This puzzle is commonly known as Fermi’s paradox, after its articulation by the 20th-century physicist Enrico Fermi, and it has fascinated astronomers, physicists, and science fiction fans for decades.
And, intuitively, it seems like some of our peers should have surpassed us and developed the ability to send probes thousands of light-years away to observe us.
It would be strange for humans to be the only intelligent life (or, at least, the only life of above-chimpanzee intelligence) in all that vastness. Alan Dyer/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images The summer Milky Way from the Howse Pass Viewpoint at Saskatchewan River Crossing in Banff National Park, Alberta. There are hundreds of billions if not trillions of galaxies alongside the Milky Way. The universe is almost incomprehensibly vast: In the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars, and as many as 6 billion of them could be Sun-like stars with rocky Earth-like planets orbiting them. Fermi’s paradox and the puzzle of intelligent life elsewhereĪ finding that UFOs represent an alien civilization visiting Earth would be crucially important, first and foremost because it would answer a question scientists have been asking for at least the last century: Where is everybody? In other words, the UFO question is a subquestion of a much broader, more profound inquiry into the future of humanity. Or it could be that we do have cosmic neighbors, but that those neighbors haven’t reached out because they face difficult challenges - challenges that could be waiting for us in our own future and that could inform how we act today. It could be we’re all alone in the universe, which leads to certain mind-breaking implications - one of which is perhaps humanity has a moral duty to preserve civilization because it exists nowhere else in the vast expanse of space. Physicists, astronomers, philosophers, and other smart people have been trying to suss out what the existence or nonexistence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe could mean. We have to get to the bottom of this question because the truth about UFOs - particularly if the extraterrestrial hypothesis happens to be somehow true - could clarify humans’ role in the universe. But I also know that it’s a question we have to get to the bottom of, and to do that the government needs to allocate a bit more in the way of research funding. I don’t think we have any evidence that these UAPs are a sign of intelligent life on a different planet. Let me lay my cards on the table here: I’ve long been on the skeptics’ side. So the UFO-curious public is left more or less where it started before this latest round of UFO stories: not knowing what these objects in the sky are or where they’re from or what if anything they tell us about the universe. It was reportedly written in half a year by two people working part-time it is not a large-scale evidence review like the 9/11 Report. It was mostly meant to summarize the UFO sightings the Pentagon has looked at, rather than explain those sightings. This report simply doesn’t contain enough new information to move anyone’s assessments much in one direction or another. Believers in the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (ETH) still believe.
In the immediate wake of the DNI report, no minds have been changed. Since then, a steady stream of mainstream news coverage and Pentagon disclosures have kept UAPs in the public eye, complete with details about their allegedly fantastical, above-human capabilities. The current mania was kicked off by a 2017 New York Times A1 article revealing the existence of a quiet Pentagon program analyzing strange aerial sightings by pilots. That takeaway comes as something of an anticlimax capping off a period of frenzied speculation over UAPs (the new preferred term for “UFO”). “Limited Data Leaves Most UAP Unexplained” reads the report’s first subject heading. The nine-page report released by the Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) office last week, formally titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” says a little bit more than “we know nothing.” But that is the main takeaway. So in conclusion, the UFOs are part of life’s rich pageant and anything is possible. The US military’s official report on UFOs is here, and its conclusion is scintillating: There’s some stuff in the sky, the government isn’t sure what it is, there’s no evidence that it’s aliens, but also no one’s ruling out aliens.
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