Dear Aliens, please don’t kill us
Tom DeLonge was the lead singer for Blink-182, a pop-punk band whose whiny ballads were the morphic materialisation of my romantic, teenage melodramatics. You may remember them from such classics as ‘I Miss You’ and ‘All The Small Things’, packaged in albums like, ‘Aliens Exist’. These days, the band trudges on without their original leading man. Why? Because he is now fully committed to proving that humanity has been consistently and frequently visited by… you guessed it: aliens. Now, this is hilarious, and so wonderfully Hollywood that I would quite happily speak of nothing else until a little green man turns up and punches me in the kidneys for being rude. However, there is one problem with being so facetious about this icon of angst’s campaign for truth (aside from vengeful ETs). And that is, that he might be fucking right.
In the early days of Covid, when this civilization-altering pandemic still had a zesty thrill about it, the US Navy released some footage of UFOs, taken from military aircraft. It was pretty wild. We’re talking about the US Navy here. In F-22s! Not dashcam footage from a man called “Rusty”. The US Navy captured this footage. Footage of a strange, tic-tac-looking thing zipping around the digital display of their snazzy infrared cameras. And the most surprising part? They had absolutely no idea what the hell it was. Neither the pilots recording it nor the most well-equipped and well-informed intelligence agencies on the planet could figure out what on Earth (or off-Earth) they were looking at. *The most surprising part is probably the fact that they released the footage at all.
So, here we are dealing with the vintage definition of an Unidentified Flying Object. But that doesn’t mean that there is an alien behind the wheel necessarily. Speculation of other-worldly visitors makes the loudest slap on news site frontpages, but scepticism amongst experts in the field is not difficult to find. Balloons, optical artefacts and experimental aircraft are a few possible culprits matching the energetic smudge’s description; and its impossible aeronautical displays of speed and agility may be down to the plane's instruments being duped by all that racing around. But, what if it was aliens? What would that actually mean? Let’s imagine that instead of giving those giddy Navy Pilots the slip, an alien with six legs and a huge dangly nose hopped out of a hatch on the top of the craft and started doing Tik-Tok dances. How would the world react then?
Pondering the implications of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence has long sat under the purview of sci-fi writers, stoners and stoned sci-fi writers, but times are a changin’! We not only have risk analysts, reliably the most boring humans on the planet, writing papers about what happens to our society when we finally find out the quite obvious fact that we are not the Uni-inhabitant of this Universe. I read one of these papers, and it - along with a really good book I’m reading called The Three-Body Problem - has got me running through the scenarios of such a greeting across the void. How would we react? Would it be friendly? Would religion collapse? Well, let me tell you what Mark Neal, officially the most interesting risk analyst on the planet, thinks.
According to Neal, there are five possible scenarios regarding humanity and the question of who keeps us company in the cosmos.
1. We are alone in the universe
2. There is life out there, but it is non-intelligent
3. There is intelligent life on other planets, but it is technologically no more advanced than us
4. There is intelligent life on other planets, which is technologically more advanced than us
5. They have already been here/they are already here
Neal explores each of these options in some detail. I’ll just give you the highlights. Scenario 1 is like Season 1 of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’: just fucking skip it. The belief that we are alone in a Universe with so many stars and planets could only belong to the most narcissistic humans, or perhaps those who worry that if God made life elsewhere then we might not be the favourite child.
Investigating Scenario 2 is at the top of the priority list for every space agency on Earth. Yeeting some humans to Mars to have a dig around for fossilised – or living - microbes will be the vogue thing in space exploration for the next couple of decades, and it’s bound to be exciting. Finding evidence of any life that underwent its own genesis in the solar system spells good news for the chances of other, more intelligent, life out there beyond the reach of the sun. What this means for our society may not be as profound as I would hope. Dreams of an existential awakening may last all but a week before we knuckle down again with making TikTok videos and buying things from Ikea. The risk of it going the other way, and the entire planet plunging into shared existential panic also seems unlikely. A paper in the journal Frontiers for Psychology suggests that we would all take the news rather well; though it depends heavily on the circumstances. Risk-wise, Neal speaks of the very slim possibility of disease lurching down on us from the heavens. Referencing the discovery of an unnervingly large virus in the permafrost of Siberia, it seems it’s never too early to start researching the possibilities of an ‘Invaders of the Body Snatchers’-type situation.
Scenario 3 is where things start to get interesting. This is essentially the idea that if we have managed the whole technological revolution thing, and there are a bucket-load of Earth-like planets out there, then there should be a bucket-load of civilizations making TikToks and buying shit from their own version of Ikea as well (that’s the last time I make a TikTok joke, I promise). And they, like us, are largely strapped down into their home planet’s gravity-well; perhaps getting out occasionally to have a poke around their celestial neighbourhood, but not really going anywhere en masse. However, if there are alien societies out there, lounging in a Goldilocks Zone, can we see them and them us?
