Sightings: Stories (Break Away Books)
Contents:
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The Fermi paradox is tougher than a Brazil nut, and scientists haven't cracked it yet. But it's not for lack of trying. They've advanced hundreds of hypotheses to explain it.
Let's take a look at each of these three explanation families. You may already have wandered off, irritated or incensed that I put the Fermi paradox on equal footing with the beloved crocodile paradox. Indeed, one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox is that it's no paradox at all, because ET has already journeyed to Earth.
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- Where Are All the Aliens? 'Out There' Book Excerpt!
Adherents of this explanation often point to UFO sightings and alien abduction stories, topics that you can read about in chapter For our purposes here, suffice it to say that scientists generally don't regard any of these reports as convincing evidence of alien life. If they did, you definitely would have heard about it.
There are more subtle possibilities in play as well. For example, what if ET came to our planet long ago, before people were around to be probed?
Unless the voyaging aliens were particularly interested in us, this is much more likely than a documented visit, given that our species has existed for just the last , years of Earth's 4. Let's indulge in some wild speculation, because it's fun! Say Earth has been colonized many times over the eons by greedy, grabby alien civilizations, each of which ground the planet's native species into the dust in the process. Don't get too high and mighty: As astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin has pointed out, a history of such oppression could explain why it took intelligent life so long to arise on our planet as well as the radio silence in our galactic neighborhood.
Maybe Earth is the only planet for light-years around to have recovered from the ravages of invasion. If you squint a little, this scenario lines up with the five mass extinctions that scientists have identified in the fossil record. These great purges occurred about million years ago, million years ago, million years ago, million years ago, and, most famously, 66 million years ago, when an asteroid strike wiped out three-quarters of all Earth's species, including the dinosaurs.
Possibility 1: What paradox? Intelligent aliens have already messed with us
The dino-killing asteroid could even have been a weapon of war, slung by a space-dwelling alien faction with a beef against their brethren on Earth. Brin didn't mean to suggest that any of this actually happened, and neither do I.
Sightings. Stories. B.J. Hollars. Distribution: World. Publication date: 03/25/ . Connect with Break Away Books on Facebook and Twitter Watch the book. Buy The Sighting by Christopher Coleman (ISBN: ) from Amazon's Book FREE UK Delivery on book orders dispatched by Amazon over £ . I don't want to give anything away but this story was a fun, quick read. Get a £10 www.farmersmarketmusic.com Gift Card when approved for the Amazon Platinum Mastercard.
There's no evidence that it did — no spacecraft entombed in ancient amber, no ruins of a million-year-old city — and I certainly wouldn't put any money on it. As scientists and other logically minded people often point out, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. It's entirely possible that intelligent aliens are or were out there, and we just haven't spotted any signs of them yet.
For example, maybe ET hasn't visited Earth because getting here is just too hard. The distances involved in any interstellar trek are mind-boggling. Proxima Centauri is "just" 4.
Chapter 1: Where Is Everybody?
It would take a spacecraft about 75, years to get to Proxima Centauri using today's rockets. There aren't enough honey-roasted peanuts and Sudoku books on Earth to make that trip bearable. Even if we assume that aliens, with their pulsating and extravagantly veined brains, have developed super-fast propulsion tech that puts our puny human gear to shame, there's still a big problem: Say the aliens, like Starfleet engineers, know how to build matter-antimatter engines that can accelerate a ship to 75 percent the speed of light.
Is the aliens' desire to probe us, or to give the ancient Egyptians some killer pyramid blueprints, really that strong? Vaal seemed like a jerk, but still. It's even possible that aliens are watching us right now, to monitor our technological progress, figure out how we tick, or keep their bratty kids occupied for a few hours. Some thinkers take such reasoning a step further, suggesting that we and everything else in the observable universe — yes, even love — may be part of a simulation run on a very fancy alien computer.
Those two games were released just 35 years apart, and the hypothetical aliens have had billions of years to come up with amazing graphics and compelling yet believable storylines.
Maybe Earth is the only inhabited world in the entire galaxy. This isn't your typical gray alien story. Unless the voyaging aliens were particularly interested in us, this is much more likely than a documented visit, given that our species has existed for just the last , years of Earth's 4. May 17, Jessica George rated it it was amazing. Instead it's just your typical found-footage alien movie, but in book form. Given this situation and the huge scale of the Milky Way galaxy, scientists have not yet been able to mount a comprehensive SETI survey. I loved this book.
Given these two assumptions, the number of artificially created universes, or patches of universe, will far outstrip the number of real ones, according to this line of thinking. Along similar lines, perhaps ET's technical mastery has driven its focus away from the real world and into the virtual, sapping its desire to explore the cosmos or meet any potential neighbors. Humanity may well succumb to this fate when high-quality virtual reality porn hits the marketplace.
There are other reasons why advanced aliens may be keeping their heads down as well. Self-preservation springs to mind: Scientists have even suggested that evil aliens may have sent fleets of intelligent, self-replicating "berserker" probes out into the galaxy to hunt for radio transmissions and other signs of intelligent life — and to exterminate any civilizations they find. Extinction is another possibility.
Where Are All the Aliens? 'Out There' Book Excerpt
Maybe those berserkers have done a lot of exterminating over the eons. Or perhaps alien civilizations tend to off themselves in relatively short order. Humanity has come perilously close to a nuclear holocaust several times, after all, and we've recently spurred a global mass extinction that may end up claiming our species as well. And yet, with all that, we've been capable of sending signals to other stars for only a century or so. If a year messaging life span is the norm for civilizations, "then it's as if there are two fireflies that each flick on once during the course of a long night," said Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to astrobiology and SETI research.
METI stands for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence — the controversial notion that humanity should reach out to potential alien civilizations, rather than just passively listen. The odds that these cosmic fireflies will flash at the same time are, of course, not good. That's sad for them, and sad for any giant space monsters that want to catch them and put them in jars.
It's also possible that ET is trying to get our attention, and we just haven't noticed yet. After all, humanity has been searching for alien transmissions for less than 60 years — the last 0. NASA began an ambitious observing project in but had to stop a year later when Congress cut off the money. The SETI Institute and other such groups generally rely on private donations to keep the lights on and the telescopes listening. These donations don't always come through.
The SETI Institute had to idle its main ear to the universe, the forty-two-dish Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, for four months in , and the original plan called for the ATA to consist of telescopes, but there hasn't been enough cash to complete the build. Given this situation and the huge scale of the Milky Way galaxy, scientists have not yet been able to mount a comprehensive SETI survey.
They haven't even come close. Tarter often relies on an analogy to get this point across: We may not even be looking for the right kinds of signals. The SETI search to date has focused heavily on radio waves and to a lesser extent laser-light pulses, because those are technologies that humanity has mastered. But we're already weaning ourselves off radio-wave transmission just a century after inventing it; when's the last time you sharpened your TV's picture by crumpling some tinfoil onto rabbit ears? Would a billion-year-old alien civilization really still be communicating like this, or in any way we could understand?
Maybe ET sends messages via neutrinos, the bizarre and unfathomably numerous particles that zoom through planets unimpeded like subatomic Houdinis. Trillions of solar neutrinos passed through your body in the time it took to read that last sentence. Maybe the aliens are telepathic.