Our Technology Future - Another Look At Aliens

We have a short parable and a short reflection for today’s post. Imagine that you’re on a road trip. You’re driving cross-country to visit family…

You could have taken a plane, or caught a Greyhound, but you wanted to experience the open road, perhaps hit up tourist attractions along the way. Along the way you come upon a quaint little town. It’s not clearly marked on the map, but it looks like a nice little town that harkens back to a simpler time, though not exactly devoid of modern technologies.

That would seem to me to be the most likely analogous example of first contact.

Much about the possibility for future alien visitation and communication is based around the idea of confrontation. Sci-fi envisions that they’ll show up to kill us, or to demand something from us. Even the ancient astronaut theorists rests on the belief that aliens came to this planet specifically over “us”.

But like in my example, what does it mean if they are instead passing by us, like in my little story at the beginning of this post, on their way somewhere else? To me, that renders a much more interesting question than if they simply came to us, period.

If aliens come directly to us, then our questions are relatively simple. Who are they, where’d they come from, what do they want from us. If they’re only passing by, the questions then become more complex and thought provoking. If not stopping by us, where are they going? Are they heading for another civilization? Is that civilization like us or like them? How far between the two? It gets us closer to that ultimate question of how many and how big.

At the same time it would answer a very poignant question about our place in the universe; how important are we? The unconscious, or semi-unconscious, theorem behind most sci-fi stories is that we as humans are important enough in the universe that aliens out there would be apt to visit with us or our planet for various reasons.

We know that our resources are not unique, and likely easier to obtain closer to their home than trying to gather what we have here. The technology needed for intragalactic, much less intergalactic travel, would likewise dramatically simplify the means of terraforming another planet or moon. Given that we are relatively certain that Mars has plenty of water, and a number of moons in our solar system do as well, it would make it highly likely that any planet that supports life has a number of other celestial bodies in the immediate neighborhood that at least have water, making them viable candidates for terraforming. This would make them (planets and moons for terraforming) a better project, despite the time it would take, than travelling across space to try to take someone else’s planet.

Once you recognize they aren’t coming here necessarily for our resources, and likely don’t need our planet for habitation, you are left with more exotic options. If you’re adamant that they would come here to Earth for some deliberate purpose, you have two more options.

The first I call the Battlestar Galactica model. Basically, you would be talking about a civilization in some sort of emergency fleeing through space from some threat or sudden disaster, needing a new home. Obviously they would likely lack any means of fixing up another planet or building sophisticated colony. But this is highly unlikely. Battlestar Galactica is a great story, but the likelihood of some other species happening to reach Earth as the first viable haven in an emergency is fairly tiny. The threat to us would be minimal if it did happen, as they would be looking much more for humanitarian sympathy than aggressive takeover.

The second option is the Star Wars model. That is, there is a civilization of sufficient technology that they can travel freely through space and become imperialistic, claiming other planets in the way European nations spread across the planet colonizing the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. Again, this is unlikely, as we would likely have seen signs of such an empire before they wound up on our doorstep given how much travel and communication would take place there, and how hard we’ve been looking. It’s either not that big an empire or very, very far away. And, we can easily predict how that encounter will go down.

Thus I arrived at my original point. The probability is that if there were an encounter of any kind, that it will be a stop along the way towards some other place that they have more direct or immediate interest in. we would be tourist attraction or scenic spot along the way – a point of interest, but not really the goal. All things considered, that may be a good thing.