is a 23W transmitter and dish in our direction. When it reaches us it’s somewhere near a billionth of a billionth of a watt, so a decrease of 20 trillion times, so 1/20 trillionth every 15 billion miles. The nearest star is about 4.2 light years away, so about 1700 times as far. A random transmission may dissipate as much as 20 trillion to the power of 1700, so you may be lucky to get a single photon of energy. Add to this everything transmitting is spinning, so it’s like a lawn sprinkler in action on the top of a merry go round, on a fast moving train turntable, all rotating at different speeds and different directions. By the time it gets to the nearest star you may find that all you get is a stray photon due to dispersion and angular velocities, even with a planet wide array, not much information to go on, unless the characteristics of an artificially produced photon were unique. The suns cross section probably outputs in any given direction a constant and continuous 2.2 x 10^21 watts, so if you look in the suns direction it would have this constant figure over its full cross section angle. A transmitter on earth, the most powerful being around 2 x 10^6 watts, that operates at best 50% of the earth’s 1000mph spin, but being on a moving 100 square foot point at a million miles an hour.
2. Somebody will hear, but unable to do anything about it. It’s only recently that we have the facility to return or transmit any large power after about 50 years of being able to receive such a signal. If they did happen to hear us it would take a lot of detective work to find out where it came from unless they understood our message. We have only been able to work things out like that for maybe 50 years out of a 300,000 year human history, so the timing would need to be exactly right.
3. Somebody hears us, but is more cautious. Just because a may be prey animal shouts out its existence it doesn’t mean that any other similar creature who thinks of the risk will do the same. If they know or are aware of the risks and possible predatory civilisations out there, it isn’t a good idea to even warn or inform other societies of their presence. On-going survival in the cosmos may just be keeping as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
4. Somebody hears us and thinks communication is a good idea. If they decide there aren’t predators on the lookout for prey they might return the call. Locating where it came from and returning an intelligible message to us may prove a problem though. We have a system called mathematics, but there may be other systems that are incompatible, even if by an odd circumstance that our moral and social view may be. They are likely to be completely different.
5. Somebody hears us and thinks we can take what they have. If they can make it this far they would likely be far more advanced technically than us, and they probably would have as little a problem with conquering us as we would a sloth when armed with a shotgun.
6. Somebody hears us and thinks we are a threat. So they send something that wipes us out, choose any option from the list.

Humans have developed in a certain way with certain morals and objectives. We live in a dog eat dog world of evolutionary competition where we have found that cooperation works better than conflict. So, our mental processes are geared towards social cohesion, and we have many benefits of peace, although conflict still happens.

If they exist, what would other civilisations be like. We don’t know. We only know what works here and under our environments. Things like democracy where everybody has a decision is not necessarily the most efficient way of doing things. The most efficient is people who have knowledge telling the people who don’t how to do things and making sure they are done that way. Some of the fastest growing civilisations of the past have been a master-slave, or elite-drone type affair, so if a civilisation has advanced this way and it needs resources it may seek to impose these principles on a society that has those resources.

By necessity a civilisation that can travel through space will be more advanced technologically than one that hasn’t. But, this doesn’t automatically guarantee that such a society would be more advanced socially. Some of the most advanced technological societies on earth neglect many members of that society, seeing them as not a worthy part and decisions taken without any consideration on the effects on that group, where simple societies of the past may have been much more advanced and looked after their weaker members. Earth is still in the learning to walk and talk line in this respect, or shouting out its presence, and through this its wealth of resources.

Luckily we have distance on our side, the nearest star being around 4.2 light years away, so 8.4 light years away if faster than light travel is not possible. The chance that the closest star would harbour advanced life is quite small, but there may be somebody travelling through that system who can hear. In rough likelihood is that such a civilisation would be around 100 light years away, so our first communications would not reach them until maybe 2030 and if they were very space able may mean they could not reply or get back until maybe 2130.

If they have faster than light drive they could be back within days, so the fastest may be in 10 years time. It really depends on how much life is out there and if it survives it’s technology. If there happens to be a stage of inquiry that turns out to be terminal you may find that virtually every civilisation will reach this and destroy itself between 12-15,000 years, so the nearest civlisation may be 1,000 light years away, only annoucing ourselves around 3030.

Will they be friendly, nobody knows, the assumption is that all advanced life will be, but based on no knowledge at all, certainly not earth where a potential for abuse is usually taken.

But what of ‘home grown aliens?’ There is a worrying number of unidentified phenomena and the assumption is that all of them are mis-identifications of natural ones. What if they are not all mis-idnetifications. All it needs is for one of them is truly non-human or past human and we have major problems. The liklihood is then that they are much more advanced than us technologically. If it is human it is a different problem and probably more severe as whoever controls them would probably have human motives, humans being extremely prone to non-scientific objectives such as wealth and power. We assume other species will also have these faults, but it is not guaranteed. They may have completely different drives, so if they had a plan, then these may not be the best for humans. One of survival at any cost could be disasterous, allowing them to sacrifice the rest of the animal kingdom in this cause. Vivisection of humans may not be seen as wrong, but necessary and making sure hmans developed in the way they choose rather than as a natural progression.

If you look at the article ‘History Seems to be Missing,’ you get this sense that there may have been something more in the past than history records or is allowed to record. There is a good possibility that a previous technological race existed in the remote past, descendants of the dinosaurs or unknown ancestors of humans, but hidden by moving onto space and subsequent global disasters, the limitations of light speed maybe restricting them to our local space, but possibly still out there in the vicinity. I think it likely that to warp space or change dimensions would need stellar level powers. The actions and secrecy of many large government departments here and around the world, and the way they seem to conceal or suppress a lot of the information suggests that they know lot more than is revealed by them, or at least are more worried by the theoretical and psychological effects of the public knowing about it than the threat the phenomena poses.

The evidence of demonstration of those abilities should cause a widespread panic amongst military sources, but they don’t and they suppress, which suggests they know what they are, where they came from, and that they pose little threat to the order the military support, so probably the military doing this poses a bigger threat than the phenomena to society, hamstringing their science and advancement. It could be the science and history taught as schools and universities is only half the picture, 50% of the supporting logic, experiments and deductions removed from being included, many self evident truths and facts, especially in physics being concealed. So human advancement is actually progressing at a snails pace, rather than the leaps and bounds we think it does.