Why I Believe in Extra Terrestrials

** ORIGINALLY POSTED 25 NOVEMBER 2011 **

Let me be clear: UFOs and Extra Terrestrials are by no means “crazy shit.” By this point, you’d have to be crazy to NOT think it is at least possible that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. At risk of turning this into a UFOLogist’s manifesto, there are a few points I’d like to make before I return you to your regularly scheduled melange of kittens and LSD trips and guys getting hit in the balls.

SPACE IS BIG. YOU JUST WON’T BELIEVE HOW VASTLY, HUGELY, MIND- BOGGLINGLY BIG IT IS. I MEAN, YOU MAY THINK IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN THE ROAD TO THE CHEMIST’S, BUT THAT’S JUST PEANUTS TO SPACE.

                                      - Douglas Adams

There is a mathematical formula called “Drake’s Equation” (or “The Drake Equation”) which basically goes like this:

1) There is intelligent life in the universe. We know this, because we are here.

2) The Universe is really, really big (see above).

Note the P=NP over Homer's right shoulder

3) It’s SO big that statistically things have to be either impossible, or possible.

4) If anything is possible at least once, it is definitely possible to happen more than once.

In fact, according to the current solving of Drake’s Equation there are 10,000 communicative civilizations in our own galaxy, which need I remind you is itself but one small neighbourhood in the sum totality of the everything. That, my friends, is a shit-whack of critters with their own little dramas out there.

Consider this: in the last hundred years we have gone from barely having sticks and fabric lift off the ground in a controlled manner to a moon landing fifty years later to tiny high resolution touchable multicommunication devices we keep in our pockets that can instantly translate any common language, find any common fact, take high definition videos (more on this later), video conference us in to anywhere in the world, or show midgets being fucked by donkeys at any time OR AT THE SAME TIME, almost instantly.

Where will be a hundred years from now? How great are our intellectual, technological, scientific and philosophical evolutions within my own short life time? And each step is an exponential leap from the last – from televisions being called “demon boxes” to nanotechnology in a lifetime boggles the mind.

Now, I have studied a lot of physics, but my educational background prohibits me from speaking with authority on the subject so all I can do is paraphrase that, as I see it, things in the universe happen more or less as soon as they can. “It will steam engine when it is steam engine time.”

I’m not a physicist, I’m a philosopher, so allow me to commit the heresy of paraphrase by reviewing the big bang and basic cosmological evolution theory as I understand it and not get bogged down in the “but what pulled the trigger?”, we will get to that some other time:

• POOF! THE UNIVERSE BURSTS INTO EXISTENCE!
• AAAAAAAAHH! I’M SUCH A HOT MESS THAT LANGUAGE CAN’T DESCRIBE TO OUR PUNY HUMAN MINDS WHAT IT WOULD “BE LIKE!”
• It’s so fucked up even space itself doesn’t know what to do! So, it expands.
• AS SOON AS it has expanded enough, the “pure energy” collapses into sub-sub-atomic particles (the quarks and shit that make up the shit smaller than the protons neutrons neutrons we learned about in school). Interesting footnote: these quarks are called “Strange” and “Truth” and “Beauty” and “Charmed” and “Up” and “Down” (arbitrary names, but more evidence that some physicists are really just philosophers who could do good maths).
• AS SOON AS THEY CAN, those quarks collapse into protons, neutrons, etc.
• AS SOON AS THEY CAN, those protons and electrons pair up and create literally a universal sea of Hydrogen.
• That hydrogen is all swirling around from the mighty WHUMP and ensuing spacial inflation like floaties in your coffee after you stir.
• Those swirls begin to clump together, attracted to eachother by their collective new-found gravitational mass like sea monkeys humping in the hugest unimaginable sea monkey orgy evarrr.
• AS SOON AS THEY CAN, those bastards collapse into stars. They just weigh so damn much that the laws of physics hit the threshold when the force they have stored in themselves to keep from shitting their pants after the big bang (“strong nuclear force”) goes limp while a new power of fusion bends them over and has it’s way with them, forcing Hydrogen to pair and become Helium, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and so on.
• AS SOON AS THEY CAN, those stars escape this process and the star super nova’s, spewing new elements into the aforementioned sea monkeys swirliemabobs which in turn makes bigger, heavier, more powerful, more FUCK YEAH! stars, which in turn crunch all the predecessors into still heavier elemental legos such as Carbon, Lead, Uranium, etc., and eventually relinquish their new gifts to their neighbours, and so on.
• Just like lego, all you need to build a car is a couple of wheels, a flat block and and a square one, once we have Carbon Hydrogen Oxygen and Nitrogen (CHON) we can build a bucket to carry around our slippery awareness, and this is where the second mighty POOF happens – life happens.

