It's not aliens, the US government is distracting you
I can't believe I have to explain this, but here we are
Now I wasn’t going to touch this story because it’s such obvious nonsense, but given that everyone else is covering it, it would be ridiculous if I - a so-called science-fiction writer - ignored it, so let’s have some fun. (This one is going to stray from politics and get sciencey so if that’s not your thing, you might want to stop reading now.)
Let’s cut to the chase, we are not being visited by aliens. I say this with a confidence level of 99.99%, but many people are being taken in by the story of ex-intelligence official, David Grusch, so let’s delve into it.
Grusch claims to have led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) but not seen anything with his own eyes. He claims the US has 11 crashed spaceships and even the bodies of aliens (which doesn’t make sense for many reasons, not least the fact advanced spaceships wouldn’t need to be piloted and the aliens could be safely aboard a mothership).
Grusch would have us believe the US has kept these spaceships secret for decades and that other governments around the world have recovered spaceships too, but somehow everyone has kept the secret until now.
The US House of Representatives is launching an investigation into Grusch’s claims, suggesting they think he might be credible. The recent release of UFO footage - and the US government’s insistence they can’t explain this stuff and it could be of alien origin - has led some to speculate the US could be “soft launching” an official announcement.
Sadly, the reality is this is a psy-op to distract us from all the crap that’s going on, a way of getting us to focus on nonsense, rather than real issues. And yet here I am, focusing on the nonsense!
Now the science-fiction writer in me would so badly love to be proven wrong. Assuming these aren’t terrifying Independence Day aliens, I’d probably beg for them to take charge because they couldn’t possibly be worse than the Tories! But I almost certainly won’t be proven wrong and here’s why:
First of all, the obvious stuff.
We are expected to believe that giant-brained aliens with an IQ of 3,000 (which they would probably have through genetic-engineering or some other enhancement) flew lightyears across the galaxy on a journey that would take decades at a minimum, harnessing absurd levels of energy, protecting themselves from dust grains that would explode like bombs (and possibly nukes, depending on their size and the ship’s speed) and yet, when they got to Earth, 11 of them just forgot how to fly and crashed!
It’s so stupid, I don’t know where to begin, but needless to say, flying around on Earth would be child’s play compared to crossing a galaxy.
An interstellar craft would be to a space shuttle what an F-35 Lightning II fighter jet is to our first aeroplane - the Wright Flyer. If 11 state of the art jets crashed, we’d be pretty worried about that, wouldn’t we? If even one crashed due to a design issue, we’d ensure it was fixed before flying any others. Are we expected to believe these “aliens” couldn’t fix any design issues?
Alien spaceships should be detectable as they’re approaching Earth because the energy requirements to slow them down are the same as the energy requirements of speeding them up. Interstellar spaceships would likely be powered by nuclear fusion (a technology we might have in a few decades) and those fusion rockets would be facing us on approach. They should be shining so brightly we could detect them from a long distance, and when they were close, they would be lighting up the sky like a second sun.
Other potential propulsion systems like blackhole drives and antimatter rockets would require even more energy and should be just as detectable, unless the spaceship was using a slower propulsion method (which would mean an absurdly long voyage) or the aliens had a technology that breaks the laws of physics as we understand them. This would seem unlikely because those laws are considered laws for a reason.
You have to ask what the so-called aliens would actually be doing here. If they’re visiting, would they not just say hello? If they want to remain hidden, they are not doing a very good job, are they? For super-advanced aliens capable of interstellar travel, they don’t seem too super-advanced!
Perhaps these aliens are like the ones in District 9 which made a desperate flight to this planet, barely keeping themselves alive in the process. This would seem implausible for any civilisation that can harness the energy required, but even if it were true, would they not ask for help or use their superior technology to take what they needed?
If the aliens were in desperate need of our planet, they could just take it with their superior weapons, or say they’re having a piece of land, or they could negotiate for territory in exchange for their scientific knowledge. There would be no need for secrecy.
Any possible explanation of what the aliens are doing here has massive holes. Occam’s razor says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one, and the simplest explanation is that aliens aren’t visiting and civilisations are incredibly rare. My guess would be less than one civilisation per galaxy super-cluster.
You might have seen the video footage that the US released of UFOs that they couldn’t explain, but a physicist and futurist who happens to be ex-military put out a video in 2021, effortlessly debunking all of this. These videos have simple explanations, one being a weather balloon that appeared to be going faster due to the angle it was from the camera. It was an optical illusion. If Isaac Arthur knows this, the US government does too. They are trying to distract you.
The key thing you need to understand is the Fermi paradox.
