Aliens Are Real: Part 3

Is Stephen Hawking right about aliens?

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If our nearest neighbours were life-forms on the fictional forest moon of Endor, 1, light years away, it would take a millennium for us to receive any message they might send. If the Endorians were watching us, the light reaching them from Earth at this very moment would show them our planet as it was 1, years ago; in Europe that means lots of fighting between knights around castles and, in north America, small bands of natives living on the great plains. It is not a timescale that allows for quick banter — and, anyway, they might not be communicating in our direction.

The lack of a signal from ET has not, however, prevented astronomers and biologists not to mention film-makers coming up with a whole range of ideas about what aliens might be like.

In the early days of Seti, astronomers focused on the search for planets like ours — the idea being that, since the only biology we know about is our own, we might as well assume aliens are going to be something like us. But there's no reason why that should be true. You don't even need to step off the Earth to find life that is radically different from our common experience of it. These single-celled creatures have been found in boiling hot vents of water thrusting through the ocean floor, or at temperatures well below the freezing point of water.

The front ends of some creatures that live near deep-sea vents are C warmer than their back ends. We're at least as extreme compared to them as they are compared to us. On Earth, life exists in water and on land but, on a giant gas planet, for example, it might exist high in the atmosphere, trapping nutrients from the air swirling around it. And given that aliens may be so out of our experience, guessing motives and intentions if they ever got in touch seems beyond the realm's even of Hawking's mind.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and chair of Seti's post-detection taskforce, argues that alien brains, with their different architecture, would interpret information very differently from ours. What we think of as beautiful or friendly might come across as violent to them, or vice versa. I don't think you can put human views on to them; that's a dangerous way of thinking.

If they exist at all, we cannot assume they're like us. Answers to some of these conundrums will begin to emerge in the next few decades. The researchers at the forefront of the work are astrobiologists, working in an area that has steadily marched in from the fringes of science thanks to the improvements in technology available to explore space.

Scientists discovered the first few extrasolar planets in the early s and, ever since, the numbers have shot up. Today, scientists know of planets orbiting around more than stars. Most are gas giants in the mould of Jupiter, the smallest being Gliese , which has a mass of 1. In , Nasa launched the Kepler satellite, a probe specifically designed to look for Earth-like planets.

Are Aliens Real? Is There Life on Other Planets?

Future generations of ground-based telescopes, such as the proposed European Extremely Large Telescope with a 30m main mirror , could be operational by , and would be powerful enough to image the atmospheres of faraway planets, looking for chemical signatures that could indicate life. The Seti Institute also, finally, has a serious piece of kit under construction: In all the years that Seti has been running, it has managed to look carefully at less than 1, star systems. With the full Allen Array, they could look at 1, star systems in a couple of years. Shostak is confident that, as telescope technology keeps improving, Seti will find an ET signal within the next two decades.

If this is going to work, it will work soon. And what happens if and when we detect a signal? Humans become, briefly, major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which is, unfortunately: But a lot of people in the modern world will take that bargain, which should probably not surprise us given how dizzying, secular, and, um, alienating that world objectively is. Most conspiracy theory is fueled by a desire to see the universe as ultimately intelligible — the bargain being that things can make sense, but only if you believe in pervasive totalitarian malice.

Alien conspiracy theory keeps the malice cover-ups at Roswell, the Men in Black. But rather than benzo comforts like order and intelligibility, it offers the psychedelic drama of total unintelligibility — awe, wonder, a knee-wobblingly deep, mystical experience of existential ignorance. Every extraterrestrial era has its own fantasy of consequentiality. These incidents, which never occurred in cities, where other witnesses could have verified them, were often reported as horror stories even as they may have expressed secret desires.

But the pop culture of the same era introduced another mode: Stephen Hawking, who died in March, was also a godfather of a sort, not just a physicist but a sage and guru for a generation of squishy-lefty seekers curious about life beyond Earth; among his last acts was partnering with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire building a giant SETI laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Americans used to regard the space race with not just national but something like collectivist pride — all those government engineers from the new middle class. Which does mark a change.