And it seems to happen AS SOON AS IT CAN. The Universe is about 14(ish) billion (yes with a “B”) years old and the best evidence to date suggests that we might be front-runners

But, nodding back to Drake there, since it’s happened here, just like the first stars crunching Hydrogen into the building blocks of these strange beings called “us”, it seems to follow logically, barring evidence to the contrary, that it probably happened elsewhere too, simultaneously. Steam Engine Time.

BUT – and this is a big BUT! That does not mean that they are as emotionally crippled, complicated, self-destructive or otherwise primitive as us. On the contrary. I touched earlier upon how magnificently huge our development has been in the past century, so just imagine if a similar spontaneously existing civilization had advanced just a little bit sooner than us? Perhaps their planet produces a plant which is naturally resonant with the Higgs Boson and they developed the physical sciences before, say, religion? There’s no reason to believe that our own philosophical evolution is a universal standard, so others (perhaps even a small percentile, remember if there’s 10,000 civilizations in our local galaxy alone then even 1% would be 100 cultures) get to  bypass the dark ages altogether and go straight to microcomputers and space travel.

Fifty years ago this was the future

Even fifty years of a lead on our own development staggers one’s sense of importance.

Now if even 1% of those civilizations are as curious and paranoid as we are, that means we are alone here in this galaxy insofar as we are the only ones who give a fuck about finding each other.

WE ARE THE ONE PERCENT!

That’s assuming a lot, but, it seems fair, we just had an election here and far more than 1% of people who voted actually voted for a local lunatic who thinks drinking and driving laws are stupid (and was arrested for it during his run for mayor), but runs a blog which gripes about, among other things, how teflon is hazardous to your health.

For any other civilization to travel here at all – local galaxy or otherwise – would require technology and an understanding of the universe beyond our own means at present. Even Proxima Centurai, the next closest star, is 4.2 light years away. That means even travelling at the unbelievable speed of about 300,000 kilometers PER SECOND (that’s 186,000 MILES per second for the remaining confused creatures still using an arbitrary system of measurement), it would take more than four years to get here, and Einstein had all sorts of problems with light-speed-travel having to do with the faster you go, the more you weigh (which explains why I am getting fatter in life as all my “free time” is swallowed by the nebulous black-hole of responsibility).

Just sit back and relax for the next four years until we get to the next closest star.

It’s probably possible, just not with our current mind-set, which is kind of the point.

So if anyone can visit us at all, then obviously time and space “don’t mean shit” to them, and limiting our refinement of the Drake Equation to 10,000 > 100 > 1 other piles of flesh looking for other piles of flesh doesn’t make sense either, because why stop at the Milky Way? There are literally HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of GALAXIES in the universe, and if each one has the statistical average of having that 1% of 1% that is still HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF CIVILIZATIONS.

This about sums up why I believe it is reasonable to postulate that, MAYBE, there is other life in the universe and it is visiting us for whatever reason – research, conquest, security, curiosity, entertainment, what have you.

Now, I touched earlier on the fact that most people who aren’t destitute possess these magickal devices which can teleport ghosts of people from the far reaches of the world and records shit simultaneously broadcasting it to space we call “cell phones”. Fifty years ago, there were only a few such devices which could capture moving images at all, and their use was carefully orchestrated because they were so rare and so valuable.

