Alien Visitation: Why Bother With Us?
UFO fanatics swear aliens are everywhere. They point to every random light in the sky and are convinced visitors from another planet have come to Earth. It's the stuff of many great sci-fi works whether the visitors are hostile invaders or benevolent neighbors. The idea of first contact is a very compelling one and a great story. So...why aren't they here yet?
Seriously, we have so much to share with them. Great recipes, the works of Dickens and Twain, Star Trek DVDs, comic books (OK I won't share my Spider-Man collection with E.T.), history, yadda yadda. Never mind our technology and society level, we still drive vehicles that consume fossil fuels, our space ships use chemical propellants and we like to fight each other. Oh by the way, we're trying to contact aliens with primitive radios that they probably don't use anymore.
See where this is going? It's undeniable that there is intelligent life out there. Some of those civilizations are way older than ours and have likely conquered the problem of space travel. Any such civilization would be thousands, maybe millions of years older than ours. That is incredibly advanced. The cliché is true that to them we would be like insects. Do you want to communicate with the ants in your back yard? Didn't think so. Yes, we are interested in trying to communicate with dolphins and apes but that is partly because their level of intelligence is close to ours. But nobody wants to talk to microbes or bees or even fish. We consider their IQs to be so low that it's not worth the effort. Advanced aliens probably feel the same way about us. They may have come by to survey the planet, learned about us and felt we were just another typical primitive society and moved on. Look at it this way, having seen how we are they must feel we aren't ready for first contact and they would be correct. Any attempt to contact us will probably result in pandemonium on our end. A good example of this was shown in the book and movie Contact where a simple radio transmission turned our world upside down. Maybe they tried it way back then with another primitive planet and saw the disastrous results. Perhaps when we mature as a species would they attempt a message.
That isn't to say that aliens close to our level of intelligence and technology aren't curious about us and would love to exchange greetings. The problem is that they are likely as hampered by the problem of interstellar travel and communication as we are. So we can't meet each other.
Don't look to those radio telescopes for a message. Sure it could happen but how likely in our lifetime? SETI is hoping to receive an extra-terrestrial greeting but the problem with this scenario is that advanced civilizations probably don't use radio communications anymore, if ever (who is to say they evolved without developing our kind of technology?). They could intentionally use radio to contact us but aren't there more efficient means to do so? And besides if we received a message it must be thousands or millions of years old. The culture that sent it may not exist anymore or lost interest after not having received a reply from us. The idea of sending a message back to the source isn't feasible because it will take just as long for the message to get to them. No, we have to develop a faster-than-light method of communicating. Might as well try to develop ftl drives while we're at it.
What is possible is that we could receive unintended broadcast signals from them the same way as I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone are just now being received by ten thousand stars thousands of light years away. Would we be satisfied with that? The idea that there definitely exists an extra-terrestrial culture at a set destination may give humanity the incentive to radically advance our level of space travel and communication.
Who knows? Maybe one of those stars has a Goldilocks planet with intelligent aliens who use our type of communications and are probably trying to figure out how Ralph Kramden will send his wife to the moon. And maybe some aliens over there are on their way.
José Soto