Given the option, America will always prefer to play the cowboy, and through the post—Cold War s, the dominant alien-encounter template was still the swaggering military strut of Independence Day. The closest thing we got to a counterpoint was the cover-up paranoia of The X-Files , which just expressed a darker faith in the same American power. By the time we got an alien epic for the War on Terror era, even Spielberg staged it as a story about armed conflict: The War of the Worlds. Of course, in that story, the winner was always going to be the humans — that is, the Americans.

And then came the financial crisis, the recession, and Trump, and the new hope that E. But even our future Chinese overlords, projecting power for the first time into the ever-receding reaches of the universe, are a bit nervous about aliens; as Andersen points out, their popular science fiction bears the evidence. They have their own memory of colonial contact — the Opium Wars, the end of that empire — to reckon with.

And, besides, the unknown is just scary. Things have to get pretty bleak before you take a chance on the arrival of a total blank slate, just for the sake of change. But the government seems to have been interested, too: So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November , the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena.

Then, suddenly, he saw a white, foot Tic Tac—shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. But Elizondo has claimed the project was alive and well when he resigned in October. The former Senate majority leader is definitely a truther.

When he was a young man, he heard a story from his grandparents about driving down from Mt. Charleston, near Las Vegas, where they saw a so-called flying saucer, for lack of a better description. Bob became a very wealthy man. He would pay for these conferences about UFOs, and he would bring in scientists, academics, and a few nutcases. There were people trying to figure out what all this aerial phenomena was. Bob started sending me tons of stuff. Mainly what interested me is that so many people had seen these strange things in the air. So tell me how this program got started.

Could I have a courier bring it to you? I also want to go to your ranch in Utah. Bigelow had bought a great big ranch. All this crazy stuff goes on up there — you know, things in the air. Indians used to talk about it, part of their folklore. We decided it would be [funded by] black money. I wanted to get something done. We have hundreds of — Eric, two, three weeks ago, maybe a month now, up in Montana, they had another strange deal at a missile base up there. It goes on all the time.

The universe is really big, people. Just 30 years ago, we had not discovered a single planet outside our solar system. Now we know of more than 3, of them, and we know nearly every star in the night sky has at least one planet in its orbit. Our study of other planets and moons in the solar system shows us many worlds possess the ingredients necessary for life — an atmosphere, organic compounds, liquid water, and other necessities. The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, for example, feature whole subsurface oceans. Some, like tardigrades, can even survive the bleak vacuum of space itself.

It shows that biology is all over. New technology gives us a better chance to actually make contact with extraterrestrials. Our radio telescopes can scan more of the night sky for an intelligent message than ever before. Our ability to parse volumes of data in mere seconds means we could conceivably survey much of the galaxy in just a few decades. Scientists now think every one in five or six planets might be habitable, based on two general criteria: Extraterrestrial researchers and enthusiasts are most excited about these seven:.

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One of the best chances we have so far at finding life on another planet. In , the photographer Steven Hirsch asked UFO-convention attendees who claimed to have had personal contact with extraterrestrials to draw and describe their experiences. For science-minded SETI freaks, the last decade has been a particularly exciting one. UFO enthusiasts point out that rods along with flying saucers are the two most common shapes cited by witnesses in UFO sightings, and the cigar shape would allow it to be slim enough to avoid collision with other objects as well as maximize aerodynamics for travel.

Both the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen initiative pointed their instruments toward the object but found no unusual signals emitting from it. With the object on its way out of the solar system, we may never know. He theorized, instead, that the fluctuations may be the result of massive objects passing in front of the star, in a kind of orbit — a whole array of massive satellites or other kinds of structures, presumably produced by a civilization of advanced intelligence.

At least one of these planets is in the Goldilocks zone, so METI International decided to beam some musical signals over to the planet. Though they last only a few milliseconds, these pulses, first detected in , emit more energy in that time than the sun does in 24 hours. Which space-besotted billionaire will be the first to make contact? Robert Bigelow As a child, Bigelow watched the government test atomic bombs from his bedroom window and he and his classmates could see the mushroom clouds bloom over the Mojave Desert from their school playground.

Reasons to Believe

To some, such memories are the stuff of dystopic Cold War hellscapes, but Bigelow remembers them as an epiphany. His company SpaceX has been trying desperately to reduce the cost of space travel in the hopes of beginning a million-person colonization of Mars. Milner is also funding Breakthrough Listen, a ten-year project to use a telescope in West Virginia to search for messages from intelligent life, and Breakthrough Starshot, in conjunction with Mark Zuckerberg and the late Stephen Hawking. It was not a speaking role. You see a lot more as a test pilot than as a farmer in Iowa. Unfortunately, the others may include ecoterrorists: Microchips and fiber optics, for instance, were taken off crashed alien vehicles and reverse-engineered.

