The E.T. I can't see

Discovery Feature Article

Aliens may exist but we probably can’t see them because we’re all just a bunch of chimpanzees. In the same way primates can’t understand quantum theory, we may be missing alien life because they may exist in a way that is simply beyond our understanding. These are the general thoughts of the chief astronomer to the Queen of England, Lord Martin Rees.

Lord Rees is a cosmologist, astrophysicist and the president of Britain’s Royal Society. He shared these opinions in February of 2010 while hosting the National Science Academy’s first conference on the possibility of alien life. The conference entitled “The Detection of Extra-terrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society” even asked what our human response would be to the discovery of aliens: fear or fancy?

Lord Martin Rees proposed that it is our assumption aliens would be able to comprehend our mathematics and technology. However we may simply miss them all together, even though aliens may be right in front of us, because they exist in a way and in a form that is foreign to how we think we should be searching for them.

Another noteworthy attendee of the conference was Frank Drake who founded SETI and co-designed (with Carl Sagan) the Pioneer plaque that was meant to be an understandable message to extraterrestrials. The conference debated the topic of alien comprehensibility and concluded that we may be where we are (without tangible alien contact) for one of three reasons.

  1. We are the first life force that truly has the ability to make our presence known and no other life exists out there so we are merely shouting into space with no one to hear us.
  2. Other life forms have existed but they are so far beyond us in their technology that we are unable to detect them or they have made themselves undetectable to us.
  3. Other life forms have existed but due to major destructive events in their history they are now either cut off from us or seriously limited in their ability to reach out to us or be reached by us.

Each argument has its pros and cons but in the end option three seemed to everyone to be the most plausible. Option one was disregarded because it seemed numerically unfathomable that we would be the first and the only life form in the entire universe. Option two was also tossed because it seemed highly unlikely that every single life form would advance in a way that would make them undetectable. Option three was regarded as the most possible because it seemed that our own history validated the likelihood of this scenario. Civilizations rise to great heights with amazing advancements in technology only to fall victim to their own self-destructive ways rendering them nothing more than a footnote. Our failure to find extraterrestrial life may not be because they don’t exist but because they have existed in a way that much to much resembles ourselves. Maybe if E.T.’s were a little more alien and not so human, we would have found them by now.

Special thanks to the Daily Galaxy for their informative report from February 23, 2010 on the “Detection of Extra-Terrestrials” conference that made this article possible. To view the original article please click on the link: Daily Galaxy Article

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