Earth has been boiling over with electromagnetic radiation from our radio transmissions for around 70 years. That means there is a sphere of radius 70 lightyears around us full of transmitted propaganda, art, messages and presumably pictures of genitalia. And it’s expanding, ever-reliably, at 1 lightyear per year. That only makes us visible to a very small portion of the galaxy. But if Stephen Hawking was still around, he would be telling us that this is already too much, and we should shut the hell up entirely. His logic stems from that same self-reflective approach that leads us to the idea that there is anyone out there to listen. Our species is right on-track to smash up this planet beyond repair, and when we do, we will either die out or we will have to look for somewhere else to set up shop. Where better to look than the home of a burgeoning civilization around a nearby star? Evolving ourselves into some unsuspecting planet’s version of a classic scenario 4 nightmare. Humans always take each other’s stuff (including lives) without much hesitation at all. For that very reason, Hawking would warn us against depending on alien benevolence.
All that being said, the probability of two civilizations making contact while both at our pre-‘space-travel-is-a-piece-of-cake’ level is low. Just think of the rapidity of innovation over the last hundred years. If technology keeps progressing the way it is, and our ability to deal with enormous global catastrophe goes the way it isn’t, then we’ll be up to all sorts of sci-fi shenanigans in just a few thousand years. A few thousand years is very short in galactic terms, which means that most aliens we find are likely to be either much dumber or much smarter us.
The unfolding of every scenario, from 3 onwards, comes with a high risk of philosophical, political, spiritual or theological turmoil, and realistically all of them. This is classic H.G. Wells territory. And feels like the most likely consequence of scenario 4. Scenario 4 has three variations:
1. We find evidence of a technologically superior civilization but they too far away to have to worry about; whether they like us or not
2. There is a civilization nearby and they’re really decent people, who just want a chat and watch our best Tik-Toks (sorry)
3. The aliens are nearby, they’re total assholes, they probably wear red hats with slogans about making their planet great again, and they want to fuck our shit up
Variation 1 brings up the same questions of existentialism as scenario 3. Variation 2 would be absolutely lit! Sharing gifts of technology and culture. It could propel our species into a whole new era of fun. Imagine the first time Earth plays Glaxon Prime in the Soccer Worlds Cup; that would be super weird, but I’m here for it. The only problem here would be that the countries of Earth might start squabbling over the interstellar microphone and things could get awkward quite quickly. Variation 3 is what would have happened if 2020 really put the effort in. Giant, hunkering ships hanging over every major city, just straight-up showing off before they blow us out of existence. Of course, they could be more subtle. Neal suggests that our assailants may forego a physical presence altogether. They may simply beam over a digital version of themselves in a radio signal, infiltrate the internet and take us down from the inside… Maybe 2020 did put the effort in after all.
If I were a betting man, I would put my money on scenario 4; specifically, variation 1 of scenario 4 (I’m not sure what kind of betting agency would take that bet but I’m quite certain, wherever it is, it’s a fun place to work). I believe a decent portion of scientists would join me on that bet, the amount of money that has been spent on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) supports my argument here. However, to date, there has been very little discussion about how to respond to a message of any kind. Do we put a kiss? Any emojis? Leave them on read? The International Academy of Aeronautics laid out some guidelines in a paper, 'Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence’. Based on the title, I would say that their strategy involves making the messages as long as possible, to appear as though we’re not saying anything definitive, and therefore not scary. So scientists are being proactive, but as of right now no country has ratified the guidelines and so first contact may well resemble the messiness of your least favourite group chat.
Scenario 5 brings us back around to where we started: aliens have already been here for a while, possibly in really fast, tic-tac ships. They’ve been abducting people, building pyramids and releasing music under the moniker ‘Beyonce’. If you ask me, this is all very unlikely (apart from the Beyonce thing, of course. Too gifted. 100% an alien). I suppose it is possible that aliens roaming the galaxy, motivated by science and curiosity, could have stumbled upon our planet during the 4 billion years that it has been home to life. But if they wander around finding life all the time, why would they care? I imagine Earth would only pique their interest once we turned up and started being all “Cogito ergo sum” and stuff. And we haven’t been at that for very long, and journey times around the galaxy are pretty lengthy; even if you are tickling the speed of light. That being said, we can’t rule it out. Maybe they have visited, maybe they’re still here. But if they’ve already been here for a while, I don’t see much changing after their big reveal party. Other than the existential crisis that appears to be more and more unavoidable.
I would cry my freaking eyes out if we received a message from aliens. I’m not even sure what the overriding emotion would be, but I would definitely be crying. For me, the Universe wouldn’t look like a different place the night after the news announcements. I already know they’re out there, I just don’t know it yet. I would feel great relief, however. Some find the idea of aliens too paradigm-shattering to live with, for me the reverse is much more terrifying. The idea that in the Universe, in all its big-ness, we’re the only speck of thought within it, gazing out into a great, desolate chamber of almost nothing. That is about as existential-dread inducing as it gets for me. This has all got me feeling rather angsty, might go and chuck on some Blink-182