Twenty years ago Hi8 and VHS recorders became extremely common and readily available, and was soon followed by America’s Funniest Home Videos and an epic tidal surge of pornography. It also began the real list of “sightings” because, going back to statistical averages, there were more objective eyes pointed at the sky. However, people had to have the camera out and pointed in the right direction and even if a sighting occurred it was piss-poor quality.

But today, anyone who’s anyone has a cell phone in their pocket, and almost any of them have video capability, and most of the new ones (iPhones & Androids, Blackberries had worse than VHS quality and can suck my balls for so many reasons) can record what we define as “High Definition” video. More eyes with better sight make for more evidence, and that’s what real science is made of.

All of this, in my eyes, makes for a very compelling case (irrefutable really) that it is at very least POSSIBLE that there is intelligent life elsewhere and that it is more advanced than us, has the capability and will to visit us, and might already doing so. Of course, some people will believe or not believe anything and there ain’t no cure for stupid, so believe whatever you want.

So let’s just take that as a given, and if you disagree with me then nothing I say is going to convince you and really I could not care less if you believed me or not because obviously you are defective, lack fundamental reasoning circuits and aren’t worth try to save, or else are on a totally different trip than me. Either way, I’m moving on to what compells me to write this: the current batch of sightings and empirical evidence of UFO’s.

If there is one (us) there is more. And according to the maths, there’s an unfathomable number of more. I’m a bit of a capitalist pig, in that I have a job and buy things with the proceeds, so I have a predisposition to believe that capitalism is a natural form of philosophical evolution, because whether I am buying computers to write this story or a squirrel hoarding nuts or a plant digging deeper into the soil to get the water before my neighbor, everything that lives competes for resources with everything else that lives, and the stockpiling and preservation of resources for later use is a natural behavior for a self-aware destructible intelligent being.

Socialist Scrat would take this beer and distribute it fairly according to need with other sabertooth squirrels.

We are alive, we know we are alive, we know therefor that we can die, we want to keep on living, there are things we need to survive, and we will do what we must in order to put off dying by gathering those things and protecting them.

I know you think you know where I’m going with this – you think I’m going to suggest they’re going to conquer us for our water, gold and trees, maybe even our bodies or our souls. Yeah, they might.

But this natural disposition doesn’t just lean towards the conquest of planets, but rather the advantageousness of discovery as a whole. We are explorers, some for the thrill of discovery and some for the rewards that new discovery brings, whether fame, fortune, or a combination of the both.

Again, it stands to reason at least SOME of the “others” don’t give a damn to find others, while others are utterly obsessed with it and are single-mindedly pursuing it. Millions in fact, if you buy into Drake. Some will have utopian propositions and the best of intentions, while others may be doing it to exploit us, while others may be downright malicious. I have seen all of the above from my very narrow samplings of our own race, it’s a mathematical certainty that it exists elsewhere.

.. here's one now..

Maybe they are already here? Maybe they are in touch with our governments and they are keeping it a secret (though government isn’t very good at keeping the truth a secret), or maybe they are already walking among us. Given the direction that our technology has been headed the past few years, even an advancement of a few hundred years could mean “quantum leaps” in human cellular evolution, so perhaps a slightly more advanced race has already learned of inter-dimensional-travel, possession, camouflage, whatever.

Maybe I am one of them, a transplant, a walk-in, and that’s why this all just makes such intuitive sense to me.

Or, maybe I’m just enough crazy to seem like a scholarly philosopher but who is in fact just batshit crazy. Like a functional alcoholic, except with crazy instead of booze.

I still watch Star Trek episodes that are completely blown out of the water by our present technological prowess, and those were made in my own lifetime. The best imaginers of the day couldn’t even really pinpoint the awesomeness of NOW, and that was only a few years ago, so who am I really to discount the possibility that an even marginally more advanced race than us sees these things as simple as pushing a button on their phone.

Maybe there’s an app for that.

Really, the material which composes our physical bodies and the energy which is the neurons which fire in our brains was all made in the hearts of stars, and when we were stars we couldn’t have possibly imagined we would become these complicated creatures that debate whether or not we’re alone in the universe and sniff meth off the back of toilets, so how can we possibly imagine what we – or others like us – will become in the time ahead?