Speculations about aliens

From: Nathan Woods Currier (nwc@physics.ucsb.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2001 - 20:49:14 MDT


This is a long and blathering post, so skip down to the ******'s if you're
bored.

>> I would say there's at least a 5% chance that one or more of those
>> reports represents actual alien contact.
>
>Wow! That seems amazingly high to me. Following Robin's precepts, you
>must have seen some evidence that I missed. What collection of alien
>contact reports have enough plausible details to make you go that high?
>
>I must admit that I haven't studied the issue, and so have only been
>exposed to third- and fourth-hand accounts of what has appeared in the
>Enquirer since I read one of Von Daniken's books in high school.
>
>And in case I missed something earlier in the conversation, is there some
>specific referent to "those reports", or is it a generic for all the
>popularly-known reports lumped together?

        If by "aliens" you mean the Little Grey Men of standard UFO
lore, then 5% doesn't seem totally unreasonable... I would guess somewhere
around 1%. The key is to drop the assumtion that they are aliens, and
consider the slight possibility that they might be genetically engineered
future humans coming back in time to study us Neanderthals. The LGM have
similar size, body plan, gravity tolerance, pressure tolerance, oxygen
tolerance, etc. Oxygen is nasty stuff- very good at destroying organic
molecules. Only through a fluke of evolution can we withstand this toxic
waste and even use its reactivity as an essential energy source. If you
believe stories of human-"alien" hybrids (which I consider very unlikely),
then the LGM cannot possibly be aliens because evolution would never
produce a compatible biochemistry from a separate genesis.

        The technology of the LGM is much too primitive, sometimes even
retro. Due to the immensity of cosmic timescales, any randomly selected
alien civilization should be hundreds of millions of years more advanced
than us. Any highly advanced technology we can imagine (within the laws
of physics) should be Stone Age to them. This includes nanotech,
consciousness downloading, etc. Yet the LGM use anal probes and big,
resource-intensive ships to collect their samples. If a logic switch can
be built with about 100 atoms then it should have a volume of about 1
cubic nanometer and be much faster than a neuron. A eukaryotic cell
(about 1000 cubic microns) could hold a trillion such switches, which is
more than the number of neurons in the brain. True aliens could
construct microscopic laboratories intelligent enough to conduct research
on us without arousing any suspicion. No need to abduct us with a
dungeon-like UFO, molest us with anal probes, and hide behind a botched
memory wipe. Many debunk the alien-visitor stories because they are too
fantastic to believe, but I debunk them because they are nowhere near
fantastic enough. They have human lack of imagination written all over
them.

        The 1% probability I give to the LGM reflects the low probability
that there is an undiscovered method of time travel or parallel-universe-
hopping which is so easy we will develop it before we develop all the
Extropian fetish technologies. Since we are already doing preliminary
fiddlings with nanotech and AI, we probably have at most 100 years before
we use these technologies to radically transform our society and even
ourselves. Also, most current theories of time travel or universe-hopping
require some sort of portal, which must be created and kept open by the
inhabitants of both worlds. Such portals require energies and engineering
on cosmic scales, so we certainly don't have one (unless you believe the
crazy tales of the "Philadelphia Experiment"). For enhnced humans to be
here today they must use an unknown "easy" method of travel, or they must
have a old portal which they discovered (or borrowed) in Star-Trek fasion.
It is much more likely that the LGM instead come from the inner universe
of repressed sexual fantasies, etc.

        The existence of alien civilizations is also very problematic.
Feynman put it best: "Where are they"? Neutron stars are intensely
studied and would make an excellent source of energy, but we haven't seen
any alien energy-extraction efforts. Our own existence shows that this
solar system hasn't been devoured by alien nanobots. If there are any
civilizations at all between here and the Coma Cluster, then space should
be teeming with aliens spreading at relativistic speeds on
sand-grain-sized colony ships. Evolution and empty space would favor
ravenous expansionists, but even with a strict "prime directive",
something is bound to slip through.

        There is also the matter of vaccuum phase transitions (you may
have heard the recent paranoia about experiments at Brookhaven). A phase
transition would be much like an "Ice-9" phenomenon of the laws of physics
themselves. Once triggered, it would spread accross the universe at the
speed of light. In its wake it might cause ordinary matter to become
radioactively unstable, or it might spread out in a blast wave,
incinerating everything. A waiting phase transition would always produce
a "cosmological constant", and we have just recently obtained strong
evidence of one in our universe. This does not imply a waiting phase
transition, but if there is one associated with it and if the transition
would spread as a blast wave, then the case against aliens is almost
airtight. I calculate that aliens triggering the cosmological-constant
phase transition would escape with their solar system unscathed, but all
other solar systems would be destroyed without warning. The temptation
would be enormous. If the universe had even a few alien despots,
psychopaths, religious fanatics, and paranoid cold-war types with their
tentacles on the Big Red Button, then we wouldn't be here. This is
all wild speculation of course, but it is fun, and it shows just one way
in which physics alone might answer the alien question.

        I think the only major bottleneck is the evolution of complex
multicellular life, which took 3 billion years on Earth. This may be the
only small probability in the Drake Equation. 70 extrasolar gas giants
have been discovered to date, and some probably have hospitable moons.
Life appeared so soon after the Earth's formation that it probably
evolves wherever chemically possible, living even on other worlds in this
solar system. Sentinence evolved here in two separate lineages- dolphins
and primates. So, if life forms easily and if it is possible for
Earth-like planets to form with a 6 billion year head start on us, then
why is it so lonely out there? Comments?

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