Now you’ve probably already heard of the idea that because the universe is so vast and ancient, we should be seeing aliens everywhere, but few people grasp just what a problem the Fermi paradox is. I could waffle on for hours on this, but I’ll try and stick to the key points:
Firstly, if an alien species was close enough to visit us, it would be a statistical inevitability that a universe that’s 93,016,000,000 lightyears across and 13,770,000,000 years old would be brimming with aliens. There should be more habitable planets in our observable universe than there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth and that means plenty of opportunities for life to arise.
Think of it like this: if you swim in the Pacific Ocean and you see a single fish, what are the odds that fish is the only fish in the ocean? Effectively zero.
If two alien species appear next door to each other in a similar timeframe, think how unlikely it would be that no other species has appeared in a universe of at least 2 trillion galaxies which each typically have 100 billion stars, which, if my maths is correct is 200 sextillion stars. If I write this out as a number, it would be 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (I think).
If we are being visited by aliens, this tells you that interstellar travel is not only possible but must be happening everywhere. Most people aren’t aware of the implications of this, but astronomers should be seeing signs of aliens every time they look into the sky and they don’t. All they find is eerie silence.
Now you might think astronomers are involved in some global conspiracy to keep the information secret, but there is no way you could keep something this big under wraps. There are too many people who could easily obtain undeniable evidence.
There is something that scientists like to call the Dyson Dilemma and it goes something like this:
Consider how Earth is currently surrounded by satellites. Assuming we don’t wipe ourselves out in the near future (in something called a late filter), we would expect our entire solar system to fill up with satellites, space stations, space telescopes, and solar collectors to harvest the full energy potential of the sun.
Remember, if aliens are visiting us, interstellar space travel is possible, in which case colonisation of our solar system should be trivial by comparison. We should quickly build something called a Dyson Swarm - and this would be visible to alien telescopes. An aliens’ Dyson Swarm should equally be visible to our telescopes because it would change the light output of the star to infra-red.
The problem gets worse: if you can travel to other solar systems, you can build Dyson Swarms around their stars too. Given the scale and age of the universe, we should see Dyson Swarms surrounding the stars in any galaxy with interstellar species. This is because it would be statistically inevitable that aliens have been around much longer than us, given that we are so new to the scene.
Perhaps no species would go the Dyson route because they all develop some physics-defying technologies that negate the need to harvest the energy of their star and the need to use that living space. But they’d have to create energy from apparently nothing or create their own universes or something weird like that. Hardly seems likely, does it?
Energy and living space should be huge concerns to any growing alien species. People don’t grasp the probable exponential growth of an alien civilisation. It’s entirely possible, if not likely, that an alien species would be post-ageing. Unless it could somehow stop every member of its species from reproducing (which would seem implausible) then its population would grow at an unimaginable rate. One scientist calculated they could fill the observable universe in as little as 10,000 years if they were able to reach that far (which they almost certainly couldn’t).
Even if a spacefaring species was not post-ageing, it would still likely reach numbers orders of magnitude in excess of the 8 billion humans on Earth. This means living space would be of paramount importance.
When it comes to galactic colonisation, space stations are much better options than planets because most planets would be inhospitable to your species, unless you terraformed them or bio-formed yourself (or if you were a robot).
You can control the atmospheric composition of a space station and you can even control its gravity by rotating it (this is known as an O’Neill cylinder.)
Interstellar civilisations should be building O’Neill cylinders everywhere, and even if most species opted not go down this route, it would only take one interstellar species to make that decision and they would take over their whole galaxy.
In all likelihood, the first spacefaring species to arise would take over their galaxy (and possibly neighbouring galaxies) like humans took over Earth. It would therefore seem implausible that aliens are casually visiting us today. They should have reached our solar system and used up the resources before we even had the chance to evolve.
Remember, it only takes one species to decide to do this and humans wouldn’t exist (unless aliens treated Earth like a protected national park). This would seem a statistical inevitability, unless spacefaring civilisations were very rare (which they can’t be if they’re visiting us) or interstellar travel is impossible (which it can’t be if they’re visiting us) or all technological species wipe themselves out in a late filter (which they can’t do if they’re visiting us).
Are you starting to see how this doesn’t make sense?
You need to be able to explain why alien spaceships are not visible to our telescopes, why they are crashing on arrival, why the aliens are not saying hello, why they are so bad at hiding, why we are not seeing Dyson swarms everywhere, and why we evolved in a galaxy that should already have been fully colonised by aliens.
The most obvious solution to the Fermi paradox is that humans evolved in an empty patch of the universe, because it would be near-impossible to evolve in a galaxy that was already taken, in the same way it would be near-impossible for chimpanzees to evolve into a technological species on Earth when we are in their way. Oh, how I would love to be wrong about this, but sadly, I’m not!
Astronomers have a saying: “It’s never aliens,” and they’re right.
Julian Assange is being crucified and David Grulsch walks free, “Come on Man”.
Not aliens just a load of unbelievable bollocks to take our minds off how our world is being destroyed by greed.