The aliens have a special technology that would solve climate change as well, he claims, but the Illuminati are hiding it because it would devastate oil interests. It was his tell-all outlining a decades-long Roswell cover-up while plugging his own clandestine exploits, which he claimed involved reverse-engineering technology found on alien spacecrafts.

This is how the world got lasers, particle beams, microchips, even Kevlar, Corso said. Its chief purpose was pressuring the government to disclose what it knew about UFOs, via investigations like Project Blue Book. Ufologists claimed this cabal was formed in , once Truman started panicking over what to do with all the alien spacecrafts the government kept finding. He was polling around 4 percent at the time. Her house was 50 miles from Mt.

According to him, failing to get government files declassified on the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, UFO incident. They held among their titles that of sixth human in orbit, first Soviet female to break the sound barrier, and holder of more than aviation world records. Once their illustrious flying careers ended, both became ufologists.

People onboard said it was triangular, brightly lit, and rocketed by at 1, miles per hour. You created a language you think we might be able to use to communicate with aliens. So what exactly is it that we would want to say to the rest of the universe if we had the chance? I think the main difficulty is the definitional one.

Where are the aliens?

You talk about alien life, you talk about intelligence; what are those things abstractly? We know the specific example that we have historically been exposed to: The question is, when you generalize away from that, what do you get to? Yes, I think the thing to realize is that we in our civilization have followed a particular path. To any other intelligence, our path would be quite mysterious. Right, so we actually have unique information to communicate. Here, just a small sampling of the classics. Wells invented for The First Men in the Moon.

Betty astonished authorities when she began drawing a map of the constellation the creatures claimed to be from. Initially it looked like nonsense, until a few scientists noticed its resemblance to Zeta Reticuli, a system inside the constellation Reticulum largely unknown in that year. Villas-Boas was forced inside their vessel, where the creatures took blood samples from, of all places, his chin, and rubbed in some sort of gel.

Soon after, a blonde female with big, almond-shaped eyes joined him. She began rubbing his body, then initiated sex. He turned out all right, though: He got a law degree, had four kids, and died believing his children had a half-sibling living in space. They reported seeing lights chasing their aircraft. The number varied sometimes it was one; other times ten , and so did the colors red, orange, and green. But the unidentified objects shared in common that they moved very fast, up to miles per hour, yet could dart on a dime.

Their lore grew among the squadrons.

The aliens are hiding in underground oceans.

However, a second explanation surfaced in the early aughts: It was Die Glocke, purportedly a top-secret weapon Nazis developed that let them time-travel. These proponents argue Nazi SS officer Hans Kammler was navigating the device when it crash-landed in Kecksburg, allowing him to escape Allied troops in the days before VE Day and successfully integrate into postwar U.

Phoenix Lights On March 13, , thousands of people in southern Arizona say they saw weird lights move across the night sky in a flying V. Most of their reports came in between 7 and A majority of people spied the pattern passing overhead it was supposedly several football fields long , but the Air Force also sent a team of A Warthogs from nearby Barry Goldwater Range on a training exercise that same night, and, as luck would have it, those planes dropped some stationary flares just outside Phoenix, considerably complicating any UFO conspiracies with a second set of strange bright lights.

Governor Fife Symington reportedly witnessed the V-shaped as well. Other so-called sonic attacks plagued scores of others in town around the same time. The story received loads of publicity — authorities thought Walton had been murdered, and seven eyewitnesses corroborating a single close encounter was unheard of. Air-raid sirens sounded; the Army proceeded to pepper it with 1, anti-aircraft shells. Eventually it disappeared from view, but not before a citywide blackout was ordered, shell fragments got lodged in surrounding buildings, and five civilians died. The Navy later explained it had been a weather balloon.

Conspiracists site a famous L. New encounters happen all the time — even to famous people. The universe is The Aliens Are Hiding If even a genius like Stephen Hawking thought that aliens might destroy us if they ever were to find us, then maybe we should be a little afraid.

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